BOXING:YOU DON'T so much talk to Darren Sutherland as enlist in his cause. He radiates enthusiasm the way bulbs shed light. He came to the mixed zone yesterday, as Ireland's latest boxing medallist, and spoke for three minutes before anybody had asked a question.
Of the three Irish boxers to graffiti their names all over the permanent record of these Games, Sutherland is the best story and the best talker and when he turns professional will almost certainly go on to become the best remembered.
His natural style is, as he says himself, "not really European". By that he means too it is not really amateur. He is not a boxer designed to patiently pick off scores on the computer scoring system but likes rather to get in close and personal and exchange punches like a broker getting rid of tumbling stock before the market collapses.
Yesterday he abandoned that style and fooled his Venezuelan opponent entirely. Blanco, a very fast and explosive fighter, came out in the first ready to rumble.
"The tactics were perfect," said Sutherland afterwards. "Tie in the guard. Get in close. Don't let him work. I gave the fireworks with the other fight and gave away 14 points. I didn't want to do that.
"One punch conceded. That's the lowest I've ever had for an opponent. He played into my hands. I wanted to close him down. As soon as the bell went he came straight at me.
"In the zone I am pretty strong. He stayed in and traded with me. There was only going to be one winner when he did that."
The 11-1 scoreline underlined Sutherland's assertions.
In terms of Sutherland's story it was just another turn in the convoluted tale that is his biography.
His last meeting with Blanco was in Chicago last October, when he lost by 20-13 in the World Championships, an event that was a low point for Sutherland personally and for Irish boxing and its under-pressure high-performance scheme.
Sutherland felt the pressure at both ends, because Gary Keegan, the IABA's high-performance director, was his first coach when he joined St Saviour's and they travelled to the Windy City together sharing high expectations.
In the aftermath of that defeat he looked around for ways to insert the enjoyment back into his boxing. Sutherland is a creature of moods. Having been spotted by Brendan Ingle on the set of the doomed Brendan O'Carroll movie Sparrow's Trap, he spent a week with Ingle before his junior cert and left for the famous Wincobank Gym in Sheffield soon after sitting the exam. After three-and-a-half years of the life of the low-level gym rat he came home disillusioned.
With good humour he told yesterday of being a 21-year-old and enrolling for school in St Peter's of Dunboyne (his peripatetic parents having moved to Navan by now). He told of being required to get a uniform and sit with 15-year-olds who had skipped transition year.
To save himself the embarrassment of meeting his friends while wearing a school uniform he bought himself a little car to get to and from school.
Now he is just wrapping up a degree in sports sciences at DCU and on the brink of a pro career which looked an impossibility when he received a thumb in the eye during a fight with Danil Shved of Russia in the National Stadium in May 2006.
Sutherland required surgery and now has permanent plates in his left eye to reinforce the socket.
Until November of that year when he received the all-clear to box again it looked as if his career was finished again.
Sutherland came back to defend his national title early in 2007 and the year not untypically turned into something of a rollercoaster experience.
He won his first major title, the EU Championship, beating tomorrows opponent, James "Chunky" DeGale, in the final but lost that World Championship fight later in the year to Blanco.
This January for the third year running he beat the popular Kilkenny boxer (and former underage hurling star) Darren O'Neill in the National Senior final.
Sutherland's enthusiastic confidence can occasionally be misconstrued as arrogance. While he was being interviewed that evening in the Stadium there were some boos from the attendance. Sutherland is unlikely to have been very moved.
He went to Pescara, Italy, in February full of enthusiasm having sat down with his coaches after Chicago in an attempt to put a bit more attack and a bit more fun back into his fight game.
It worked but he lost there (for the only time in five bouts) to DeGale. The Londoner (who also has a Caribbean background; his father is from Grenada) won by 23-22 in a memorable scrap which saw Sutherland almost wipe out a 10-point deficit.
"One of the key things to me after Chicago was enjoyment. I was boxing a style that didn't suit me. I'm not really a European-style boxer. I like to fight. I like to get stuck in. Sometimes amateur boxing doesn't reward that.
"I said I would rather go out my own way and if I don't qualify well I am doing something I enjoy. The guys worked with that style, which is different from the other guys but it works for me."
Tomorrow as he gets down to the last chapters of his amateur career he fights DeGale again. If Sutherland exudes confidence DeGale has a self-belief that must make Sutherland a candidate for a self-help group in assertiveness.
DeGale, whose nickname Chunky is the legacy of a portly childhood, begins his biography on his website with the words, "Was it destiny or fate that made me the man that I am today? A man destined to go on and do great things in the world of boxing . . . who has already achieved more than most do in a lifetime."
Tomorrows semi-final showdown between Darren "Dazzler" Sutherland and James "Chunky" DeGale doesn't need a promoter to spice it up but what promoter wouldn't jump at it? The whiff of cordite in the air and two rivals with more in common than they possibly know each looking to take the bragging rights and a better class of medal from the other. Another day in the odd life of Darren Sutherland.
