Destiny calling
Kildare’s Dennis Hogan is next up for a shot at the WBO light-middleweight title but, first, he puts his dream on the line in a bout with Wales’ Jamie Weetch
Dennis Hogan puts world title ambitions on the line
STRETTON is one of Brisbane’s most affluent suburbs. Deep pockets are needed to live in this plush part of Queensland. It’s not somewhere ordinarily associated with cultivating dreams of pugilistic glory, but this is where Dennis Hogan goes to work every morning.
He pounds away in the gym of Glenn Rushton’s $10 million (AUD) mansion, a palatial pad that also includes an indoor squash court and swimming pool. It is from here that Rushton, a self-made millionaire turned boxing trainer, moulded Jeff Horn into the world welterweight champion and he hopes to do the same with Hogan, the 33-year-old Kilcullen native who’s currently the mandatory challenger for the WBO light-middleweight title.
It takes around 35 minutes for Hogan to drive home each evening, time where he is alone with his thoughts. He knows that some people think he’s taking an unnecessary risk next Saturday in Brisbane’s Convention Centre when he puts it all on the line against Welshman Jamie Weetch. It’s not just his WBO intercontinental title at stake, but also his No 1 ranking.
However, the WBO only confirmed that he is in line for the next world title shot after the contracts were signed to face Weetch. The bout had been arranged and he wasn’t going to back out.
‘When I drive home each evening, I just listen to myself, my mind,’ he explains. ‘I sit in the car and listen to my thoughts for a while. You find out a lot about yourself when you just sit and listen to what your mind is saying. I know that I’m in a brilliant place at the moment, I have never felt better or more confident.
‘I know people see it as a risky gig, that I am taking a fight that I don’t need to, because I’m the mandatory challenger. But I’ve trained hard for this fight and I want to end the year with a bang. I want to make a statement, get a comprehensive victory next week on my way to getting that world title.’
Beating England’s Jimmy Kelly in the title eliminator in April was another step in Hogan’s extraordinary journey of reinvention since arriving on Australia’s east coast seven years ago.
He wasn’t just another Irish carpenter escaping the floundering economy at home. He was a talented amateur boxer (his path to a national light-heavyweight title having been consistently blocked by Kenny Egan) and came to Brisbane on the halfpromise of a few professional bouts.
A devotee of meditation these days, he’s shed more than 10kgs after giving up his drink-and-party lifestyle, dropping to light-middleweight and fighting his way into world title contention. But in the past few months, he has discovered that things don’t always move smoothly at the top of the fight game. Jaime Munguia, the fearsomely hard-hitting Mexican, is the current WBO champion but he has just side-stepped Hogan for a second time despite the Kildare man’s top ranking. After taking out Canada’s Brandon Cook on the Canelo Alvarez-Gennady Golovkin undercard in September, he will now face Japan’s Takeshi Inoue, ranked third, in January.
‘The WBO have made it mandatory now so if he does beat Inoue, he will have to fight me or vacate the title,’ Hogan states. ‘He can’t keep ducking me. I didn’t think he was like that, because he is young and fresh and says he wants to be a great champion. But when he started cherry-picking guys around me for title defences, I did wonder if he is a bit wary of me. My style might be a bit awkward for him,’ he adds.
Munguia is promoted by Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy and the feeling is they are grooming him for a step up to middleweight to face stablemate Alvarez in a super fight. ‘He really is huge for a light-middleweight,’ says Paul Keegan, Hogan’s manager.
The IBF contacted Keegan recently to see if Hogan would be interested in facing American Julian Williams in a world title eliminator, but the route is set now with the WBO. And should Munguia vacate the title to move up a weight, it becomes a little easier, not that Hogan wishes to take it.
‘The thing is that I can see myself as a world champion. I already feel like a champion. When I first started visualising myself as world champion, I was ranked 1,000th with BoxRec so I know where this journey is going to end,’ he adds with confidence. Indeed, when he left Kildare in 2011, he told friends that he would return one day as the world champion.
‘Who knows what they thought of me at the time, saying that. The chances of it happening were pretty slim. But I came home after winning the fight against Kelly, and Jay Brennan, one of my friends, reminded me
‘I WAS TOO NERVOUS AND PUTTTING MYSELF UNDER PRESSURE’
that I said that. And I am heading towards becoming world champion now. Next time that I will be home, I will have that world title belt wrapped around my waist.’
Hogan went home for the first time in a couple of years last April, with girlfriend Brideen and their young daughter, Aria. It was hectic.
‘I was home for my grandmother’s 80th birthday party and then we had Brideen’s mother’s 70th down in Kilkenny. We were up and down the road a lot.’
While his career began at St David’s Boxing Club in Naas, where his late grandfather Paddy Bourke was a founding member, he also remembers Kilcullen being stopped in its tracks in the early 2000s to welcome home a champion.
Billy Schwer was a light-welterweight from Luton-Irish stock who built a fine career through the 1990s, eventually winning the IBO version of the world title. Hogan remembers Schwer taking a European title back to his ancestral home once and how it awakened him to a world of possibilities.
‘I remember my father taking me to see him. There were cars parked everywhere, a huge crowd out and I asked him who was this. He told me that his family lived around the corner from us in Brannockstown. He was European champion at the time and I remember thinking that if someone from here could do that, why couldn’t I? I don’t know why I thought success was so far off or why someone from where I was from couldn’t dream of reaching the top. But Schwer coming back with those titles lit something in my brain that it can happen for anyone.’
Hogan knows the value of never giving up. He spent the best part of a decade realising his potential in the amateur ranks. ‘It took me 10 years to become All-Ireland champion. I always felt that I had the skill and talent to do it but I was selfsabotaging. I was too nervous going into fights, putting too much pressure on myself but, eventually, I did it, and it showed that when I really wanted something, I can do it. To me, it was a lesson in perseverance, resilience and just never giving up.’
He has taken that lesson with him to Rushton’s gym, nicknamed The House of Dreams, where he can sometimes spar 28 to 30 rounds a day, often with Jeff Horn. This will be only his third fight with the charismatic Australian trainer, but he has already made an impression on Hogan who plans to use some of the tactics gleaned from Horn when he faces Weetch.
The Welshman also emigrated to Australia to follow his pro dream and is a tough operator.
He came through the ranks of underground prize-fighting in Wales and has survived both being stabbed in the neck and shot in the face by a pellet gun in the past.
It won’t be easy, but nothing has come easy in Dennis Hogan’s boxing life. He hasn’t lost sight of what is driving him – the world title.
In fact, he can even visualise his first defence, in Dublin’s 3 Arena. With Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan now having moved down to the light middleweight division, and still backed by the promotional heft of Golden Boy, it opens up the possibility of an all-Irish world title fight.
Before all that, Hogan must take care of business next weekend.
‘I am into the big picture. I believe that it is my destiny to become world champion and I know myself that I am two fights away from it.’
*Dennis Hogan’s bout with Jamie Weetch will be broadcast globally on epicentre tv. Visit epicentre.tv for info