THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE
“THE night that I won the world title our house burned down. My mother and my auntie Brid and my sister Rachel were the only ones in the family still in the house. The town was full because halfway through the Pedroza fight people started to think ‘Mcguigan’s gonna win this, let’s get into the town to celebrate with all the locals’. Clones had at that time a population of 2,400 and by the time the fight was over there were 20,000 people in the town.
“Although it only had 2,400 people, Clones had 22 pubs – so you knew what the priority was. Per capita that’s a phenomenal amount of drinking facilities. My mother used to light a holy candle and put it on top of the television, to help me win my fights. She did this when I won the world title and it burned the bloody house down!
“There were so many people that night in the house celebrating. All the Irish and Northern Irish TV Stations had sent TV Crews to the town to report the senes of celebrations. BBC NI, UTV, RTE – it was mad, completely mad. By the time they got off to bed it was very late or very early. We lived in an old Victorian tea mill, three stories high – that was now a grocery shop. We lived at the back of the shop and my gym was above the kitchen at the back. You had to go through the kitchen and walk up the stairs to access my boxing gym.
“At about six o’clock in the morning auntie Brid smelled the smoke and saw the flames. She ran back and woke my mother and sister Rachel. They ran to the window and started shouting: ‘Help! Help! Help! we're on fire!' Everybody at that stage was either paralytic or asleep except for one guy. His name was Brendan Mckenna, who’s since passed away RIP. He used to live beside us and was noted for his capacity to hold booze. He was staggering across The Diamond and just ignored my mother’s shouts and kept walking. And then he turned to them and
said: ‘You’re all right, love – we’re all on fire!’ You’ll be alright in the morning and he turned and walked on!
“Thankfully, about ten minutes later a Garda came walking up over The Diamond and heard the frantic shouting of my mother, sister and auntie and called the fire brigade. They got my mother and relatives out and put out the fire. But the whole back of the house was burned down: all my old medals were destroyed and the stairs leading to the gym were ruined, there was widespread damage.
“I’d been planning to stay in London for a couple of days but instead I came home on the Monday. Within an hour of arriving in Belfast I went into the city centre and there were 70,000 people there. It was incredible. I was driven up Royal Avenue on the back of a lorry with all my team and into the Lord Mayor’s chambers in Belfast City Hall. It was amazing the amount of people there, It was truly lovely.
“Then I went down to Clones that night and 20,000 people turned up again in the town to greet me. Three days later I went down to Dublin and a quarter of a million people turned out to see me. It took me one and a half hours to get from the top of O’connell Street to the Mansion House where I met the Lord Mayor. The Dublin City Lord Mayor said I gave the Pope a run for his money with the amount of people who turned out to see me.
“People ask me what was the greatest day of my life, the fight against Pedroza was obviously the greatest night of my life but because I was so preoccupied with the job in hand. It was hard to enjoy it because you’ve got to be completely focused and concentrate every second of every minute so it’s impossible to enjoy it but coming home to Belfast, Clones and Dublin and standing up on those rostrums and looking at all those people and knowing how much I meant to the Irish people North and South of the border during those horribly difficult times was hugely gratifying for me. Those moments were the greatest moments and days of my life.”