Locker Room: For reasons which aren't quite relevant but nevertheless fill column inches, I used to take a great interest in the fight career of Roberto Duran.
You see, years ago there used to be a little greasy-spoon-type restaurant joint in Rathmines. It was called the Sunset Café. The Sunset was long and narrow and quite dark. Its heyday was in a time before cappuccinos and lattes, a time before Rathmines had become halfway civilised.
One afternoon I was sitting in the Sunset Café slurping coffee in the company of a young woman who was being treated to the entire "wonder of me" routine which passed for courtship back then. My smooth monologue was interrupted by the sound of shouting from near the door.
An emaciated drunk, the kind who looks like Tom Waits after a long illness, was being obstreperous with the cashier. Their difference was a philosophic one. On such a manky day with the rain blowing like grey gunsmoke up the Rathmines Road should a man down on his luck be required to pay the full price of a cup of coffee or merely that price he could best afford?
The woman at the till was intransigent in her view that the full price was what was required. Her unwillingness to enter the cut and thrust of the debate was annoying to the man. He began shouting.
In situations like this your mother always said, "Don't stare." Good advice. I turned around and stared. The woman at the till caught my eye and pleaded with me to come to her aid.
I don't know if it was the caffeine or the lust but instead of reaching into my duffel pocket and fishing out enough small change to pay for the man's cup of coffee and a little peace I jumped up and put my hand firmly on the old man's shoulder and said, " C'mon, pal, let's go."
At which point he sort of half fell and half stumbled pathetically towards the door as if he had been hit by a steam train. With nimble footwork I got the door open just in time for him to pass out of The Sunset and into the dark, wet evening without breaking his momentum.
I turned to walk back to my seat and towards the face of she who just seconds before was being intensely wooed. She now looked conspicuously sick. There was very little left to say and no chance of any good loving.
We sat for some seconds and just when it seemed the embarrassment and shame quotient couldn't get notched up another millimetre the door to The Sunset opened again and the old man leaned through. In a breaking voice he starting hurling unhelpful abuse at my back.
"Who do ya think ya are? Roberto Duran? Come out here and I'll take care of ya. C'mout here, Roberto. Can you hear me, Roberto? You wouldn't last out on the street, Roberto."
"I think he's talking to you," said she. " I'll leave you to it."
This was the winter of 1980, and just then, everyone, especially me, thought Roberto Duran was a granite-tough guy built for the ages. I remember what time it was because a few days later Roberto quit in the ring against Sugar Ray Leonard, just turning his back and saying the words "No más".
All of which leads us not into a discussion of the influence on dumb machismo mores of the career of the odd Panamanian but to a reminiscence of a near corpse of a fighter called Irish Pat Lawlor, The Pride of The Sunset, whose career intersected a couple of times with that of Duran and whom I hadn't thought of in some time till I had cause to speak with Ireland's John Duddy on Wednesday last week and then to Bernard Dunne (formerly of the Sugar Ray Leonard stable) a day later.
Irish Pat Lawlor fought out of (of all places) San Francisco, maybe the least pugilistically inclined city in the whole of the US. His fight monicker refers not to the old café in Rathmines of course but to the Sunset, an old Irish enclave of that misty city. Given to sporting a big red moustache and a tweed cap and writing bad, lachrymose poetry, Irish Pat wasn't quite in tune with his broader environment.
His path intersected with Duran's a few times - most miserably back in 1991 deep on the undercard of a Mike Tyson/Razor Ruddock fight when Duran, old and out of shape, and having received a punch to the left armpit, turned his back and quit on Irish Pat in The Mirage in Vegas. Duran later claimed the armpit had been quite tender at the time. One paper commented that Hands of Stone had become Senor Cellulite.
(Still, Duran, who was born in 1951 and made his pro debut in 1968 at 118lb, had his revenge in June 2000 when he fought Lawlor for the second time. This time Roberto was 167lb and 49 years old. He won over 12 rounds in Panama City. We can only imagine the spectacle.)
Lawlor was slightly more fun to follow than Roberto, his expectations being lower and the pathos factor being reduced accordingly. When I first came across him he was boxing while studying for his real-estate exams. No definitive word on what happened there exactly, but after a defeat last year he announced he was staying in boxing only until he took his pest-control-licence exam.
He wasn't staying in the game till he became a champ, that's for sure. His early run of victories over faint-pulsed opposition came to an end when he was beaten by a chap called Drafton Bunch, a journeyman out of San Diego who travelled with the handicap of a weak chin. Bunch fought two more bouts, lost them both, and packed it in like a sensible man.
Irish Pat has never been threatened with common sense, though. Lawlor has always been gloriously out of tune with the world around him. Back in his heyday he chose not just to box out of San Francisco but to run for mayor of that city on, of all things, a virulently anti-gay platform. He entered the ring for fights wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend "It's Great to Be Straight" and ran on the slogan "If You're Mad as Hell and Want to Holler, Cast Your Vote for Irish Pat Lawlor." It's safe to say no PR consultants were bothered in the course of Irish Pat's campaign.
His keen grasp of the democratic system was nevertheless illustrated in the quote he gave to a local newspaper vis-à-vis the gay community: "All the laws go their way because they are voting."
Even after delivering that memorable blow to Duran's sore armpit, Irish Pat's career resolutely failed to take off. It might be because, as one critic says, he couldn't keep his hands up with a gun to his back in a hostage situation or because, as he said himself, he's such a light hitter: "I couldn't break an egg at middleweight."
He made the egg comment in the context of his perhaps-unwise decision to allow himself to blossom and bloom up through the weight categories so that when last heard of he was hoping to entice Evander Holyfield into the ring.
The reason? History and cash. He has a plan. He has fought opponents who have held titles in every weight class from featherweight to super-middleweight. Holyfield was a light-heavyweight, a cruiserweight and a heavyweight. Irish Pat dangles the carrot of an easy win.
"Holyfield has to believe I can't hurt him. So he gets, in his mind, an easy victory, and I get to make history."
He also needs the money from a Holyfield beating to get his life going again. Three years ago he lost his job, his house and custody of his daughter during a two-month stint in jail for drinking and driving.
A recent poetic work from the Pride of the Sunset explains the pathos of his situation.
"I'm at the point of my career where I'm dealing with pimps, another one of their whores/Taking fights on short notice and picking myself off of different arena floors/Who will it be tonight? Another young undefeated kid?/I go one, maybe two rounds, then BAM - across the apron I skid/It's not like I've been training and have a legitimate chance to win it/When the usher opens the door and yells LAWLOR, YOUR UP, I just say to the others BE BACK IN A MINUTE."
So there. That's the connection between the shame of the Sunset Café and the Pride of the Sunset. Just thought you should know.
