The incredible story of Seán Mannion’s US boxing odyssey
Seán Mannion, aka Rocky Ros Muc, still wonders how his WBA title fight with Mike McCallum might have turned out if he hadn’t been injured
SEÁN MANNION is shuffling around his kitchen, preparing for another day on the building sites of Boston. It is a frosty New England morning but having received a call from Ireland, he almost instantly enquires about the weather in Dublin.
Mannion has spent most of his 61 years in Boston, having left Connemara as a 20year-old. But Ireland, and more significantly, Rosmuc, has never left him. It has always defined him, illustrated by something that happened before he stepped into the ring to face Mike McCallum for the vacant WBA light-middleweight title in October 1984.
The bout was going out live on ESPN. A businessman, who ran a workwear company, spotted an opportunity and offered him $5,000 to have his firm’s name emblazoned on the waistband of his shorts.
Mannion rebuffed the offer – and a few more that eventually went up to $25,000. Rosmuc would be on the front of his shorts. The exasperated businessman thought it was a rival company.
‘He said to me “what do they have?”. I said people,’ Mannion recalled. ‘He asked again “what do they produce?”. Human beings, I said.’
Mannion is a gently-spoken, taciturn individual who seems genuinely taken aback that his life is of such interest more than three decades after the most famous night of his career. But the story of how he left a small village in the Connemara Gaeltacht and ended up fighting for the world title in Madison Square Garden is extraordinary and has been beautifully rendered in a new documentary, Rocky Ros Muc, which has been long-listed for an Academy Award, a first for an Irish language film.
While the bout with McCallum forms the centre-piece, the film manages to skilfully weave different elements of the story together — from the racism and street riots that formed the backdrop to the Boston he emigrated to in the 1970s to the emergence of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and his crime gang. Interviews with characters as disparate as current Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and former crime boss Pat Nee add layers of intrigue to the tale.
Almost every boxer is defined by a single fight and in Mannion’s case, it is the bout against McCallum, the classy Jamaican known as ‘The Bodysnatcher’ who developed a reputation as one of the best pound-for-pound fighters around by claiming world titles at light-middleweight, middleweight and lightheavyweight.
‘It is the fight I am known for, but for me, it was one of my worst fights,’ Mannion recalls of the famous night when more than 12,000 Irish people crammed into the Garden.
His durability — famously he was never put on the floor in 57 pro bouts — meant he lasted 15 rounds but never really laid a glove on his elusive opponent. ‘Before the fight, I knew McCallum was good but I didn’t realise just how good until I was in the ring with him.’
Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns were the four middleweight kings of the 1980s and each of them refused to get into the ring with McCallum, so that gives an idea to how good he was.
What wasn’t known at the time was that Mannion’s preparations had been hampered by an eye injury he sustained in sparring during the first week of his training camp in New York State’s Catskill mountains. His eye needed 10 stitches and ,on medical advice, he was told not to spar again before the fight.
‘I should have postponed the fight but, at the time, I thought that this might be my only shot at the world title,’ he recalls. ‘That’s what I was thinking, they would never give me another title shot.
‘I realise now that because I was ranked number two in the world, they would have had to give me a shot at some stage. I didn’t know that, then. That is where a good manager comes in, he would have pointed that out. But my manager (Jimmy Connolly) wanted to go through with it.
‘Maybe, I wouldn’t have beaten McCallum anyway because he was so good – he’s an all-time great – but I would have made him work harder for it. You wouldn’t let a junior boxer go to a tournament with no sparring and here I was boxing for a world title with no sparring done.’
Eight years ago, Mannion met McCallum at an event that marked the 25th anniversary of the bout. The Jamaican asked him about the eye injury, under the misconception that it has only cost Mannion a couple of days’ sparring.
‘I told him I wasn’t able to spar in the run-up to the fight. He didn’t know that and said: “It’s a good thing for me that you weren’t able to spar because my life would have turned out very differently”. I don’t know what he meant by that.’
Following the defeat to McCallum, Mannion managed to extricate himself from Connolly and hooked up with Angelo Dundee, the legendary trainer of Muhammad Ali. Dundee claimed that Mannion had the hardest chin he had ever seen and if he got him at 20, rather than 30, he would have moulded him into a world champion.
By the time that link-up came around, though, he had fallen out of love with the game. He boxed on 21 more occasions but his heart wasn’t in it any more. While there was loose talk of bouts being lined up against Duran and Leonard, they came to nothing.
‘I was fed up with boxing after the McCallum fight, fed up how the fight turned out,’ Mannion explained.
Few people in Ireland had seen
any of his fights as he worked his way up the light-middleweight rankings. That included a famous win in Atlantic City over Korea’s In-Chul Baek who came into that bout having won 26 bouts by knockout.
‘Nobody talks about it but it was one of my best performances. The Korean later moved up to supermiddleweight and won the world title,’ Mannion points out.
‘Nobody in Ireland had seen me. I knew the McCallum fight was live on RTÉ, as well as having 12,000 Irish in the crowd. Knowing there were people at home, watching it made me a bit nervous.
‘I felt that I let them all down, I felt that I let Ireland down. I felt it then and, to be honest, I still feel it. ‘It is something that still haunts me, that I let the Irish people down. It is not nice, to go to bed every evening with that thought.’
He struggled to deal with losing his one shot at the world title and admits to problems with drink and depression, although he takes issue with the suggestion that drink played a part in stopping him fulfilling his potential .
‘It annoys me when people say that I didn’t train hard enough, that I was drinking. When I was preparing for a fight, I did nothing but train. I trained as hard as anyone. I was the number-one ranked contender in light-middleweight for over a year, in the top five for three years, in the top 10 for five years. Would I have done all that if I hadn’t trained and just been drinking?’
It was back in Rosmuc when he started boxing under the guidance of Mike Flaherty. There’s a touching moment early in the documentary when he talks about how his father Pat reacted when he won the National Championship as a 17year-old, welling up with emotion. His father was later buried with that medal.
When he left for Boston, Mannion thought he was also leaving boxing behind. It was only by chance that he got back into it. An avid fight fan, Mannion went to Brockton one day to watch ‘Marvellous’ Marvin Hagler train.
‘I went there with a friend of mine from Galway, Fr Grealish. The two of us walked into the gym and they were looking for a southpaw to spar with Tony Petronelli, who would go on and fight for the world title. Nobody else was volunteering, so I put my hand up.’
Mannion impressed the trainers and it took off from there. Being a southpaw was to his advantage, especially as he had a looping way of jabbing that was hard to figure out. Within seven years, he was fighting for the world title.
He used his brother Paddy as his cornerman during his rise through the rankings, simply as the pair of them could speak Irish between rounds. The Irish language has remained something which defines him.
Despite spending the best part of four decades in Boston (he did return home briefly for a couple of spells), he tries to speak Irish every day, whether on the building sites with his nephew or on the phone to his sister back in Galway.
His pride in the Irish language is evident in the film, although he admits that parts of the documentary are tough to watch (his sister Eileen, with whom he lived in Boston, is featured in it but has since passed away).
Before he sets off for a day’s work on the outskirts of Boston, he explains that he hopes to be home next April for a family wedding.
He may do so as the most unlikely of Irish Oscar winners.