‘I’m glad to teach kids about the good side of boxing, it’s a sport that can save lives…it saved mine’ BOXING
Oisín Fagan went through some extraordinary highs and life-changing lows on the pro-boxing circuit and now he is using those experiences to help the youth of Dublin’s disadvantaged areas
‘I HAD A BIG IRISH HEART AND IT CAN TAKE YOU FAR IN SPORT’
THESE are strange times to be living through,’ Oisín Fagan says on a Thursday afternoon when he should be teaching a bunch of fifth and sixth class kids from Ballymun and Finglas the basics of boxing. As is the case for so many, his normal life has been turned on its head in the past week.
But he had an idea of what was coming down the tracks before the country went into lockdown.
His partner, Petra, had gone home to her native Slovakia to visit family before she was due to start a new job. However, when she tried to return to Ireland, she was told that she couldn’t leave the country and had to go into quarantine.
That was a couple of days before Taoiseach Leo Varadkar ordered the shutdown of all schools here.
Fagan knows it will be at least a month before she gets back. Maybe more. Nobody knows when the world will return to some sort of normality.
He doesn’t know when he will be next teaching some eager schoolkids about the basics of the ring in his job as an Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA) development officer.
In conjunction with Dublin City Council, Fagan, Olympic gold medalist Michael Carruth and Noel Burke, coach to former world lightweight champion Kellie Harrington, go into schools in disadvantaged areas around the city, trying to stimulate an interest in the fight game.
Aside from a decent professional career that saw him win the Irish lightweight title fight in iconic venues like Madison Square Garden and the MGM Grand in Vegas and test himself against former and future world champions, Fagan was also a PE and English teacher in the United States, so this work is the ideal fit. And in the past few years, he feels that he has really made a difference in the lives of some children.
‘Some of these kids might have never laced up a pair of gloves in their lives, and never thought about it but we just want to see if boxing can offer them something. Football and the GAA is out there, but that’s not for everyone. We are just providing another option, that will try and keep them off the streets.’
The young fighters are divided into three groups – bronze, silver and gold. They move their way up from non-contact boxing to using headgear. For those who make it to the gold group, there’s a chance to train at the IABA’s High Performance gym and box in the ring at the National Stadium.
‘Each of the coaches will bring their own group to that showcase event. And we pride ourselves on how well we match the kids. There have been tens of thousands that have passed through the programme and with those bouts, there has been less than half a dozen bloody noses.’
Fagan reckons that kids often discover something about themselves in the ring that hadn’t been readily apparent.
‘We always joke with them that we’re keeping them out of trouble, and on the straight and narrow. But kids respond to different things.
‘The quiet, shy kid might not be into team sports, but he might find something in the ring that he can connect with. Often when it comes to football or Gaelic or hurling, it can be the loudest and most confident kids that stand out. It’s different with boxing, because you have to look inside yourself when you are in the ring. It is about the size of your heart and it can help some kids really come out of themselves.’
Fagan speaks from experience. A talented soccer player in his youth, the starring role he played with his native Portmarnock as they reached the Leinster Junior Cup final in 1996 was enough to earn him a scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. During his time there – where he majored in Physical Education and Political Journalism – he was twice voted All-American scholar athlete and looked set for a career in Major League soccer.
However, a bad knee injury suffered during the final year of his degree halted any prospective career as a professional footballer. He kicked his heels around Oklahoma for a while, staying fit by training in a local gym. Money was running out though and he had even taken to living in his car, when boxing intervened and everything changed.
‘My parents get upset when I say in interviews that I was living out of my car, because a call home would have changed everything. But I was nearly 30 years of age, and thought I was too old to be running to them at the first sign of trouble. I wanted to figure it out for myself.’
The gym owner was involved in helping to put a card together at the AMC Flea Market in Oklahoma and asked Fagan if he was interested. So, at 29 years of age, he made his debut as a professional fighter.
‘A lot of my friends from university came to watch. I ended up fighting a guy called Sheldon Mosley. I trained really hard for seven or eight weeks for the fight and ended up winning, even if there were a couple of hairy moments,’ he recalls.
In the crowd at the Flea Market that night was Phil Cunningham, a principal of a local inner-city High School. He introduced himself to Fagan following the fight.
‘I was just after winning my first pro bout. As you can imagine, I was on top of the world. And then Phil approached me and said he heard I had a PE qualification, that he was looking for a PE teacher. So, I made my debut as a pro boxer and got my first teaching job on the same night,’ he chuckles at the memory. Over the next few years, he supplemented his teaching income with prizefights wherever he could get them around the American mid-west. ‘For a few years, I was a teacher by day and fighter by night. I’d come into class on Monday with cuts and bruises on my face,’ he remembers, evoking an image of Joel Edgerton’s character in the movie Warrior.
It just so happened that there were plenty of boxing fans in his class, many of whom would cheer him on when he fought locally. Most of his pupils came from Oklahoma’s Hispanic community, which is obsessed with the sport.
‘There were parallels with some of the kids I work with now. A lot of the kids came from tough, challenging backgrounds. It was an innercity school and 95 per cent of the kids were Latino. But most of them loved the fact that I was their teacher and also a boxer. A lot of them would come to my fights on a Friday or Saturday night, and if I came in with a cut above my eye on a Monday morning, they would have the jibes and jokes ready.’
By Fagan’s count, at least half-adozen of the kids he saw go through that school have gone on to become professional fighters with one, Alex Saucedo recently having fought for the WBO super-lightweight title in his native Oklahoma City. ‘He lost
that fight, but he’s on the cusp of making it big. He’s working with Eddie Autry, who’s my former trainer over there. But a lot of those kids have gone into boxing,’ Fagan observes.
It was an interesting time in his life, one that he is currently chronicling in an autobiography that he hopes to complete soon. He was lucky to have teaching to fall back on, as there was little money to be made in the lower rungs of midwest America’s boxing’s ladder.
However, following his first six bouts being in the Farmer’s Market in Oklahoma or a casino in Tulsa, he left his class on a Thursday evening for his seventh fight to fly to Las Vegas, where he had a date with the son of one of the sport’s legendary figures that weekend in the MGM Grand. Fagan had been making enough noises in the light-welterweight ranks to be chosen to fight Julio Cesar Chavez junior on the undercard of Erik Morales’ clash with Miguel Cotto.
‘I remember coming in on the plane and seeing the lights of the strip and thinking to myself ‘this is mad, I am going to be fighting in the MGM Grand in a couple of days’ time,’ he recalls. ‘And a lot of people tell me I won that fight. Maybe I did enough to win it.
‘But there were 16,000 Mexicans in the crowd that night. I was never going to get the decision against him, not in Vegas. And it was hyped up as Chavez junior being presented to the world. He was the big name. ‘And his father, this absolute legend of the sport, accompanied him to the ring and was in his corner.
‘There was no way I would have got the decision. But he said for years after it that I was his toughest fight and I appreciated that.’
Having fought a future world champion in Chavez junior, Fagan also got the chance to meet a former champion in Paul Spadafora, the one-time IBF lightweight titlist, a few years later. Again, he took his renowned opponent the distance but once more, the judges gave the decision to the more famous name.
Still, having been such a late starter to the sport, Fagan carved out a decent career for himself.
His timing wasn’t bad, either. Just as he was racking up a few wins on his record, Brian Peters was trying to revive the pro scene in Dublin on the back of Bernard Dunne coming home from Los Angeles. Fagan, who had less than a handful of bouts as an amateur before leaving for the States, had his first professional fight in Dublin in the National Stadium in October 2005. Within eight months, he was back in Dublin and became the Irish light-welterweight champion by stopping Richard Thomas in the Stadium.
‘Winning the Irish title was the best memory of my career, but I had plenty of good memories. A lot of great nights. Fighting on the card in one of Bernard Dunne’s nights in the Point (now 3Arena), and the fight being live on RTÉ that night. Fighting Chavez junior in the MGM Grand, winning in Madison Square Garden, it was actually 12 years ago this week when I stopped Brian Caden in the Garden.
‘There were some really good times, considering I didn’t start boxing until I was nearly 30. I went the distance with two guys that won world titles, and might have done enough to beat them. There is nothing I would change about it. It is like a Rocky story, without the glory of a world title.
‘Looking back, I wouldn’t change anything. It was some journey. I was never the most skilful boxer in the world, I don’t mind admitting that, but I was fit and healthy. I had a big Irish heart, was tough and rugged. And a big heart can take you a fair bit in the sport.’
In November 2008, a door was opened to the big-time for Fagan when he was matched against Amir Khan in a Sky pay-per-view main event in London’s Excel Arena. Hundreds of family and friends from Portmarnock came across for the bout, but Fagan remembers it as ‘the worst night of my life’.
After fracturing his ankle in the first round, the bout was stopped in the second.
His injury wasn’t even mentioned by the Sky commentators on the night. It’s an episode he would sooner forget.
The only other painful memory of his career concerns his last fight when, at 41, Fagan was beaten by an opponent half his age at the 3Arena.
‘It leaves a bitter taste even now. I only took the fight at a few days’ notice. Didn’t have my own cornermen, had to use a house cornerman and he ended up throwing in the towel, which had never happened in my career before. It didn’t sit well with me. But thinking back now, it was a silly thing to do. My opponent was in his early 20s.’
It was the 10th defeat in his 37th and final bout of a professional career that had begun almost by accident. But Fagan insists that he will always be grateful for how boxing helped him turn his life around – and it’s that side of the story he likes to emphasise with the kids he is now teaching.
‘I suppose some people might find my story inspirational, but I do try to tell the kids on our programme that my story shows what boxing as a sport can do. And I am glad to be able to teach kids about the good side of boxing, how it is a sport that can save lives because it probably saved mine.’