BOXING: MALACHY CLERKINon the dark nights the Olympic hero has endured since Joe Ward took his Irish title and his battles inside and outside the ring
IN THE far corner of the weights room, Kenny Egan pulls up a chair and stretches his legs out before him. The gym that houses the high-performance unit beside the National Stadium is quiet just now, the boxers on a lunchbreak before afternoon training.
To start off with he keeps his voice low, as if the silence in the gym is a still pond and he’s being careful not to send too many ripples out and around. He eases into himself eventually but even so, it’s a different shade of Kenny Egan that we’re dealing with now. Sober, in every sense.
Things have changed. Outside these walls and inside them too. This gym had been not so much a work-out space as a domain for over a decade. His domain. He was here on the very first day, sweeping the floor with Gary Keegan and Billy Walsh as the high-performance unit was magicked out of thin air.
For every session of every day of every year since then, he was the holder of a national senior title. He was the one who brought bounty home from big tournaments, the team captain on the trips away and eventually the Olympic silver medallist. He was the big kahuna. Then all of a sudden he wasn’t.
It’s Joe Ward’s world now. Egan lives in it and gets along as best he can. When Ward took his title from him at the national championships at the end of February, life changed for them both. On a big picture level, Ward is in pole position to go to the London Olympics and Egan is not.
All that hue and cry over whether to turn pro or not in the wake of Beijing, all that time spent pondering his future, it means nothing here. Merely qualifying for London will be one of the achievements of his career.
Day-to-day, the difference is more subtle but it’s there and he feels it all the same. He and Ward get on reasonably well but theyre different people. Training partners looking to breast at the same tape. Rivals with 12 years between them. Forced easy going is harder than it looks.
“It’s a weird feeling, being number two,” says Egan. “After so long. When I won the first national title, Joe was only six. He’s a smashing lad, fair strong for his age. Fair play to him, he’s top dog now. I’m the one who has to take it off him.”
Egan is back here for the summer after wintering in Miami. He is two boxers now, fighting in two different sports.
In Miami, he’s part of the World Series of Boxing, a makey-uppy wheeze sanctioned by the International Boxing Association to allow amateur boxers get paid for fighting without losing their amateur status and thus still be allowed to box in the Olympics.
His contract with the Miami Gallos is said to be worth in the region of €40,000 a year. From the outside looking in though, it’s hard to argue it’s worth it.
He won’t admit it but the five months he spent in Miami are a huge part of the reason he lost his national title. The WSB may have amateur boxers but it isn’t amateur boxing. The rounds are scored 10-9, just like in the pro game. The hit-and-don’t-be-hit mantra Egan has spent 21 years learning off by heart is of no use to him.
“There’s no such thing as catching a guy with a good, clean left and going one-up, then coming back 20 seconds later and picking him off again to go two-up. You have to win the round through aggression.
“If he’s in your face for the whole three minutes pushing you back, even if you’re the one landing the nice clean scoring shots he’s probably going to win the round. It’s a totally different sport.”
The first fight he was in over there, his opponent came bulling across the ring at him and landed a headbutt right above his eye. Cut him to ribbons, blood everywhere. He got cleaned up and won the fight in the end but only by meeting gun with mortar.
By the time he got back to Dublin for the nationals, he was a different fighter. In the final, he got penalised twice for lowering his head into Ward’s and the rest was hullabaloo.
To get to where and why it all went wrong though, you have to go back to before Miami. Or at least back to what brought him there. The money is nice and the locale is nicer still out there but he didn’t leave this gym and the expertise and brotherhood held within it just for a few readies and a nice tan.
“I actually didn’t even want to go to Miami back when I was signing up. But I needed to get out of this country for a while. I needed to get away. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. It was great to get away and be a nobody for a while.”
Fame did two things to Egan. It made him want a little bit more of it until too much of it ground him to dust. But worse than that, it gave him free rein to have a good time. You win an Olympic medal, doors open for you.
If you want to, you’ll always find someone to keep the party going. He wanted to. He always wanted to. And for two years after Beijing, he was a drunk.
“I’d drink with the devil, that’s my problem. I’d drink with anyone at all. Then I’d make up excuses and let people down, not turning up where I’m supposed to be turning up. I was just going on benders. Like, the amount of times Billy covered for me in here. I wouldn’t turn up for training or I’d turn up late stinking of drink.
“I wouldn’t answer the phone or if I did I’d be making up some bullshit story about being sick. It was just happening too often.”
There was no moment of clarity, no particular rock bottom. Just the gradual realisation that the plates beneath his existence were gradually shifting and slipping. He came back from the Olympics a full-time athlete but within months he had morphed into part-athlete/ part-celebrity/part-Gift Grub character.
By the spring of 2010, he was still keeping up the athlete facade, but it was becoming less and less of who he was. He wouldn’t say he ever became a full-time drinker or that the boxer ever totally disappeared. But that was where it was all headed.
He’s been sober for almost 10 months now. Hasn’t touched a drop, not even at Christmas at home with his brothers. He goes to AA meetings and shares his life with the room, listening to stories that leave him half-horrified and half-inspired.
The strength to stand up and tell a church hall full of strangers what life felt like at your darkest moments, he looks at that and he marvels. The way he saw it at the start, he’d come through fights ever since he was eight years old and this was just another one.
But to see it in ordinary people, just day-to-day strugglers trying to find a way through life, that slapped him in the face. Turned out he was just ordinary people too.
“When I started off, every story I heard I could relate to. Everybody was saying something that I had done or had happened to me. Black-outs. Not remembering. Going on a mad one and not giving a f*** where it was going to end up.
“That was me, blinkers on when the chance to go on a bender came up.
“We’d be sitting in the pub and in my head, I’d be going ‘Right, this is going to turn into a real good session here’. The rest of the lads might only be out for the night but I’d be ready to go again the next morning. I’d be ringing round the boys at half-10 in the morning – ‘Right, where are we going?’ Ready to go again.
“But sure they’d all have to go back to work eventually and I’d keep going. I’d find myself high-fiving oul’ fellas in the bar, with everyone gone home. Terrible carry-on. Stupid stuff.”
It’s too simple to state that in the end, the boxer in Kenny Egan fought his way out. Alcoholism doesn’t work like that. He can no more say that he’s beaten it than he can say he’s perfected his left hook.
But it is something he has control over for now and something he’ll keep working on until he doesn’t have to. And as long as he has boxing in some shape or form, he absolutely has to. The sport didn’t save him but it fairly lit up the escape route.
“It’s like they say, you take it a day at a time. People ask me will I go back and have a jar once I’m finished boxing and I say no because I’d be even worse then. I wouldn’t have to go training so I could drink away all I liked.
“I wouldn’t be able to hold down a job if I went back drinking. Imagine if I’m ever a coach here, coming in stinking of drink. No way. That’s it, the show’s over.
“I’m glad Im off it now and not in 10 years time when I have nothing. That’s what I was thinking – I could be sitting in a bar, not a pot to piss in, pointing up at a photo of a fella with his Olympic medal and telling kids, ‘See yer man? That’s me’. And the kids going, ‘F*** off, that isn’t you’. I don’t want that.
“I feel better for it. I can function now. We had a week off last week and I can come back in here now ready to go. If that was a year ago, I’d have been on the piss last week and I might not even have turned up this morning.
“I’d have rung Billy with some bullshit story about not feeling well. And then I’d have to get back fit again after the bender and it would take a couple of days until I was able to do any decent training. Now I’m fit all the time, ready to peak whenever I need to.”
For the rest of this year, he will need to peak at least once and will hope to have to do so a few times. Things are up in the air at the minute but he has heard word that there will be box-offs in July to determine who goes to the World Championships. That’s his first job. There are only two chances to qualify for London and the worlds are the first of them.
If Ward beats him again in the box-off, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. There’s a possibility he might have to go up a weight division. But that’s all in the wind. He isn’t thinking that way for now.
“I’m just keeping the head down, training hard. What will be will be in a boxing sense. Look, if it doesn’t work out and I don’t go to London, fair enough. I went to Beijing and I got my medal. That’s the worst-case scenario. Of course I don’t want it to go that way and I’ll be gutted if it turns out like that.
“I’m still going to give it everything and whatever happens happens. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.
“But once I just keep my head focused and keep myself on the straight and narrow, I’ll be fine. Who knows? Sure I could keep at it and go to the Olympics in Brazil! At 34 years of age. It’s possible. Anything’s possible once your head’s right.”
Spoken like a man who can truthfully vouch for his head for the first time in two-and-a-half years.
Whatever the summer brings, that’s a victory in itself.
