KINGDOM WARRIOR ON PRO CAREER
The decision to turn pro is already paying dividends for Milltown boxer Kevin Cronin, writes Damian Stack
SITTING in his corner in the Victorian grandeur of the Alexandra Palace, he knew. This was it. The end of the line.
It’s not like it hadn’t been coming either. The disappointments and slights, each building upon the last. That burning sense of injustice bringing him to a point he probably never thought he’d find himself: pissed off and out of love with the thing that drove him.
He knew it, deep in his bones he knew it: he won that fight. Was it his best? No. He could do better. He had done before. Still though, it was good enough and that’s all that really matters. He out-boxed and out-fought his opponent, and yet it wasn’t his hand the referee raised to the air in triumph.
His coach approached him, gingerly enough, knowing and fearing what was to come. The look on Kevin Cronin’s face probably told him all he needed to know.
“You won that fight,” he told him.
“I know,” Cronin replied. The Milltown man didn’t want to make a big show of his disgust. He knew how hard his opponent would have worked; didn’t want to rain on anybody’s parade – not just after he’d won a bout. It wasn’t until after they got out of the ring that Cronin’s coach, Patrick O’Brien, from Cashen Vale Boxing Club, put words to what they were both feeling.
“That’s it so,” O’Brien intoned. “I think so.”
And with that, it was over. Cronin’s boxing days seemingly at an end. After almost a decade of commitment, grind and no little glory, this chapter in his life had drawn to a close. Little did he know that another was just about to begin.
Not long afterwards a man sidled up and sat next to him at the Ally Pally and told him what he already knew.
“You won that fight. My six year old son could tell you won that fight.”
The man, it turned out, was boxing promoter Leonard Gunning. Cronin, understandably enough, wasn’t really in the mood to listen. Gunning, though, planted a seed when he told the disgruntled amateur his style was suited to professional ranks. They exchanged numbers and Gunning promised the Kerry man he’d be in touch.
By then, however, Cronin’s mind was elsewhere. Already on a beach in Portugal, where he was due to attend a wedding and spent a couple of weeks in the sun. The very last thing he was thinking of was boxing. That soon changed.
“At the start of the holiday I was like ‘I’m done with boxing’,” he says.
“But a few weeks later I was just itching to get back in, hit a bag and go sparring. I just said ‘feck it, this can’t be over for me’.”
Old habits die hard.
BOXING had been part of Cronin’s life for almost as long as he could remember. Starting as an eleven-year-old at Tralee Boxing Club before drifting away and coming back again a handful of years later.
“When I got back into it, I’m not actually certain,” he admits.
“It was about sixteen, in and around that age anyway, fifteen, sixteen. The only reason I did it is because I was involved in football when I was younger and didn’t really like it, and I put on a bit of weight and stuff.
“They started doing boxing classes in Milltown and I said I’d go down for the craic and that’s how it started. It was only a bit of craic like. A coach was out from Ballybunion doing a few tests and I stuck with him then from sixteen on, going out to Ballybunion.”
It wasn’t long before the boxing bug bit – and bit hard.
“It was solely fitness that got me into it,” he says.
“But it’s the kind of sport where if you love it you’ll get into it or get out of it straight away because you’re doing it for fitness. I got hooked on it at that stage. It’s hard to get out of it once you get into it.”
The bond he made with O’Brien, that coach from Ballybunion, was made to last. Cronin started making the nearly twohour round trip to the seaside town three days a week. At that stage he was competing as a super heavyweight.
“I wasn’t great as a youth,” he confesses.
“I was kind of a messy fighter. I kind of settled into it more as a senior, but I still hadn’t settled into it. I was still 108kg I’d say and I was boxing at that [weight]. I was boxing in the Celtic Cup with that and I lost a couple times. We said I’d try a different weight class and I came down.
“When I started working
harder as a senior, I started to take it more seriously and I came down to 91, to heavyweight. We said look we’d give it a crack at heavyweight and see how things go. I made heavyweight easy enough really.”
The longer it went on, the older Cronin got, the more seriously he took it, the better he became, the further he got in competitions. In 2017 he had his sights firmly fixed on the International Celtic Cup.
“It was everything to me really, at that stage,” he explains.
“I was gone from training three days a week to six days a week. I was trying to train twice a day then. That’s all my mind was set on for about six months, the Celtic Cup. You could say it was like a footballer training for the All Ireland championship. Like they’d be training, I was training.
“When you hit the intermediate standard that’s basically it, if you don’t train to a professional standard, you’re going to get
Some weeks I’d be flat out training and other weeks then I’d be like ‘feck this will I just pack it in?’
smacked like, you’re going to get caught out.”
The Celtic Cup went even better than he’d expected. Cronin won it and followed it up with victory in the Munster intermediate championship. Everything was coming together nicely, even if All Ireland glory was denied to him at the semi-final stage.
2018 was supposed to be his breakthrough year as Cronin and his team targeted the Under 21 championship at All Ireland and European level. About a week before the championships were to start, however, the powerful young man broke his hand putting paid to that dream.
“That set me back and things went up in the air then for a couple of months,” the 6’2 Milltown man says.
“Some weeks I’d be flat out training and other weeks then I’d be like ‘feck this, will I just pack it in?’”
Even when he did get back to boxing, he was beginning to fall a little out of love with the sport. Bad decisions in home-show bouts, which he wasn’t that bothered about strictly speaking, didn’t sit right with him. The politics of it, he’d have enough.
Still though, he was intrigued when his strength and conditioning coach, Peter O’Donoghue from Tralee, came to him with a proposal. Cronin regained his motivation when given the idea that he drop another weight category to light heavyweight, in preparation for the Haringey Box Cup at the Alexandra Palace.
“My boxing coach said no, but me and my strength and conditioning coach put that forward and he kind of said ‘no you’re too big for it’. We only made heavyweight from super heavyweight so there’s a big weight gap,” he says.
“So we talked about it and eventually he said ‘go for it and if the worst comes to the worst you can fight at 91’. I made the weight over the six weeks and I took it very seriously. I boxed the English champion in the quarter-finals straight away.
“I literally got off the scales and I was in that same evening to fight the English champion. I kind of looked at him and said
‘my fucking luck’. Straight away after the fight we said 81 was my home. I never in my life gave a fella a beating like I gave that fella.”
WHAT happened next – that controversial semi-final defeat – was both a curse and a blessing for a man with over fifty amateur fights behind him. As they say when God closes a door, he opens a window. Once Cronin had a little time to consider things on his break in Portugal he was rearing to go again.
“I was just so sick of the amateur and it was just timing really, it fell perfectly,” he says of the decision to link up with Boxing Ireland Promotions.
“I got a call then from Leonard and Stephen Sharpe. The two of them rang me – they’re both under the same boxing promotion – and they offered me a contract to go professional. I didn’t even accept it at first. I said I’d see.
“They invited me up to a show in Dublin. They sat me ringside and they were just talking me through it. There was a few light heavyweight fights at it and they said ‘he’s probably the top pro light heavyweight lad in the rankings’ and ‘this lad is getting close to the top’. I’m kind of watching him and I’m going ‘fuck it, I’d stop these lads like’.
“There was Paddy McDonagh and he was intercontinental champion a couple of years ago and I was like ‘an intercontinental champion is only two steps off a world champion’. I was kind of watching him and next thing I was saying ‘I could get in there and I could stop that fella, like and I’m going to have a cut at it’. And I did.
“I contacted them and signed up a new coach at Lewins Gym [in Dublin], Jonathan Lewins is the head coach there and Nicky Dullard and Patrick Lewins. They were the three coaches. Unbelievable boxing coaches.
“You just wouldn’t believe the class that they have and my coach Patrick [O’Brien] actually left the amateur ranks at that stage as well. He’d been stuck in the amateurs twenty or thirty years and he just called it a day after that as well.
“I don’t think it was because of myself – it was just timing really. Then he got excited over the professional side of it as well. Now he’s joined the professional side of it and come on as a coach as well, so that’s four boxing coaches and my strength and conditioning coach Peter O’Donoghue and then my manager too [Gunning]. So we’ve a solid team there.”
The Milltown man signed on the dotted line in August 2018, but didn’t debut until
March 2019 as a problem with his boxing licence delayed his first steps into the big, bad world of professional sports. At the time that was undoubtedly frustrating, but in hindsight it was no bad thing, according to the twenty-three-year-old.
“To be honest I wasn’t settled into the pros anyway at that stage,” he says.
“It’s a whole different style – it’s nothing like amateur boxing. You’ve got to sit down on your punches, you’ve got to move in a different way. So the more time for me the better. It’s timing again. It was just perfect when the Clash of the Titans event in Dublin came up.
“It was one of the biggest shows in Ireland in a while and it was on TG4. Next thing they offered me to debut on it and I was delighted. I said no bother. Did the press conference and working with Patrick and Peter down here and went up and debuted against a Polish fella, Mateusz Lisiak.
“That was a decent fight, to be honest, because I was still trying to get used to the pro style. I was kind of edgy enough. There was a big crowd there, we’d a big support go up and I was nervy enough.
“I didn’t want to be going in for the kill so I kind of boxed away and then I went back into the corner with my coach. And that’s the difference... the level of coaching. He just goes to me ‘turn your hand in’ and I was like ‘right I’ll try that’. Literally the first time, the first punch I threw I broke the man’s nose.”
After that devastating fourthround stoppage, Cronin defeated vastly experienced Latvian Jevgenijs Andrejevs on points in London in June of last year. Since reaching a 2-0-0 record as a pro, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted upon his career. He’s not that concerned about it, though, as he’s got more than enough time on his side.
“It is about development,” he argues.
“Right now with this whole lockdown thing what I’ve been given is a whole lot of world champions and high-level boxers by my coach to watch and he’s watching them as well. He’s trying to see one or two things from each boxer and seeing how they’d suit me.
“He’s picking these world-level boxers and seeing... I don’t know did you ever hear that saying, is it Muhammed Ali? That you pick one thing from every high-level boxer and try work it for yourself. You don’t want to be copying any boxer.
“That’s what we’re doing now. There’s a lot of this stuff that would actually suit my style of training, and we’re doing a lot of movement training.”
The original plan for Cronin for 2020 was to have four bouts to set him up for a home-county fight in the INEC in Killarney for a Celtic title. That will still happen, it’s just going to be a little delayed. In the meantime the Kingdom Warrior is settling into his new job as a fire-officer, while training and keeping as sharp as he can in his back garden in Tralee.
His motivation never greater, his goal never clearer, Cronin’s aiming for the very top.