SKIPPING CLASS BIG MOUTHS AND COCKED FISTS AT ST SAVIOURS OLYMPIC BOXING ACADEMY words // CHRISTOPHER GOODFELLOW pictures // IAN KEEGAN
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The gentrification that’s creeping northwards from Parnell Street seems a long way away, and the area is blighted by endless abandoned buildings whose facades have been covered with hulks of graffiticovered steel. The estate on Upper Dorset Street alone has at least 17 empty ground floor flats, not counting the entire abandoned block on its North-Eastern edge. And when you walk through its corridors you can hear the cries of knackers echoing off the concrete stairwells: “Why the fuck are you taking photographs for?” But the five-year-old with the big mouth is quickly reprimanded and once you start kidding around with the members of St Saviours Olympic Boxing Academy, which is based in the middle of the blocks of flats, you soon realise you judged the tenants far too quickly. They’re out here training world champions and Olympic medal winners with little funding in a twenty-year-old gym. Inside the club there’s only space for a practise ring, a minimal exercise floor and a section for “boxers and coaches only” which has a series of mirrors and punching bags hanging from the rafters. You can spot the less experienced, younger boxers immediately; kids with
cocked fists and crew cuts, wrists bent at an angle, chins up. But when the younger lads have a chance to get into the ring and spar or work the pads with coaches it’s like a glimpse of manhood itself. Aspiring boxers coached by ex-champions. The real fighters in the group, the ones who are good with their mitts, curl their shoulders and move their feet in a series of rapid steps, the corners of their elbows pointing to the floor like half drawn longbows. Three of them, Sean O’Neill, Shane Roach and Gavin Keating are busy getting ready for a charity event on Saturday night. This week, because of the summer holidays, there are only about two dozen members training, moving between shadow boxing, floor exercises and the punching bags. Most of the kids come from the area immediately surrounding the club and pay only €2 a week to take part. John McCormack, a coach at the club, leans on the rope and squirts water in the mouths of two youths that are taking a break from sparring, giving them advice. This wily old man was once the British Middle Weight Champion; he only lost eight fights in his whole career, all of which were on points, not knockouts. His brother Pat briefly held the British Light Welterweight title and their dad Spike McCormack was an Irish boxing legend, holding the Middleweight title back in the 1940s. The only thing older than the coaching legacy is the building that surrounds us. The old Fire Station, which also plays host to karate lessons and a model railway club on the first and second floor, was opened in 1905 when fire tenders were horse drawn and the street outside lined with terraced housing. And it has seen nothing more than a few licks of paint by the McCormack brothers since the club moved there in the late 1980s. It was Jim Macken, Shaun Fitzpatrick, Ned Kane, Harry McKeown and Paddy Callan, who launched the club back in 1964 in an orphanage hall behind the club’s namesake, St Saviours Church. At the weekend John and his brother Pat took me to the charity event they had been preparing for earlier in the week, an eleven-fight fundraiser for Stephen Connolly, who had lost his house to a fire, at The Curragh Camp. On the way there John’s cigarettesmoke-filled car drove passed Ballyfermot and we discussed the Council’s ill-advised plan to relocate families there from the city centre in the late 1970s. At the time the estate mirrored the problems facing the youths who live in the area around St Saviours today. The mix of poor quality surroundings and lack of activities left them out on the streets causing trouble. And the conversation reflected the two coaches’ ethos about their own neighbourhood. “They put them out here with nothing but a church and a pub and there was nothing for the youngsters to do. You need something for the youngsters to do otherwise there’s trouble,” said Pat. And that’s the sense of civic understanding that, along with an insatiable passion for the sport, drives these men to work with the children at St Saviours.
TOTALLY DUBLIN
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