Hampsey ready to box clever in fight for game’s big prize
Former boxer aims to follow Red Hand heroes
The legacy of a youth well spent is that there is literally nothing that can be thrown at Padraig Hampsey today that will force him to take a backwards step.
He played in his first national final when he was 14, sustained a broken nose in the opening minutes but, after inspection by the doctor, got the green light to go on.
True to the stereotype, they make their footballers tough in Tyrone but they make their boxers even tougher.
He lost that fight by a point – one of two national finals he reached as a two-time Ulster champion at underage level – and while his gloves have been hung up for the past seven years, the fighter in him remains.
Or at least the fire-fighter, which has become his defining role on a Tyrone team that is now tracing the footprints of those he idolised in the noughties, a period when he religiously took the road south in September accompanied by his father, Paul.
In a teenage life where Manny Pacquiao competed with Conor Gormley for his affections, there could only be one winner in the celebrity box-off in his mind.
Gormley could throw a punch to take care of himself if he was boxed in a corner but the Philippines, unlike Carrickmore, never did produce a line of great corner-backs. Hampsey was nine years of age when he bore witness to the Gormley’s gamesaving block in the 2003 All-Ireland final against Armagh. It lit the kind of fire in him that could never be quenched.
‘Steven McDonnell was through on goal and putting the head down. When he lifted it, Gormley was on his foot. It was unbelievable,’ he recalls.
‘It was probably one of the greatest sporting moments I have ever seen, just his sheer desire to get down on his foot. It was unbelievable. Deadly, really.
‘And if you look at the Tyrone team back then, it was just their sheer desire to win. They were swarming around the opposition to win ball. Their desire to get the ball back and win for the county – it is always something you look back on. You try to win it for yourself.’
That principle provides a neat correlation between his two sporting loves; you have to learn to do it for yourself before you get to do it for the team.
He wasn’t thinking that way as a 10-year-old when he made the short journey from Coalisland to join the Clonoe Boxing Club, where he fell under the wing of the late Frank Gervin.
He loved boxing for the sport of it and it opened doors to friendships – Conrad Cummings, the one-time holder of a professional European middleweight belt is a pal. It also opened up the world. He fought in Greece, Denmark and Florida’s Marco Island –
but the biggest journey of all was in his own head.
‘I found that if you were not putting it in, you were going to get nothing out of it,’ he explains.
‘It was that and the fact that, whenever you got into that ring, it was yourself. You had no teammates to back you up. It was just you and the man you were fighting. It was great in that sense.
‘I found that whenever I came back to the football it helped me. The training helped both ways and you found that you were getting better through both sports.’
The benefits arising from the cross-pollination of skill-sets was not lost on Mickey Harte, a man in the midst of building a team capable of carrying the burden of expectation he himself had created.
Hampsey, a graduate of Tyrone’s development squad system, was part of a talented group coaxed and coached through under-age by Fergal Logan. He togged out at fullback when the latter guided them to an All-Ireland Under-21 title in 2015. Harte liked what he saw.
‘He was a very physically imposing young man. He had good football skills and he had great pace. It’s a really great combination.
‘He also has a boxing background which tells you a lot about a person because there is no hiding place when you are boxing. You are on your own and if can’t stand up for yourself you will be found out.
‘So I think that ability to stand on his own two feet, and to be able to bring that into the team context, is a great thing and he can do that,’ explains Harte.
And those words have been backed up by action.
Hampsey went from not seeing a single minute of game-time in the league in his rookie season in 2016 – he did make two appearances off the bench in the championship – to becoming Harte’s number one man-marker last season.
Ahead of last year’s Ulster semi-final clash with Donegal, their supporters fretted as to how they could curb the influence of Michael Murphy in the absence of the now-retired Justin McMahon.
Hampsey stepped into the breach and went one step further than just curbing Murphy. He outscored the Donegal captain by 0-2 to 0-1 in open play. It was a game that was the making of him.
‘It was a deadly feeling coming off the pitch that day especially with the win for the team alone,’ he says.
‘It was just the battle alone with Murphy – just his physique and raw power. It was a great experience and one which I sort of look back on,’ he admits. It also meant that in every big game now, he finds himself sent on a match-defining mission. As a full-time gym instructor with his club Coalisland Na Fianna, he has the nerve and the body for it – and he thrives on the responsibility. Today, the odds are that he will be tasked with tracking Ciarán Kilkenny – the alternative will be locking horns with Brian Fenton – and he will be primed for it. ‘You sort of enjoy getting the role of marking the big players. I don’t really see much pressure. ‘Any job you’re trained to do you put the head down and you work hard at it,’ he says. Alone in the ring in a battle of wills, it will feel just like home.