‘I KEPT TRYING TO KNOCK HOLYFIELD OUT…WHICH WAS INSANE’
It is been 30 years since Seamus McDonagh took on one of the greatest heavyweights of all time and not even transcendental meditation can stop him thinking about it every day since
EVEN in a pandemic, Seamus McDonagh’s morning routine hasn’t changed. It has been the same for the past 24 years. Once he gets up, he goes through his 12 steps, writes his resentments and fears out on paper and practises some transcendental meditation.
It’s the reason that McDonagh feels in a good place, these days.
But no matter how much he focuses on the here and now, there is one event in his life that he can’t escape. The night in Atlantic City when he faced one of the greatest heavyweights of all time.
‘It still feels like yesterday,’ he says with a sigh from the San Francisco apartment he’s called home for 25 years.
‘It has been 30 years since that fight took place and there probably hasn’t been a day gone by that I haven’t thought about it at some stage. Of course, there’s a bit of regret. I wasn’t prepared mentally for just how huge an event it was.’
McDonagh lasted four rounds with Evander Holyfield that June night, longer than James ‘Buster’ Douglas did a few months later when Holyfield began the first of his four reigns as heavyweight champion.
And the Irishman did manage to nail his more renowned opponent with a perfect shot that rattled Holyfield.
However, he was only ever meant to be a bit-part player in the drama.
It was a bout to keep Holyfield fresh. Some bookmakers even refused to take bets on the outcome. McDonagh was a cruiserweight and a pretty good one, having been ranked as high as third in the world. By virtue of beating a couple of heavyweights, he was also ranked ninth in the higher division, so Holyfield’s team felt the big-punching Meath man with strong Irish support was the ideal adversary.
Holyfield was supposed to face Mike Tyson that night for the world heavyweight title. But a few months earlier in Tokyo, Douglas was responsible for the greatest upset in boxing history, shattering Tyson’s aura of invincibility. McDonagh watched that fight in Buchanan’s Bar on Staten Island. He had no idea of the significant impact the shock would have on his own life. With plans for the ‘Fight of the Decade’ now in tatters, and the new champion injured, Holyfield needed an opponent. Step forward the handsome Irish fighter, who had a record of 19-1-1 with 14 wins coming by knockout.
‘I was ranked in the top 10 at heavyweight at the time as well as, three at cruiserweight.
And I had this big Irish following on the east coast, which appealed to them, so they asked me to step in and fight their man,’ McDonagh remembers.
‘I declined, at first. Probably laughed at them. I wasn’t going to fight Holyfield. He was the top heavyweight in the world. I was a cruiserweight. Why would I fight him? They came back a week later and told me if you beat him, you can make $25 million in your next fight because you’ll get the title shot. So, I warmed to the idea,’ he recalls, with a soft laugh.
So, on the first Saturday in June 1990, with this country feverishly anticipating Italia ’90, an Irish boxer faced the best heavyweight in the world. Steven Spielberg and Donald Trump were among the luminaries sat in the front row. McDonagh was led to the ring by
Irish pipers. As the boxers were introduced, the enormity of the occasion suddenly overwhelmed him and Holyfield knocked him down in the first round.
‘It was the first time I was put down since Peter Reynolds did it to me at the back of Jimmy Corry’s garage in Enfield when we were 11 years of age,’ he points out.
‘I wasn’t prepared for it. Mentally. Physically, I was in good nick. Really good nick, but I didn’t realise how big this was. And all the nerves and the occasion just overwhelmed me before the opening bell. My legs weren’t even working. And when you are in the ring about to fight the best heavyweight in the world, it’s not really a time to start losing it.
‘I was fighting a corporation called Holyfield really, backed by millionaires and billionaires.
‘He was on a path to become heavyweight champion. I didn’t even have a professional team around me. I had my dad and my brother and we had a couple of old Italian guys out of Brooklyn training me. Great guys but very old school, they didn’t know anything of the bright lights that goes with fighting someone like Holyfield.
‘I ended up trying to knock Holyfield out, which was insane really. If I just fought a cleverer fight, moved a bit more, I could have gone the distance with him. I mightn’t have beaten him but I could say I went the distance with one of the best heavyweights there has been. Still, I got a couple of nice slaps in,’ he laughs.
Holyfield praised McDonagh for his powerful left hook after the bout and they went their separate ways. Holyfield would dominate the heavyweight division for the next decade, becoming a four-time world champion while McDonagh retired from boxing within a year and struggled to cope away from the ring.
However, these days, McDonagh is the more contented.
While Holyfield has struggled with bankruptcy that saw him get back into the ring in his late 40s – McDonagh was even approached about the possibility of a rematch a couple of years ago but politely declined – the Meathman is now embracing life as an actor and filmmaker and has enjoyed more than two decades of sobriety.
The 57-year-old has practised transcendental meditation every morning since he took his last drink and he swears by it.
‘It makes you feel like you did when you were drinking, back when the drinking was good,’ he quips.
He should be in the middle of shooting a movie at present where he plays a newscaster.
‘The character’s a bit like Daithí Ó Sé,’ he explains. And he hopes to start a film project in Ireland later in the year, a fictional story about a boxer from Connemara that is based loosely on Seán Mannion’s life as well as his own. But everything is currently on hold due to Covid-19.
McDonagh got into acting after a chance meeting with Jimmy Smallhorne (he played Git in Love/ Hate) in New York.
‘Jimmy was over doing a play in the Irish Arts Centre about Bobby Sands and he convinced me to come down and audition for one of the smaller parts. And that was that.’
A New York sportswriter he knows, Bobby Cassidy, then asked McDonagh to play the lead in his own work, Kid Shamrock. On the stage, he discovered a passion that he didn’t know existed, a deeper passion than he ever had for boxing. Even though he was successful enough to be a Golden Gloves champion, and a contender at cruiserweight, McDonagh never truly liked the sport. He only did the sport to keep his father, Jim, happy.
‘I wouldn’t have been a fighter only it was something my father wanted,’ McDonagh says in a voice that still has a trace of an Irish accent despite almost 40 years in America. ‘He had been a professional fighter in England and his own trainer, Arthur Batty, was a massive influence on his life. And he wanted to share all that knowledge with his sons.’
McDonagh insists that his older brother, John, was the better boxer of the two, but he was still good enough to pick up All-Ireland youth and junior titles for the boxing club that his father started in Enfield, one of which saw him picked on an Irish selection to fight in Chicago in the early ’80s. His father went over with him and stayed. McDonagh followed a couple of years later, with his sister Rosaleen, after he had finished his Leaving Cert.
‘Well, I tried a couple of jobs first. I was working in the chewing gum factory in Kilcock for a few months and then tried an accountancy office in Newbridge. But neither really did anything for me, so myself and my sister decided to go to Brooklyn where my auld lad was at the time.
‘In 1982 or ’83, going from Enfield to Brooklyn was a bit of a culture shock. It was like going into a different world. But I tried to embrace it, as best as I could.’
McDonagh got a job, driving the horse-drawn carriage around Central Park. ‘It was a good job. I met a lot of interesting people and made serious money. But when you are 21 and in New York with a rake of money in your pocket, well there are plenty of places to spend it.’
In the city that never sleeps,
McDonagh always found a bar open. ‘Yeah, I started drinking a lot. I don’t know when I thought I had a problem. Most of us drink a lot in Ireland without ever thinking we are an alcoholic. I was the same, but I did stop for a while in the mid-1980s.’
McDonagh threw himself back into boxing and ended up the New York Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of 1985, knocking out all of his opponents on the way to the title. His trophy was presented to him by none other than Muhammad Ali. McDonagh and his brother had been brought to Ali’s bout with Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in Croke Park 13 years earlier, something he was pleased to tell the Greatest.
‘Dad actually brought us to watch Ali train before the fight, too. The training session was in the old handball club, beside the Cusack Stand there. That’s a pretty nice memory to have,’ he says.
His Golden Gloves success, and the explosive manner of it, meant he was viewed as a potential star by some professional promoters. He had already signed up to do a literature degree in St John’s University on Staten Island, but was struggling to pay the fees for the second year.
‘I was given $2,500 to sign professional papers, and that paid for the semester,’ McDonagh remembers. His time as a college student also saw him strike up an unlikely friendship with Norman Mailer, that heavyweight of American literature.
‘I reached out to him. I knew he lived in Brooklyn like me, and knew that he was into his boxing. So, we corresponded for a while. He used to ring me up and talk about the big fight that was on the weekend before, quiz me on what books I was reading. He actually rang me the night before the Holyfield fight to wish me luck,’ McDonagh recalls.
His talent in the ring meant that he was getting bigger fights and his prospective literary career fell by the wayside. Still, within a year of going four rounds with Holyfield, he had retired. His last fight, a cruiserweight contest against Jesse Selby, left scars and did some damage. Having been head-butted in the second round, McDonagh blacked out and didn’t remember the rest of the fight, even though he lasted another seven rounds.
‘I retired from the ring at 28. I was lucky. There are fighters that go on until they are 38 or older.’
But a hole appeared where boxing once existed. When he fought, McDonagh was always able to stop drinking a month before stepping into the ring. But now he had no more fights and no motivation to stop drinking.
‘When I stopped boxing, I didn’t know what to do. It had been my life and to be honest, I thought, great I can just keep drinking now. But the thing was that I was 28, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, couldn’t figure it out. I had all these fears. What drinking does is it anaesthetises the fears. But when you are an alcoholic, that doesn’t work anymore, the fears become worse and make you drink more.’
Twenty-five years ago, he made the decision to get out of the Big Apple and the temptations that lay there and move to the West Coast. And on February 1, 1996, someone told him about the 12 steps and transcendental meditation. He took his last gulp of vodka and hasn’t touched a drop since.
Still, McDonagh hasn’t found a way for his mind to stop occasionally travelling back to that night in Atlantic City 30 years ago.
And maybe, he doesn’t need to. ‘Look, it was a great night to be part of and it has opened a lot of doors in my life. It is still opening doors in my life, but I just wish that I had put up a better show.
‘I was a far better fighter than I showed that night, but it is great to have been a part of something that people still remember.’
I didn’t want to be a fighter – it’s something my father wanted