This is the biggest fight of our lives
Billy Walsh’s goal of plotting Team USA’s return to the summit of Olympic boxing is going extremely well but he insists priorities have shifted for now...
THERE was snow in Colorado Springs last Monday. It is coming up on five years that Billy Walsh has been in this part of America and it still has the capacity to surprise. ‘The day before, it was like 21 degrees, the sun splitting the stones. And you wake up the next morning and there’s snow. Crazy.’
The city is regularly voted among the most desirable places to live in the United States but as it lies a mile above sea level, the weather can fluctuate. It adds to the charm of somewhere that Walsh has grown to love. He goes hiking on a local trail called the Incline or the nearby Garden of the Gods, stares up at Pike’s Peak and the Rockies and realises there are worse places to be in the world.
From the US Olympic & Paralympic Training Center, Walsh has been plotting a way for the one-time superpower of amateur boxing to return to the sport’s summit.
Following his acrimonious split from the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA), he had been less than a year with the US squad by the time Rio rolled around but the team still returned home with a gold, silver and bronze.
Walsh ended 2016 named the best boxing coach in the world.
Tokyo, though, would always be the acid test of his work as head coach with the American team. Every member of his Rio squad turned professional after the last Olympics, leaving him with a clean slate to develop a new group of boxers, which he hopes will end America’s long gold medal drought in the male ranks.
It’s remarkable to think that the nation that produced Olympians like Cassius Clay, Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya hasn’t won a gold medal in men’s boxing since the great Andre Ward claimed gold in Athens back in 2004, but that was how far Team USA had fallen.
All plans have been turned upsidedown in the past six weeks, though. The Olympics is now more than a year away, as the world tries to get a handle on the Covid-19 pandemic. Walsh has been in lockdown on his own in Colorado Springs with his family back in Ireland. Jack Quinn’s, the Irish bar he discovered not long after coming here, is closed like all pubs and restaurants although he can still get a takeaway of food and beer from there.
Even if he wanted to go back to Wexford, he couldn’t as he’s currently in the process of applying for a green card.
‘If you leave the country apparently, your application becomes void and you have to start the process all over again. So, I’m like a caged lion here on my own,’ the 56-year-old says with a chuckle.
‘But look, everyone is in the same boat. And I don’t mind it too much. Even though, I like going out, socialising and that sort of thing, I like my own company, too. And this has given us all time to think, which I hadn’t got too much of before because I was organising training sessions, going to meetings, meeting coaches.’
‘Obviously, it is a disruption to our plans, everything was focused towards Tokyo in July and August, but we just have to adapt to the situation. It is the same for everybody. Good athletes are able to adapt to anything and good coaches should be able to adapt to anything as well,’ he points out.
Once the extent of the lockdown became apparent, Walsh sat down with his team of coaches and decided to send the boxers home to spend time with their families. The various destinations taken in by those fighters offers a sense of America’s vastness. From New York to California and from Ohio to Texas, they dispersed to every corner of the map, although there is one from Colorado Springs – talented middleweight Naomi Graham.
‘The team haven’t been together for around four weeks now. With everything that was going on, we just decided to let the guys go home to be with their families for a few weeks. They are doing work on their training plans at home, and we stay in regular contact through video calls.’
The postponement of the Games until the summer of 2021 created another headache for Walsh, as it opened a window of opportunity for some of his boxers to have their head turned by professional promoters. One of the big challenges for him since arriving in America has been to convince the most talented fighters that the Olympic dream is one worth pursuing.
‘It’s a massive challenge. Before I came here, the American team were losing their best boxers from one year to the next, because of the draw of being a professional. You had fighters who would become national champion at 18 and sign pro papers the following week.
‘And it’s still a challenge. We have tried to sell them the vision of the Olympic Games and built the brand of Team USA around that. We sold it as a pathway to becoming a world champion in the professional ranks, like some of the best fighters in history were Olympic champions before becoming professional champions. And they are starting to believe in that Olympic platform.
‘It can be tough to convince them. A lot of our guys come from poor backgrounds, and if there’s a big promoter waving a load of dollars at you, it can be very hard to turn that down. But pro boxing has stopped now as well. There are no pro bouts, and they might only get two between now and next July if they go pro, so I have told them that they might as well wait another year and get that Olympic medal around their neck because it will add another couple of zeros to your contract if you do turn pro,’ Walsh says.
The method appears to be working. Keyshawn Davis, the gifted 21year-old light-welterweight who was a silver medalist at last year’s World Championships, was seen as the best hope to bridge that gold medal gap in Tokyo. However, with the Olympics on ice, the Davis home in Virginia had been inundated with calls from promoters, some touting offers of a six-figure signing bonus. He confirmed on Friday, though, that he would be remaining with the American team in an effort to become Olympic champion.
It’s the sort of thing that would have been hard to imagine happening in American amateur boxing before Walsh took the reins. But he has been able to show them that it is
We have tried to sell them the vision of the Olympics and built the Team USA brand around it
worth sticking around for the gold medal as it boosts professional prospects. There are examples he can use, such as double Olympic champion Claressa Shields who has become a three-weight world champion as a pro and still pays the occasional visit to the training centre.
‘None of our team are over 22, so they have time on their side. That’s the message I keep telling them, that the pro ranks will always be there, but this might be your only shot at the Olympics,’ Walsh says.
‘And it’s just one more year and it also means that it will give us more time to work with some of the younger boxers, ensure that they have more experience. It’s in my nature to be optimistic anyway, so I am looking at this as an opportunity, having more time to work with these fighters.’
There’s plenty of potential in the current team. In January’s prestigious Strandja tournament in Bulgaria, the USA were second in the medal table, just behind Ukraine, mainly down to the talent in the female ranks with Virginia Fuchs and rising welterweight star Oshae Jones both winning gold.
When he first arrived in Colorado
Springs, energised by the challenge of reviving the sleeping giant of amateur boxing, he was astounded by how far things had fallen. Not only had no male American boxer claimed a medal at London 2012, but the team itself only won a handful of fights. Preparation was so shambolic that it emerged fighters had gone into bouts, not knowing whether their opponents were orthodox or southpaw.
As he did with Gary Keegan in Ireland, when they created the medal factory on South Circular Road, Walsh sought to transform the entire culture of American boxing. One of the first things he did was to have the five Olympic rings painted prominently in the gym, so the boxers had a visible goal. And a key component has been to develop a coach education programme in the States, as there hadn’t been one for more than 20 years, a sign of how neglected things had become.
‘It was vital we got that up and running, because it was the first programme run in the States since 1994 and it means that fighters will now be getting better quality coaching and they will be fighting with a better style.’
Of course, he still keeps an eye on what is happening in Ireland. He was glad to see his friend Bernard Dunne appointed to succeed him as high performance director and there are already plans in place to have a preOlympic training camp with Ireland and Germany, whose head coach is Eddie Bogler, his fellow Wexford man that was also part of the IABA high performance programme.
They have already sourced a venue in Miyazaki, on the southern tip of Japan. ‘It was where the Germany team had their pre-tournament training camp before the 2002 World Cup, and they didn’t do badly. France and Morocco are also looking at the same camp, so we will have some top-quality sparring.’
Boxers need to qualify for the Olympics, first. And while the cancellation of the Americas qualifier in Buenos Aires means that none of the US team have booked a ticket yet, Brendan Irvine was the first Irish boxer to qualify for Tokyo at the controversial London qualifying event. Walsh was pleased for the Belfast native, even if he was disgusted that the meeting had gone ahead.
‘I was delighted to see Brendan qualify. He had a horrendous couple of years with injury, and he will be someone to be reckoned with in Tokyo because he has the experience of that first games behind him. It was funny. I was in Brendan’s corner in the 2015 World Championships when he fought Nico Hernandez and a few weeks later, I was over in America, working with Nico.
‘But it was ridiculous that it went ahead. I couldn’t believe it. Even Donald Trump was closing things down at that stage. And then some of the Croats and Turks ended up getting the virus, so they actually risked the boxers’ health by holding the event. Someone should have stood up and shown a bit of leadership because this thing is far bigger than boxing.’
Some nights, he flicks on the bizarre television show that is Trump’s nightly press conference. Other evenings, he catches up on Netflix or his reading. And occasionally, he reflects on what is happening across the world and whether an American male boxer winning gold in Tokyo is at all important at present.
‘Sport doesn’t matter at the moment. The survival of the human race is much more important than sport and we just have to get through this pandemic. We are living through history at the moment. When you read about the Spanish Flu or the Plague, it never crossed your mind that you would live through something similar. But here we are. Even the fact that the Olympics is postponed shows that this is a major historical event. The last time it happened was the Second World War and this is something similar.’
The night after we spoke, Trump announced that he was giving each State a set of guidelines to decide when they can reopen their economy. Colorado Governor Jared Polis had already made clear that his state won’t be easing restrictions until mass testing for the coronavirus is available on a consistent basis.
It might be some time yet before Billy Walsh is back in the US Olympic Training Center, plotting how to restore American boxing to past glories. The world may well be a different place, then.
I was disgusted it went ahead, they risked the boxers’ health