Future bright as Phelan emerges from darkness
Kildare boxer has had to fight hard both in and out of the ring
tegic review under way in Welsh rugby and the results are due in June. Major changes are needed at all levels and there will be a big focus on the important underage pathways. However, there will also be strong momentum behind a push to reduce their regions from four to three, thereby improving funding. While we probably have the players to resource five pro teams, the lack of talent in Wales at the moment suggests to me that three teams is the right number for them.
Winning with your professional team is important to create self-belief for the players who step up to that level. Three young Welsh players from the Cardiff club who featured heavily for Gatland this spring — Cam Winnett, Alex Mann and Mackenzie Martin — had only won a total of seven games of professional rugby between them before going on to lose five in a row in the Six Nations. Even the most resilient of young men would struggle with a run of results like that.
The next month or two should
see the final plans put in place for the Irish provinces’ playing rosters for next season. Ulster will probably be a bit later than the other three as Richie Murphy gets a chance to show he is the man to get them back on top. Billy Burns’ move to Munster has been confirmed and it will be interesting to see if Richie or director of rugby Bryn Cunningham can convince the IRFU to give them a bigger budget to either keep the other players who were being cut to balance the books or to recruit.
Bayonne had been chasing the under-contract Stuart McCloskey (he has one more year) but they got Manu Tuilagi over the line last week so McCloskey is likely to stay on.
Leinster have been linked with ‘Tongan Thor’ Taniela Tupou, who is under contract to the Melbourne Rebels but may become a free agent if they go out of business, which looks increasingly likely. He has had a couple of serious injuries but is one of the most powerful and dynamic players in the world, never mind front-rows.
It may come to nothing in the end but it would be a huge statement. Back in 2008, the Leinster board signed off on the recruitment of Isa Nacewa, Rocky Elsom and CJ van der Linde to get the province over the line and win their first European Cup in 2009. They went on to win three more, but have failed to win it since since 2018. That isn’t acceptable for them and the decision to sign Jacques Nienaber to replace Stuart Lancaster and RG Snyman to replace Jason Jenkins is about as aggressive a recruitment spree as you will ever see. They should be applauded for it.
For Munster, there will be changes too. Stalwarts like Simon Zebo and David Kilcoyne may be moving on. We are unsure what will happen to Antoine Frisch after the flirtation with Fabien Galthie for the training camp ahead of France against England. Diarmuid Kilgallen from Connacht is a good signing, as is Billy Burns to replace Joey Carbery, but they will need to either replace Peter O’Mahony with someone who can have a similar impact on and off the field or, better still, tie him down for one more season.
The rugby treadmill isn’t confined to what happens on the field, contracting and getting the best talent is relentless too.
Four years after being on the cusp of a career breakthrough in professional boxing, Katelynn Phelan is ready to roll the dice again. But this is a different Phelan from the 20-year-old who went to Germany in the middle of the Covid pandemic and outclassed the local unbeaten heroine Jessica Schadko in her home gym to secure three world belts in only her fourth professional fight.
Meet KP2.0. “I am now the best version of myself,” said the Kildare native, who admits she contemplated ending her life due to depression and anxiety.
Even though she had a stellar underage boxing career, which culminated in winning a bronze medal at the 2017 Youth World Championships, her teenage years were blighted as a result of having been bullied relentlessly at secondary school.
The experience left her vulnerable, particularly to being trolled on social media. “After my last fight there were a few trolls online giving me hassle and I ended up in a dark place,” she revealed.
Being sidelined due to tendon
damage and a trapped nerve in her elbow contributed to her anxiety.
“I got injured in my first fight after winning the world title and had to have surgery. The recovery took a lot longer than I had hoped. It was almost a year before I had the confidence to throw a proper punch again.”
But her real battles were fought away from the ring. “I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of months. I just woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore’. Throughout the day I was having panic attacks and didn’t feel great. It was getting worse and worse and in the end I told Shane [her boyfriend], ‘I’m not doing good. I need help. I’m struggling’. I also told my mam.
“Shane brought me to A&E in Naas hospital, though we stopped at McDonald’s first. He thought it might cheer me up because we both like our takeaways. Going to the hospital was the turning point.”
Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, a combination of medication and counselling aided her recovery. But it wasn’t a linear process.
“I didn’t think counselling was working for me at the start, but after one or two sessions I opened up about everything and how I felt. It was the best decision for me. Honest to God, I can say I’m in a good place now and I’m happy and healthy. I am quite open about my mental health and the impact it had on me. I was suicidal at one stage, that’s how bad it got. Shane pulled me out of that dark place and boxing saved me.”
Part of her recovery involved coming off social media for a period. “I unfollowed over 1,000 people as well. We closed our circle and we now just have a circle of people we know are genuine. I have the people around me now that I need to be around me. I work hard on my mental health every single day. I keep journals and I do gratitude. I know they sound like clichés and everybody tells you to do them. But, genuinely, it works for me. I have tried multiple things and loads of them didn’t work. I feel so happy in myself that I am just grateful for what I have.”
The message she would give to her 15-year-old self or to anybody feeling down is to say, ‘This is OK, you are not alone’.
“Reach out to somebody. There is no point in suffering alone. No matter who it is, they will help. You don’t have to explain everything. Just say: ‘I am feeling a bit down today and I need a bit of help’. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s the big thing. People are afraid to ask for help.”
There are few frills in the harsh world of professional boxing for those at the bottom end of the food chain. Phelan couldn’t afford to buy tickets for the two Katie Taylor fights in Dublin in the last year and watched them on TV.
Along with Shane, they run a business, S&K Valeting, from their home in Kildare. But three days a week Shane drives Katelynn to Belfast to train with her new coach Daniel Anderson.
Her ice bath is an old barrel filled with water from the garden hose.
Sponsorship from Lucky Day Competitions, Mellow coffee bar and bistro, Hairbelle, Knocklyon Auto Point and Wolfe Cycles are invaluable, but after such a long absence from the ring, she needs to rebuild her profile.
“I need to get my name back out there, improve my record and then aim for bigger things again,” said Phelan, who is due to return to the ring on April 12 in the Warehouse at the Red Cow Inn.
Back in the limelight means she could be subjected to negative comments on social media again. But this time she is better equipped to cope with it.
“I didn’t understand how to deal with the negative trolls before. I didn’t have anybody to tell me that this is going to happen, especially if you win a big title. Now I am prepared for it. I have surrounded myself with people who will help me through it. I was only saying to my mam recently I have never felt like this before. I feel like a different person altogether.
“Looking back it is crazy to think
I was in such a dark place. It is OK to reach out. You are not alone. If there is somebody out there struggling, I am willing to listen to them and help them. Just give me a text.”
Her mood benefits enormously as a result of the endorphins her body generates during training. “The endorphins you get are absolutely crazy, particularly from the ice baths. But just going for a walk helps.”
Being defiant has characterised the life of the girl who is known as the ‘Smiling Assassin’ when she steps between the ropes.
She went behind her dad’s back to start boxing at the age of six. She celebrated her 18th birthday by going against her parents’ wishes and obtaining a professional boxing licence. She defied the bullies and trolls who threatened to ruin her life. After all that, making her mark in professional boxing ought to be straightforward.
I just woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.’
It was the week after the Masters last year and a friend had offered him an apartment in Harbour Town for the tournament at Hilton Head. That’s a thing about Seamus Power; study him on the course, or on the range, and you might easily tag him as a loner. There’s no small talk. He’s all business. But he seems to have friends in every city in America.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, two days before the opening round, and I had been ‘chasing’ — a loose term — the interview since February. I mean, he’d been a pro for 12 years for f **k sake, gone to an Olympics with Pádraig, and was older than both Rory and Shane, so I clearly hadn’t been running very hard. Not that it bothered him.
“Come to the apartment,” he said, “and we’ll do it there.”
We started talking about the money he’d won that year — the $245,000 at the Phoenix Open, the $355,000 at Riviera, the $113,000 at the Matchplay Championship in Austin — and what it meant to be a multi-millionaire. Not much, he said. He wasn’t into flashy stuff or watches or jewellery and the most extravagant thing he’d ever bought was a BMW 530 that was two years old. “A lovely car,” he said.
The root of him was his boyhood on a small farm in Touraneena, Co Waterford with his father, Ned; two brothers, Jack and Willie; his mother, Philo, and the impact of her death from cancer on their lives when he was just eight years old.
“For a long time I wasn’t able to process it,” he said. “People would ask, ‘What do your parents do?’ I would never tell them. I would never mention the fact that my mum had passed away.”
“Was that a form of defence mechanism?” I asked.
“Oh I’d say it very much was.” “Is that what drove your pursuit of sport?”
“There’s a good chance of it,” he said, “especially towards golf, because I think golf is what you might call one of those ‘internal struggle’ sports. I’d be down on the driving range in West Waterford in horrible conditions — rain and cold in winter — and I became OK with it, because it seemed to match up with some of the stuff I was going through.”
We spoke for two hours, then I returned the following evening and we did another hour. I couldn’t get enough of him. After a decade of toiling in the shadows, he’d become the sixth Irishman in history to win on the PGA Tour, looked nailed on to play at the Ryder Cup in Rome and had risen to a career-high 28th in the World Rankings.
The next Major — the PGA
Championship — was looming at Oak Hill in Rochester.
“I haven’t played there before,” he said, “but I’ve heard a lot of good things. Then it’s LACC [Los Angeles Country Club] for the US Open which is meant to be a brute, and Royal Liverpool for The Open. I played a British Boys there once and really liked it, so it’s going to be another great summer.”
Two days later he missed the cut at Hilton Head. A month after that he missed the cut at the PGA, and another cut at the US Open. In July, he missed another cut at The Open, played badly in the FedEx Cup and was forced to withdraw from the Horizon Irish Open at The K Club — two of his sponsors. Then he watched the Ryder Cup on TV and didn’t play for the rest of the year.
So it was with some trepidation that I sent him a note recently on the eve of the Players Championship:
Seamus Power: ‘The thing that was really encouraging was that it was the first time in a year that I felt 100 per cent.’
Seamus, mindful of the fact that everything seemed to go tits up for you after our last interview, would you be amenable to doing it again?
“Absolutely,” he replied. Seamus didn’t believe in ‘Jonahs’ but his caddie, Simon Keelan, wasn’t as sure: “Go easy on him,” he said.
So we pulled up two chairs at the Marriott Hotel in Sawgrass and started with a reflection on the nature of the game: What if he was tasked to explain to a Martian why golf was so hard?
“Jeez! If you could only simplify it,” he laughs. “I remember in college [a scholarship at East Tennessee State University] we were buddies with the baseball and the tennis team. And one of the guys — a really good tennis player — hadn’t played much golf but wanted to play a few holes.
“On the first hole he swings and completely misses the ball, and I’m looking at him thinking, ‘How is this possible? This guy can rip a cross-court return to a ball served to him at 150-milesan-hour. But he can’t hit one sitting on a tee!
“And just the basic physics of it ... I mean, you’ve a curved face on a round ball played in all kinds of conditions on uneven surfaces. Even my dad, who wouldn’t play at all, is amazed that you can hit it onto a green from 180 yards and not think too much of it. And there’s just so many aspects to it.
“A perfect example is a left-to
right wind. Can anyone explain to me why that’s harder for a right-handed golfer than a lefthanded golfer? Because it just seems so much more difficult. So it’s a funny sport for that. There’s always something ... a visual something ... a mental something ... that gets in the way of what you just naturally want to do at times.”
It was an injury that had derailed him after we had spoken at Harbour Town. It had started with a niggle in his hip a few months before during the off-season. “I was doing a bit of running to stay in shape,” he says, “but I don’t have the best body type for that, and think I might have aggravated it.”
The hip bone is connected to the back bone, the song goes, and the back bone is connected to the shoulder bone, and within a couple of months it was obvious there was a problem.
“I tweaked my lower back at Bay Hill [in March] and was told afterwards that probably restricted the rotation of my hips, but it was weird. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“I’d go play and my ball-speed could be 15 miles an hour down on the previous day and you’re looking at it going: ‘What in the world is that?’ It was bizarre. I remember the Tuesday of the US Open — a long-hitting course — and my ball was carrying 265 [metres] and I’m like ‘What is happening here!’”
(He has a gorgeous trait of laughing at misfortune when most people would swear.)
“I just couldn’t get into the left side; couldn’t really swing. And it wasn’t like I was in excruciating pain, it just wasn’t working.”
His doctors thought it was muscular at first and suggested physio and dry needling. “It would act up and go away and then it stopped going away and
gradually got worse. I played in the pro-am of the John Deere [in the first week of July] and Simon said, ‘I think you should withdraw,’ but I ended up finishing 13th and thought, ‘Maybe it’s not too bad.’
“Then we went to Scotland and I don’t know if it was the flight, but I remember hitting my tee-shot on the 13th — my fourth hole of the tournament — and something just popped. And I had never withdrawn from a tournament before but I was just dragging my whole leg.”
Then he went for an MRI. “That was the mistake,” he says. “I should have had it done earlier. I had tendinopathy and bursitis, mostly in the left hip, and there was a little cyst on the edge of the labrum [shoulder] which was kind of upsetting things, but overall the doctors seemed pleased. There was no structural damage, just inflammation in a couple of areas, so I kept going when I probably shouldn’t have.”
He shared a house with Luke Donald in Scotland and was still in the frame for the Ryder
Cup, but he needed a good July and his body couldn’t respond. I missed the cut at the Open, and the [FedEx Cup] play-offs weren’t great, but then there was a twoweek gap to the Irish Open and I thought, ‘Maybe’.
“I had 10 or 11 days’ rest, hit a few balls before flying home and couldn’t walk for a day and a half. That’s when I thought, ‘Jeez! This is serious. I really need to shut this down or I could jeopardise my career.’”
He watched the Ryder Cup with his brothers in Waterford.
“If I had just played poorly and
missed out, I would have been more disappointed,” he says,
“but being injured made it easier to come to terms with. The real disappointment was that I had such a nice plan.
“The Ryder Cup would have been ideal, obviously, but my plan was to play the Irish [Open] and Wentworth — I had never played Wentworth — and then, if I wasn’t in the Ryder Cup, I was going to play the French because that course [Le Golf National] looks amazing and the Olympics are there.
“Then I was going to go back and defend in Bermuda and maybe go to Japan. So it messed up all of that, and those first couple of weeks I was pretty down about it, but then I had a lovely time off, because I hadn’t had a break in a long time. I came home in September and did some travelling and tried to make the best of it.”
Because that’s your nature? “Yeah, I think so,” he laughs. “I try, anyway.”
In November, after a threemonth break, he started hitting balls again with some friends in Portugal, then travelled to Hawaii in January for his first ‘The gallery is just two spectators — Bob Rojahn and his son, Cole’ event of the season — a T-50 finish at The Sentry in Maui. It was followed a week later by a T-74 finish in Honolulu, and now he was disappointed.
“I just assumed after all the rehab that it was going to fine. That I’d get to January and be good to go, but the course in Maui is a long, hilly walk and you’re competitive for four or five days in a row, and I was like, ‘Man, something’s not right here still.’
“I hadn’t slept properly for about six months. Whatever the pain, or whatever way I’d lie, I could never get comfortable. So after the Sony I went to see a specialist — one of the top hip guys in the US — who gave me a cortisone injection, and within two or three hours the relief was unbelievable.
“I took a week off then missed the cut at Torrey, but I played better than I scored and felt it was a step in the right direction. Then I played better in Pebble, okay in Phoenix, and then really started seeing some things with the ball [speed] in Riv. But the thing that was really encouraging was that it was the first time in a year that I felt 100 per cent.”
He had also become one of the 16 members of the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council (PAC).
“I was asked,” he says. “They said my name came up somewhere, and would I do it, and I figured I would. I’m curious by nature anyway and felt, ‘We’ll see what it’s about.’ It’s an interesting time to be on it, so hopefully I’ll make some sort of positive contribution. We’ll see.”
There’s a lot of debate on where the game stands now.
“Yeah, I know. My biggest worry, and I love golf, is that I don’t think it’s a mainstream enough sport to be splitting the top talent. I mean obviously some guys are bitter about the guys that have gone to LIV, but this tournament [The Players] would be better if you had Jon Rahm and Cam Smith.
“This is not one of the Majors but it’s the pinnacle of the PGA Tour and you’re missing guys that everyone knows should be here. So my biggest hope, if some sort of deal is done, is that maybe it’s amalgamated and you can get all the guys you need back together. That’s the best thing for golf, but I’ve no idea how that would look. And I know guys are going to be pissed if [LIV players] come back and are not punished.”
Where do you stand on that? “I don’t really see the point. I mean if you had status before ... like Dustin Johnson. What’s he won? Twenty-four or 25 times?
What are they going to do? Make him go to Q-School or something? I don’t know if that’s the way to go.”
What about financial penalties?
“I don’t know. What do you do? I don’t see any legal way you can take money off them. Fine them? Okay, so you fine Jon Rahm a couple of million dollars, but where does that money go then? It comes back to the same thing with the equity [the announcement recently that the PGA Tour was getting a $3 billion investment from Strategic Sports Group that would give players access to $1.5 billion as equity owners].
“Who’s going to get that? Who do you give it to? The money thing is an awful shame for golf. There are so many headlines now — this money, that money — people have lost their minds. I get what’s happening and that money talks, but it’s a shame for the game and I hope they can figure it out.”
And if LIV had made you an offer?
“I never had any interest in it,
and they didn’t have much interest in me, obviously, but even if I was approached, it doesn’t appeal to me competitive-wise. To take away the possibility that I might not play in the Ryder Cup would be too much for me to give up. I’m so proud to be able to say I’ve won twice on the PGA Tour, and if I won on LIV, I don’t know how much that would add to it. And I might never win again, but I feel that getting another win on the PGA Tour would be so cool.” He’s planning on it.
It’s four days after the interview and Seamus is playing early — 7.35am — and alone in the final round at Sawgrass. A marshal shouts ‘top of the morning’ as he walks from the first tee. Another spots the tricolour on Simon’s bib and offers them a ‘happy St Patrick’s Day’.
The gallery is just two spectators — Bob Rojahn and his son, Cole, from Ponte Vedra Beach.
Why are they following the world’s 103rd-ranked golfer? “Tradition,” Bob explains. “We always follow the first group out.” That won’t bother Seamus.
It’s three hours later when he walks towards the clubhouse after a closing 69, and you could bet all the money in golf that there was no happier man on the course. He was heading for his car and the drive to Tampa for the Valspar Championship this week.
He was back.
He shared a house with Luke Donald and was still in the frame for the Ryder Cup.
Archie Ryan ended the best week of his first professional season so far by finishing second overall at the end of the five-day Coppi e Bartali race in Italy.
The EF Education-Easypost rider also went home with a stage win on the penultimate stage and the orange and white jersey of winner of the under 23 classification.
The Wicklow man won the penultimate stage, surging clear of an elite front group on a tough uphill section inside the last 5km of the undulating 151km stage.
Having begun the final stage in Emilia nine seconds behind Dutch leader Koen Bouwman, Ryan stayed in the front group all day to retain his second place overall, with Diego Ullissi of UAE taking third, just one second further back.
Judd Trump is one win away from a fifth ranking snooker title of the season after beating Jackson Page in the semifinals of the World Open yesterday.
Trump faces China’s Ding Junhui in today’s final in Yushan after beating an unfortunate Page 6-2, the Welshman cutting his finger while taking his cue out of its case before the match.
Victory in the final would give world No 2 Trump a 28th career ranking title, moving him level with Steve Davis on the all-time list and behind only Ronnie O’Sullivan, Stephen Hendry and John Higgins.
Killester were crowned women’s basketball league champions after beating Liffey Celtics 90-62 in last night’s play-off at the National Basketball Arena.
The Dubliners ended a 44-year wait for glory in the women’s league with victory over their Kildare opponents.
Reigning men’s league champions Ballincollig were dethroned by Killester after an 83-70 defeat in the play-off quarter-finals.
Killester will next face the winner of today’s Belfast Star v Demons quarterfinal.
Meanwhile, Belfast’s CJ Fulton out missed in the first round of March Madness after his College of Charleston side were beaten 109-96 by Alabama.
Aryna Sabalenka paid her tribute to her close friend Paula Badosa after she beat her 6-4, 6-3 at the Miami Open four days after the death of former partner Konstantin Koltsov. Koltsov, an ex-ice hockey player, died in Miami aged 42 in what police described as an apparent death by suicide.
“We’re strong women and we knew how to separate that in that moment,” Sabalenka said. “I knew she was going to play very well… and I told her I wish her the best and let’s see if she can go very deep in this tournament.”