BOXING/INTERVIEW/BERNARD DUNNE:BERNARD DUNNE'S house sits discreetly tucked into the corner of a quiet road. Like its owner, the house is deeper and more substantial than the modest front suggests. No bling. In the hallway, though, is a reminder that Bernard Dunne has led no ordinary life.

“The account of how Brian Peters and fellow promoter Pat Magee locked antlers like stags, eventually forcing Dunne to fight somebody of the calibre of Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym in his first voluntary defence, should be mandatory reading.

“Yeah, I miss it,” he says, frankly. “More lately than anything else. I have been watching a few fights in my weight division. Looking at them, wondering. I know it was the right decision, but I do miss it.”

A stunning, block-mounted monochrome photo faces you. A thing of painterly beauty, blown large and hung there, the photo captures a moment which changed Bernard Dunne’s story forever. Dublin. The Point. The ring. A man called Ricardo Cordoba is contorted violently as he takes a driving punch from Bernard Dunne. The impact of the blow has sent droplets of sweat shooting up from Cordoba’s head and the photograph catches them all, suspended in the light hanging there like a halo.

Cordoba is from a tiny town called Santa Marta in the Chiriqui province in Panama. Fewer than 2,000 people live there. And Bernard Dunne is from the urban sprawl of Neilstown in west Dublin. He is fighting for his career. He has a cyst on his brain. Two journeys intersect here in this moment of studied violence.

Every muscle in the body of either man is contorted with tension. There is a common desperation between the men, a bond which creates a separation between the fighters and everybody else. In their war they are brothers and the rest of the world is just sound effect and backdrop.

You have to have been in there, with it all on the line in that squared circle, to really understand. When Bernard Dunne was throwing the punch he was doing so on behalf of the noble legions of triers and bad luck stories, of tomato cans and punchy delusionals, the mass of boxers who just could have been contenders. Next thing, he was a world champion.

One night in March. The story. They knocked each other down. They got back up again. Until round 11 when Cordoba tasted the canvas three times. After the final visit he departed riding on a stretcher and left Bernard Dunne to his tribe and that part of his life which would be epilogue. World champion.

Into the sittingroom he brings coffee and brownies and talks about his garden which is a generous piece of real estate with a barbeque area and a table for playing Texas Hold ’Em on fine evenings; there are some fruit trees and a large trampoline for the kids. There’s the patch he intends to rotavate and there’s the bit the dogs live in. It’s a garden with separate neighbourhoods.

It’s beautiful, but it’s a leap into the sort of life we all understand. From the monastic dedication of the fight and the heady, adrenalin-filled nights to gardening and school runs and Irish classes down the road. Does boxing not nag at him, with its siren songs which have tempted so many suckers back onto the reefs of comeback?

“Yeah, I miss it,” he says, frankly. “More lately than anything else. It is over a year since I have boxed. I have been watching a few fights in my weight division. Looking at them, wondering. I know it was the right decision, but I do miss it.”

Recent bouts, Steve Molitor versus Jason Booth or Rendall Monroe’s scrap with Toshiaki Nishioka have all featured fighters in approximately the same age group as Dunne, with the Japanese fighter four years older. Few of them though (with the possible exception of Booth), have been along for the ride Dunne has experienced.

“I haven’t done a bit of boxing training since I stopped. Since Poonsawat beat me (six months into his reign as champion, his first defence) I haven’t put a glove on. Apart from running the marathon, I’d have done nothing. Soccer twice a week. And that’s it. I miss it, but I don’t regret leaving it behind.

“Watching a fight, I’m looking, I’m analysing. I’m wondering what would I have done different. Try to clock out of it. I want to stay away from the gym. I’ve had my fill. I don’t want anybody whispering that it would be easy to make a comeback. I have made a few quid and I have a happy life. Move on.”

Apart from running, learning to speak Irish and immersing himself in the lives of his kids, Dunne has taken time recently to sort his thoughts and put them into a new autobiography. The experience pleased him. Bernard Dunne, My Story is a nimbly written excursion through a fighter’s life and does much to explain the enduring popularity of the young fella from Neilstown. He is a scrapper, by blood and by profession, and even for those sniffy professors of the sweet science who claim his punch was too feathery or his chin too delicate there is something noble and attractive about that.

So as we rooted for him in The Point, so we root for him through the harsh and jagged turns of his professional life outside the ring. Blazers and promoters and hangers-on can be as debilitating as too many uppercuts. Perhaps some day a boxer’s story will unfold like a happy fable with bravery and honour being rewarded only by love and riches. For now, Bernard Dunne’s tale is the nearest we get, but even that has a few jarring bumps along the way.

The discovery as he stood on the cusp of the pro-career of a cyst on his brain (cavum septum pellucidum, for those with an interest) swung him off course drastically.

“You have to acknowledge there is a problem. Then it’s about how do you deal with it. I was 20. I wanted to box. My Mam and Dad fretted badly. I thought it was nothing till I spoke to (his long-time) coach Harry Hawkins about it.

“Harry listened. Then he went off and rang Prof Jack Phillips himself. Jack had done the scan. Harry got back to me and said, ‘Look this is serious. If this breaks you will be banned. You won’t get a professional career’. I told Mam and dad and that was really it.

“Did I want to take the chance, or did I want to play safe and get a nine-to-five job? I agreed to do a scan quite regularly and if anything changed, flared up, I would stop. If they could show me it was getting worse, you would have to stop. I would. I think I would. Honest, I would. At that stage you wouldn’t be making much money. You would have to stop. If you were getting half a million you’d take the risk maybe.”

The discovery of the cyst wasn’t in itself a tragedy. They are common enough, but Dunne’s was discovered late in life with no reference point on the road behind to indicate if it had grown to pea size or had always been that size. The British Boxing Board of Control would withhold a licence if they knew of the cyst, so at the last minute his attentions turned to America.

He is a boxer, though, and it seems never to have seriously struck him to be anything else. He veered away from a career which would have brought him under the strict ministrations of the British Boxing Board of Control and went Stateside instead.

“One thing I knew I wanted to do was to still box. I wanted to have my chance and the States gave it to me. If it worked out, great. If I got stopped for the brain stuff or because I wasn’t good enough, I wanted to be able to say I had tried it.”

As luck would have it, though, he soon found himself in Buffalo in the state of New York, a place where, in the strange geography of boxing, the fight bosses are as cautious as they are in Britain. A brain scan duly showed the cyst. No fight. Dunne managed to play the entire thing down as a glitch on the scan, however, and, using the initial Dublin scan as a reference point, had the two scans compared back in LA. No growth. No deterioration. With one bound our hero was free.

“We were very successful at that. Keeping it all played down. You know how it is, all of a sudden the rumour machine gets going, the press would have you with tumours and in a wheelchair. Things get blown completely out of proportion. If it had broken I would have been banned from England. It could scare off sponsors and stuff. We decided the less that knew the better.”

In fact, he was already off course, having failed to qualify for the Sydney Games. Dunne travelled to Sydney as a reserve and ended up with a broken hand and lacerated face from sparring accidents. When it was clear he wasn’t going to be participating, he was effectively abandoned by the IABA and the OCI, who left him to fend for himself in Australia. No food. No roof. No nothing. After a golden amateur career the experience soured Dunne on the prospect of hanging around for Athens 2004. Relationships have been patched up, but the treatment still rankles.

“When it came up after the first brain scan I thought about staying amateur, but the fallout with the association was fresh. I said I’d give it a go as a pro. Brian Peters came in. I was honest. ‘I have a brain problem and I can’t go to England. Can you get me something in the States?’ He did, in fairness. He gets some stick in the book, but he runs a good show and he got me a world title fight and he got me to America. So credit to him as well where it is deserved.”

Ah, Brian Peters. Every boxing story has a pantomime baddie stalking its pages. Usually he wears a badge that reads Promoter. Access All Areas. By world standards Peters doesn’t make it as a baddie. Unfit to double-cross Don King’s shoelaces. His sins, such as they are, come across as venial and petty on the whole, and there is an amusing story of Peters inserting an obligation in Dunne’s fight contract that the promoter be given, as a memento, the robe which Dunne would wear into the ring for the Cordoba fight. For peace, Dunne signed. In the mayhem afterwards the garment got stolen from Dunne’s corner. The theft added to the merriment of the night.

“Poor him. I would love if we had been smart enough to have it swiped ourselves! That would make a better story even.”

For all that, and for all the due credit which Dunne duly heaps at Brian Peters’ feet for the good he did, there is a sadness in reading the story of how it all ended. The account of how Peters and fellow promoter Pat Magee locked antlers like stags in the glen, eventually forcing Dunne to fight somebody of the calibre of Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym of Thailand in his first voluntary defence, should be mandatory reading. (As should the chapter on the build-up to the equally calamitous Kiko Martinez bout.)

The good news is that Dunne has moved on. He is working as a commentator at a Peters event this weekend and is amused in his anticipation of how he will be received. What’s done is done, he reckons. He’s had his say and is happy to move on.

“One thing I didn’t want to come across in the book was sour grapes. There is no bitterness. None of that. Some of the stuff we went through, it was petty. So I just put it down. Credit where it was due. And criticism where it was due.

“It’s a short career. I’m 30 and I am finished. You gotta make what you can when you can. You learn to look after number one. But that takes a while.”

It is mid morning. Bernard Dunne lets Daisy out into the back garden and points to a glass box just down from the big-screen television. In it are the pair of green gloves he wore on the night he fought Cordoba. The best fight of 2009, the greatest fight of his career.

He travelled down so many mean streets, with the worries over his health, the failings of his sport, the years in exile, the slipperiness of promoters, but one perfect night like that, one night to keep in a glass case in your mind, that’s more than most of us can ever hope for.

You look at Bernard Dunne and understand for the first time why he didn’t settle for the nine-to-five life when that cyst appeared. Some people have to take a percentage off the back end of the dream. Some people have to tear down the dream. Some people have to retail the dream. The rare ones, the lucky ones, they live the dream.

These gloves. That photo. Soil traces gathered on an epic journey.