‘Everybody was having a great day, the pubs were jammers...But there I was ready to kill’
‘MIND COACH’ TRAINED IRISH FIGHTER NOT TO FEEL PAIN
IT WAS one of the most memorable moments in Irish sport and one of the biggest in boxing history.
Now a new documentary tells the inside story of how underdog Steve Collins beat world champion Chris Eubank at a thrilling fight in Cork’s Millstreet in 1995.
One Night In Millstreet features interviews with “Celtic Warrior” Collins and Eubank, as well as Barry McGuigan, sports writer Paul Howard and mind guru Tony Quinn.
Dubliner Collins (59) told The Star that watching the doc was like seeing the fight through new eyes.
Said Collins: “I saw for the first time what everyone else experienced and my first reaction was I wish I’d been there! “Everybody is having a great day, the pubs were jammers, walking up singing ‘here we go’, ‘we’re gonna win’ - the royal ‘we’!
“But there I was ready to kill, focussed, wound-up, dying of starvation, under pressure, stuck in a room trying to sleep, hoping that, you know, that I win after all the talk I gave, the showing off and the big brava- do, that I’d pull it off.”
He tells the documentary how getting fight was: “like a Rocky
Collins was rank the story.” regarded as a outsider to win — and decided to forego a ‘normal’ boxing trainer i n favour of mind-coach and hypnotist Tony Quinn.
Experts didn’t know whether to laugh at the hilarity — or cry at what sounded potential life-threatening insanity. But it worked.
Quinn admits in the documentary: “I knew nothing about boxing” but he reportedly trained Collins not to feel pain.
“I think in something like boxing, the mind plays a big part in it,” said Quinn. “A lot of people in situations where they’re very excited may actually feel no pain anyway.
Many boxers
I don’t think feel pain until afterwards.”
Eubank’s manager/promoter
Barry Hearn tells film-makers he didn’t believe this claim — but crucially Eubank himself did.
Magic
“What a load of rubbish, but the only person who didn’t think he was talking rubbish was Chris Eubank. He thought it was black magic!” said Hearn.
Author Paul Howard was the Sunday Tribune’s boxing writer at the time and was collaborating with Collins on a biography.
“He had won two world title fights and he was still living in a rented house in Swords,” said Howard.
“So Steve arrives at the weigh-in, gets out of a green
Jaguar dressed like
Darby O’Gill.
“It was extraordinary to see him in the flat cap, three piece thorn-proof suit, I think he had a shillelagh and this Irish Wolfhound, I don’t know where he got the dog because it wasn’t his, nobody had an Irish Wolfhound! “I didn’t recognise him at first when he walked into the hotel. I knew something was going on, whatever THIS was.”
The plan was to get at Eubank and unsettle him.
Said Collins: “I wanted to take him out of his comfort zone. The first thing in my mind was his ‘style’. “He was a good dresser, known for it, and he was voted the best dressed man in Britain - twice. “So this is all part of him and I wanted to be ‘Irish’ around him so I got the countryman idea, I would dress that way, the tweeds, the jacket the cap the whole lot.
“Then I contacted a very well known Wolfhound breeding family and they met me around the corner on the day
e weigh-in and gave me this beautiful while, also, I’d bought this old green k II Jaguar and it felt just right.” d Eubank: “No one had ever got underh my skin, I was always kind of objecbut Steve did a very good job. u have to remember I’m champion of world and Steve is 45 minutes he comes dressed as an Irish tryman, he then proceeds eak only in Irish — exnt tactics.” lins in one of the worstmangled pieces of Gaeilge ecord intones: “Céad míle a roimh, go léir anseo inniu n lá mór seo in mo shaol agus m libh anois go mbeidh an bhuaigh ar Chriostóir Mac Eubank a Mill . Go raibh míle maith agaibh.” n the tension really ramped up.
Tactics
Collins insisted, “I deserve this” — the loof Eubanks countered: “What is dee, talk to me about deserve, there are ing children in Africa. Do they dee that?” mood turned as Collins snarled: “...if want to bring Africa into it, you are of an descent, 100 per cent right? Why u deny your African heritage and o impersonate an Englishman you are not?” ris got really angry. remember the Lord or went up to him wards and said, uld you like a tour nd the city?’ and s said ‘F**k this at the top of oice.”
One Night
Millstreet s in Irish mas torow.
‘No one had ever got under my skin.. But Steve did a very good job’