By the late 1980s Doc was struggling badly with the drink. He kept himself topped up throughout the day with what he and his friends mysteriously referred to as a hurley gurley. Local barmen knew to fill the largest glass to hand with the strongest fortified wine in the pub when this was the order. By nightfall he was drunk and belligerent and, at times, violent when he returned home to Eskdale Gardens, where the family was staying while Holmdene Gardens was renovated. In the end Isobel couldn’t take it any more and when the Holmdene house was fixed up, she moved back and Terrence stayed in Eskdale. After more than twenty years of an eventful marriage, the pair separated for good.
Though he was loath to show it, or any other emotion that could be interpreted as weakness, his parents’ break-up hurt Eamonn. The youngest child in the family is often the worst affected by marital splits and at this time he was the only boy still living at home. But he was also very close to his dad in that embarrassed-to-express-it manner so common in Irish father-son relationships. By now he was through with school, departing with a score of ninety-nine per cent in his final technical-drawing exam, and could often be found working alongside his old man in the construction business. Doc called his son ‘Rocky Two’, never explaining the necessity of the numeral addendum. Rocky lost to Apollo Creed first time around before winning the rematch, so perhaps that had something to do with it.
Together they rebuilt or repointed much of the brickwork in the Ardoyne and they later worked on the chimneys of the Unity Flats a mile down the road towards the city centre. Eamonn would carry the hod and then lay the brick while Terrence renewed the cement pointing between the masonry. They were a good team for, despite a shared weakness for the bottle, the two Magee men were blessed with a strong work ethic and enjoyed the tired sense of satisfaction that a day’s physical graft brings. For years as a kid, Eamonn had earned decent money by scouring the district for empty gas canisters and returning them to a local supplier. When even younger, he worked the stalls of summer carnivals on the Holy Cross football pitch and the famous Mickey Marley hand-picked him to be his Ardoyne helper when the street entertainer and his faithful steed, Joey, trotted into the district with their hobby-horse roundabout. Eamonn had never been afraid of putting in a shift, but this now was real, tough work and not without its risks, both from the nature of the job and the special circumstances of Northern Ireland at that time.
Once, while they were repointing the brickwork of an old building on Belfast city centre’s Lower Donegall Street, Terrence’s ladder gave way and he landed teeth first on the pavement. He lost a couple of his prized pearly whites in a pool of his own blood that morning, but a few months later father and son were standing outside a Belfast courthouse determined to gain fair compensation. They had limbered up for the negotiations with a few dawn pints in the nearby Docker’s Club and Eamonn was in the mood to play hardball by the time he had the lawyer in his sights.
‘Six thousand,’ the solicitor offered by way of an opening gambit.
‘No,’ was Eamonn’s succinct and firm response.
‘Eight.’
‘No.’
‘Ten?’
‘No.’
When the beleaguered brief raised it to £12,000, sixteen-year-old Eamonn shook his hand and accompanied his smiling father on one almighty all-day session to celebrate.
On another occasion they instinctively ducked for cover when the rattle of machine-gun fire rang out from across the Lower Ormeau Road. ‘Someone has just been murdered,’ Eamonn remarked to his dad as he hoisted the long-handled brick hod back onto his shoulder. In actual fact, five had been killed and another nine were injured when two UDA men sprayed a betting shop with forty-four bullets from a semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm pistol. It was a violent reminder that the Troubles were pervasive across every square mile of the city.
Eamonn truly loved his mother, but there were certain things he would only ever tell Doc and Isobel knew it. Like where he went at night. But Isobel would still head out and look for her baby boy. In a riotous, balaclava-clad group of a hundred, she was still able to pick Eamonn out in a heartbeat. Some days she’d come home in the afternoon and find some militant republican paraphernalia – a pair of gloves, a whistle, a replica gun even – carelessly left lying around, and would swiftly toss it over her back wall into a derelict site behind the house. When she later challenged Eamonn on it he’d always brush her off.
‘Fuck sake, Ma. I’m not in the RA, okay?’ he’d snap back.
But Isobel was always aware that Terrence knew more than she did. When they were still together, she had heard him slip out of bed on many an occasion to ease open the bathroom window and allow Eamonn and his Fianna comrades to scale the drainpipe and squeeze into the house. She knew that behind the scenes Terrence was using what was left of his influence to take care of things for Eamonn when he ran into trouble too deep for a teenager to handle alone. More than her other three boys, Eamonn was clearly his father’s son.
The day before St Patrick’s Day in 1988, Terrence set off for Milltown Cemetery on the Falls Road. There, in the republican plot, the three IRA volunteers shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar the week before were due to be buried in front of thousands of mourners. As the final coffin was being lowered into the ground, UDA member Michael Stone threw two hand grenades into the crowd and began shooting indiscriminately. As people panicked, scattered and dived for cover behind gravestones, dozens of youths and young men chased after the loyalist assassin as he ran towards the M1 motorway. Every ten or fifteen yards, Stone would turn to hurl another grenade or fire from the two guns he was brandishing. Finally he was caught and beaten unconscious before the RUC arrived just in time to spare him fatal mob justice. By the time the smoke and debris had settled and Gerry Adams had resumed his graveside oration, three were dead and sixty injured from the gunfire, grenade shrapnel and flying shards of splintered marble. Back in a friend’s house in the Ardoyne, Eamonn watched the footage of the massacre on television and immediately threw himself wholeheartedly into the riots that were erupting in nationalist districts across the city.
Isobel was at home on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when a neighbour burst in to warn her that Eamonn had just been arrested. She sprinted down to the barricades only to be told by onlookers that he’d been put in the back of an RUC jeep and driven away. A couple of hours later she was back in her house, staring out the front window in silent prayer, when she spied Eamonn walking up the path. Running out in near hysterics she grabbed her son and, shaking him violently, screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Do you want to get shot! Is that what you want? Give me a gun and I’ll shoot you right now if that’s what you want!’ The certainty of firing that bullet into her own child may have been easier to live with than the constant worrying and wondering where her baby was and what danger he was in.
But, in truth – despite his actions that day – Eamonn was gradually drifting away from that lifestyle. Now approaching his seventeenth birthday, he had a decision to make on how committed he was to the IRA’s violent war against the British occupation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to continue down the path he was on, but deep down he knew it wasn’t for him. He had seen friends die on that path, and others play a leading role in atrocities that any man would struggle to live with until the end of his days.
***
The ease with which he, or any young, disenfranchised man born in the Ardoyne in the 1970s, could have chosen the Armalite over the ballot box still numbs Eamonn today. I ask him if there was one watershed moment, one defining incident so traumatising that it repelled him from the militant republican cause. But he just shakes his head and leaves a heavy, pregnant silence hanging in the air. After what seems like an age, in which I wonder whether he has forgotten my presence, I start to move on to boxing matters when he suddenly interrupts.
‘See the likes of Bootsy Begley, the Shankill Road bomber,’ he begins. ‘We were the same age and knocked about with each other all our lives. We were in the Fianna together, we drank together and yet I had no idea he was in the RA. I hadn’t a fucking clue. Neither him nor Sean Kelly, who I see every day working in the shop round the corner.’
He pauses again, as if still amazed by the fact, before continuing. ‘That could very easily have been me, you know. Wee things like that, it’s hard to stop thinking about them. And wee Bootsy was a total gentleman. I know what he done was totally wrong and absolutely disgusting, but he was always a gentleman.’
Another pause and this time I drift away too, back to that Saturday afternoon in 1993 when Begley and Kelly walked into Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road with a bomb on an eleven-second fuse. They were to clear the civilians out and blow up a UDA meeting believed to be taking place upstairs, but the bomb exploded prematurely, killing nine Protestants and Begley himself. It was later revealed that the UDA meeting had ended early and the intended targets were long gone when the blast ripped through the building. In the bloody aftermath, loyalists murdered fourteen civilians inside a week, and eight in one sitting when a UDA gunman yelled ‘trick or treat’ before opening fire on a Halloween party in Greysteel with an AK-47.
Shaking his head, Eamonn finally murmured, more to himself than me, ‘I wonder how Sean Kelly can live with that.’
***
Boxing instead began to take up more and more of Eamonn’s time as, together, he and Patsy McKenna won title after title in the juniors. A mixture of pride and the knowledge that Eamonn would probably just lose it has caused Patsy to keep hold of Eamonn’s old amateur record book to this day. Watching him thumb through the wad of thin, faded pages where the letter L for loss is a rarity, I can see that footage of the fights is flickering vividly in the old man’s mind. He proudly points out the big medal-securing victories but other, seemingly less significant bouts, appear to stir more emotion.
He remembers Tommy McMenemy, a big strong fella from Twin Towns in Donegal. He was more powerful than Patsy’s guy but Eamonn had the class and would cut him to shreds each time they fought. Another Donegal man, Anthony McFadden from Dunfanaghy, was even more ferocious. He had knocked McMenemy out inside sixty seconds and Patsy sent his charge out with a warning about his punching prowess.
‘First round, bang, and Eamonn is all over the place,’ Patsy recalls with a laugh. ‘I honestly thought it was all over. But he stayed on his feet, and he held on for dear life, and then his head cleared and he totally out-boxed the kid to victory.’
Magee could bang too, however. Patsy’s eyes widen when he describes how he left a lad from Enniskillen sprawled on the ring floor in the National Stadium in Dublin. As the young boxer lay prostrate on the canvas, his left leg suddenly began twitching horribly. As he stood in the neutral corner, the blood drained from Eamonn’s face and he stared, transfixed by that spasming limb, and willed his beaten opponent to rise.
‘I didn’t mean to do it, Patsy,’ he said quietly as his trainer led him away.
‘You’re all right, son. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.’
The passing referee then made an ill-advised and insensitive remark about Eamonn being a vicious bastard and Patsy almost jumped him.
‘What do you want him to do!’ he yelled. ‘It’s a boxing contest, he’s trying to win and so is the other guy.’
Half an hour later, boxer and coach were sat in one of the arena’s back rows grabbing a bite to eat in between bouts. Patsy always brought a big cool box of sandwiches and salad and chicken legs so neither he nor his fighters would have to go looking for food as the tournament progressed.
‘Patsy?’ Eamonn whispered.
Patsy looked over and saw Eamonn nodding his head down the row of seats to where the young fella who had just been unconscious on the canvas was sat on his own.
‘Go and offer him a sandwich and a drop of tea,’ Patsy suggested.
Unsure what reception he’d receive, Eamonn approached somewhat timorously with a chicken sandwich in one hand a mug of hot tea in the other. Tentative and uneasy with each other at first, they were soon chatting side by side until Eamonn was called to get ready for the final. They didn’t mention what had just happened in the ring but both boys understood that it was just an unfortunate occupational hazard of the sport they loved.
‘Good luck in the final, mate,’ Eamonn heard his new friend shout as he strode towards the ring.
Patsy liked to see that side of Magee, a confirmation that his kid had a good heart. For although Eamonn had earned a reputation as the best junior in the country, he was also gaining notoriety amongst the boxing authorities as the biggest troublemaker on each Irish squad he made. At times it was deserved – as when fire extinguishers were let off in a Cork hotel – but at other times it was not, like when he was accused of stealing beer in Scotland when the theft took place while he was battling it out in the ring. Either way, such spirited hijinks were little more than devilment to Patsy and he was generally happy to turn a blind eye so long as nobody got hurt or arrested. Only when alcohol was involved did he begin to worry. Particularly if he smelled it on a boxer’s breath during the fight.
One such incident comes quickly to mind, for both Patsy and Eamonn. It was the morning of the 1987 Ulster finals and Eamonn woke early with a hangover from hell. He rolled out of bed, crawled to the bathroom to empty his stomach of toxins, and did his best to avoid the daylight that exacerbated the headache busy splitting his cranium in two. His friend, Budgie, looked on with a rueful countenance.
‘There’s only one thing for it, mate,’ Budgie stated with self-assumed wisdom.
‘What’s that?’ Eamonn croaked in response.
‘Hair of the dog. Get up, let’s go.’
Still nowhere near sober, the best young welterweight in the country struggled to the local Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) clubhouse where he knew an early morning pint would be easy to find. With the previous night’s excesses still coursing through his veins, his bloodstream only needed a gentle top up before Eamonn was again borderline blotto. Never one to do things by half, Magee downed six more lagers before sauntering into St George’s Boxing Club in the Markets area of Belfast with his gear slung over his shoulder. He was up against his old friend, the hard-hitting Anthony McFadden, and Patsy looked on in bemusement as Eamonn waltzed around the Donegal man throughout the first round and then tottered back to his stool. Three steps from the corner, Patsy’s jaw dropped.
‘I can smell the fucking drink off you from here, for fuck sake!’ he hissed, as Eamonn pursed his lips, breathed through his nose and proffered his denial with a sheepish shake of the head. He still won the Ulster title that day but, of course, that wasn’t the point. Patsy tried to reason with him and even invited ex-Olympians and pros to the gym to help hammer home the point that there was only a very small window to forge a successful boxing career. That you can’t live that life and expect to succeed in the ring. That it takes sacrifices beyond what the average man on the street is willing to make. It broke Patsy’s heart that he wouldn’t listen but the trainer knew enough about alcoholism to understand he just had to carry on and do for Eamonn the best he could.
The other major threat to his fledgling boxing career was street fighting. As the most famous boxing family in north Belfast, the Magee boys received respect and provocation in the district in almost equal measure. As the brother marked out as the future superstar, Eamonn was presented with the lion’s share of the challenges, at least one a week throughout his entire young adult life in his own estimation.
‘I never went looking for it,’ he still insists. ‘Trouble just always found me.’
They came from outside the district to try their luck as well, particularly New Lodge. When the Ardoyne or Bone locals separated from the New Lodge crowd upon exiting the Glen Park Bar and the alcohol and testosterone-fuelled young men started squaring up to one another, Eamonn was invariably called out to deal with multiple threats in a single night. Finally, he decided to end the confrontations once and for all. He gathered a gang of his most trusted cohorts together one evening, and they sat drinking indoors, preparing for the decisive battle while the New Lodge lads enjoyed themselves in the bar. Just before closing time, Eamonn positioned his men in various alleyways and entries surrounding their target. It was raining heavily that night so they each tied a plastic bag over their head. It made for an intimidatingly comical look, but passers-by were much more concerned by the hurley sticks that each grasped in their hands as they waited for their quarry to exit the bar. The attack was swift, bloody and decisive. Around forty young men struggled back to the New Lodge that night and never again returned to the Ardoyne.
At other times, the three brothers still living in Northern Ireland joined forces, as they did when Patrick began receiving hassle from some thugs in neighbouring Ligoniel. They were a formidable trio to go up against but, in reality, Eamonn on his own could normally take care of any situation that arose. One night the three came out of the Shamrock and were saying their goodbyes. Noel and Patrick were now married and both wives were present, while Eamonn was on crutches having damaged his leg in a fall a few days earlier.
Suddenly there was a shout of ‘Magee!’ and the group of five turned to see an angry young man making a beeline for Eamonn. The attacker was a nasty piece of work, a known bully clearly desperate to take a shot at the boxing champ with a few drinks in him. He was across the road and on top of them before the women could scream or Noel and Patrick could get their fists up, but in one fluid movement Eamonn had let the crutches fall, put all his weight on his good foot and stretched the attacker out cold on the Ardoyne Avenue pavement with one short left cross. Neither his brothers nor their partners could believe the speed at which the shocking incident had transpired.
On another occasion, a vanquished foe did manage to make a clawing contact with Magee and a trip to the Mater Hospital was required for three stitches in a torn eyelid. Budgie accompanied him and after the doctor’s needle and thread had patched Eamonn up, the pair walked on down the Crumlin Road to get some food in a Chinese takeaway at the Carlisle Circus roundabout. While they waited for their dinner, a pair of hard-looking characters entered, placed an order and immediately left. Budgie was half cut but Eamonn had his wits about him and could innately sense the threat of violence in the air. He pulled his friend outside with him and, sure enough, the same two guys rounded the corner with baseball bats.
‘Run!’ Eamonn yelled and took off up the Antrim Road. Budgie, drunk and not an athlete, was soon flagging and it wasn’t long before the attackers caught up with him. Looking back, Eamonn saw him on the ground, writhing and kicking and attempting to dodge or deflect the worst of the blows. Magee didn’t hesitate. He ran back, clotheslined the two baseball aficionados off his cowering friend and then raised his fists in anticipation of a battle.
At that precise moment a siren wailed in the near distance and the aggressors turned on their heels and fled. It turned out to be an ambulance rather than a police van and it picked up poor Budgie and brought him to casualty. By the time they were back in the Shamrock a few hours later, Budgie had three of his own stitches to match Eamonn’s. The only difference was that his were holding his lower lip together, and for the rest of the night there was great hilarity as half of each mouthful of Budgie’s beer leaked through the wound and dribbled down his chin.
I once asked Patsy if he knew how often his most valuable asset was scrapping bare-knuckled on the street.
‘Of course I did,’ he barked at me in his own indomitable fashion. ‘Everyone in the district knew what he was like. He missed a multi-nations tournament in Italy in 1988 with two broken knuckles after dealing with some guy behind the Shamrock.’
So was he not concerned when Eamonn came into the gym every week with cuts and bruises and a tournament just around the corner?
‘That was a rarity,’ he replied with a wry smile. ‘Not many were ever able to land a meaningful punch on him.’
***
Around this time, another family tragedy hit Eamonn hard. He had been in the Shamrock drinking with Nipper, his mum’s younger brother. Eamonn loved spending time with his young uncle and the pair of them had great craic that night, drinking and laughing until closing time when they said their goodbyes.
‘See you tomorrow, Nipper.’
‘Good man, Eamonn.’
The next morning Isobel shook her son awake.
‘Eamonn, son, Nipper’s dead.’
‘Aye right, Ma,’ Eamonn mumbled as he rolled over to go back to sleep. It was 1 April and, despite the hangover, you’d need to get up earlier than that to make a fool of him.
‘No, really, son. He’s dead,’ Isobel continued tearfully but Eamonn was snoring again.
When he finally rose from his bed a couple of hours later, he learned that it was true. Nipper had gone to sleep in an armchair in a friend’s living room and never woke up. He was only thirty-three years of age and his seventeen-year-old nephew was the last person to see him breathing.
***
1989 was the year Eamonn announced himself on the world stage. Despite still being technically a junior, he was so good that he began competing against the seniors – grown men who may have had ten years or more on him.
In May of that year he finally got to take part in the Gaelic Games in Canada, the tournament that an RUC bullet had previously prevented him from boxing in. It wasn’t long ago that Eamonn believed the world ended at Ardoyne shops and now here he was, trotting around the globe with his boxing pals. His friendship with Wayne McCullough continued to strengthen but he also grew close to southerners like Paul Griffin from Dublin and the Cork trio of Michael Roche, Gordon Joyce and Paul Buttimer. Magee, Griffin and Roche became particularly thick and were invariably found at the centre of any mischievous goings-on. In Canada, midnight escapes through bedroom windows were made and the team coach was pulled over following police reports that those in the back seat were partial to baring their rear ends to shocked locals in every town they passed through.
On another night, Eamonn brought a young lady back to the hotel room he shared with three of the other boxers. She was a stunning older woman, like no one he had come across in the Ardoyne, and he wanted to make the most of this one night he would spend with her. After hours of waiting patiently outside, Griffin and the others began banging on the door, demanding to be allowed to their beds. The two lovebirds giddily ignored the pleas for so long that security was called and proceeded to open the door. Unperturbed, Magee continued with his conquest with the other three looking on, although the pressure eventually got to him and he was forced to conclude his business in the privacy of the en-suite bathroom.
It was largely harmless stuff but it was still behaviour in stark contrast to the likes of McCullough, who was early to rise, earlier to bed and breathed pure boxing throughout the day. Nevertheless, it was Magee – scratching his crotch furiously between rounds on account of a virile dose of crabs he had contracted before leaving Belfast – who flew home with a gold medal and the coveted boxer of the tournament award after a series of impressive victories.
In August the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA) sent him to Puerto Rico to fight against the world’s elite in the world junior championships. The opening ceremony took place exactly eighteen years to the day from the beginning of internment and the macabre anniversary seemed to inspire Magee, who fought magnificently to reach the final. He benefitted from a walkover in the preliminaries, when Costa Rica’s Francisco Campos withdrew, before stopping a durable Bulgarian, Ivan Ivanov, inside a minute in the next round. In his quarter-final he had the gold-medal favourite from Cuba, Josef Sanchez, down in the first and third stanzas on his way to a comfortable 26–13 victory. He then faced a local star, Victor Perez, in the semi-final and had too much for his Puerto Rican foe, running out a 29–17 winner with a performance that endeared him to the Caribbean natives. Nerves got the better of him in front of 8,000 fans shouting his name in the final, however, and he lost out to the East German Enrico Berger. But a silver medal from a world championships is a prized possession for any boxer. Shane Mosley and Joel Casamayor were two other young hopefuls to medal that year.
Eamonn arrived home to praise being showered on him from all corners of the boxing fraternity. ‘Eamonn High’ read the headline in a Belfast Telegraph feature that described Magee as ‘a rarity in the sport in that he can box or fight depending on what is required’ and ‘a clever boxer with a punch that comes naturally to him’. Irish head coach Frank Gervin endorsed that view: ‘This boy has everything going for him. There is no doubt in my mind that one day he can become an Olympic champion.’
The undisputed Godfather of Irish professional boxing, Barney Eastwood, tried to tempt him into turning pro then and there but Magee was still focused on amateur glory and the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland in particular. ‘I always wanted to go to the Commonwealth Games,’ he said, ‘and I knew that if I came home from Puerto Rico with a medal I would be in line for a trial.’
A fortnight later that dream was dashed by a vote in the Ulster Boxing Council that vetoed the idea of Magee fighting a trial against Eddie Fisher to see who deserved the spot on the plane to New Zealand. The legendary Northern Irish sports writer Jack Magowan described the move as a ‘surprise thumbs-down for Ireland’s brightest young talent’ and IABA president Felix Jones concurred. ‘The selection of an Ulster team is not my business,’ Jones began, ‘but you can’t ignore the fact that Eamonn not only stopped a Bulgarian in Puerto Rico, he had the Cuban favourite twice on the floor and then beat a very good Puerto Rican in front of 8,000 wildly partisan home fans. And standards there, in my view, were higher than in either the Ulster or Irish championships!’
The apparent lack of support from his own council was a major blow to Eamonn but much worse was to follow just a week later. Standing in the queue beside John Connolly in a pizza takeaway on the Antrim Road, he felt a tap on his shoulder.
‘Have you a fag, mate?’ asked the stranger.
‘No I don’t, buddy,’ Eamonn replied honestly.
Minutes later he was walking down the narrow Phoenix Entry carrying his pizza box when he felt a strange warm sensation flowing down his back. Reaching to the side of his neck he was able to fit four fingers into a gaping wound up to his knuckles.
Turning around he saw the stranger who had just requested a cigarette with the remains of a broken bottle in one hand and an iron bar in the other. Blood was dripping from the jagged edge of the bottle. The man dropped it and swung with the metal pole but Eamonn managed to avoid the swipe and get his hand on the weapon. After a brief struggle he wrenched it free and went on the offensive himself. Despite the hurt he had inflicted when he slashed the sharp end of a fractured glass bottle across Magee’s throat, the attacker knew better than to continue the fight now Eamonn was armed. He immediately spun and fled into the night.
Eamonn dropped the bar and stumbled forward onto the Antrim Road. Somehow, there was no pain, just an awful warm feeling over his skin as the crimson blood continued to pour freely from the three-inch gash on the side of his neck. By some miracle there was an ambulance waiting at the nearby traffic lights and it sped him to the Mater Hospital and straight into the operating theatre. Dozens of stitches were required, both inside and out of the wound, but surgeons assured him he was a lucky young man. Had the glass thrust into his flesh just a few millimetres to the side, his external jugular vein would have been severed and he’d be lying dead in Phoenix Entry.
His mother wept openly, and his father privately, when they saw their boy in the hospital bed, but Isobel confesses that her overriding concern was that Eamonn would go looking for revenge as soon as he was discharged. As it happened, it was taken care of within a week. It turned out that the attacker was from the New Lodge, possibly one of the many who suffered that beating with the hurley sticks outside the Glen Park, and he was soon tracked down and given a severe kicking that culminated in several layers of skin from the man’s face being left on a pebble-dashed wall. A few days later the police lifted one of Eamonn’s friends, brought him to the station and stood him in front of the victim.
‘Is this the man who slashed Eamonn Magee?’ an officer asked.
‘No, that’s not him,’ was the reply.
The officer then turned to the young man with the freshly scarred face. ‘Is this the man who attacked you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ came the reply.
That was the end of that incident. Eamonn still sees the man who was within millimetres of murdering him walking about north Belfast on an almost monthly basis. They may even nod a silent greeting to one another as their paths cross, but they have never talked about the horrific violence that passed between them.
Incredibly, Eamonn was back in the ring within six weeks. At the end of November he won four fights to become the Irish intermediate champion, which was the final stage before competing for the senior title. In December he travelled to Rome to take part in a multi-nations event and returned, three dominant victories later, with another boxer of the tournament accolade and a papal blessing from the Pope when John Paul II spotted the Irish fighters from his balcony during mass in St Peter’s Square.
The serrated scar on his neck was still in its raw, angry infancy and Eamonn took to wearing turtlenecks to cover it up when he left the house. It made for an interesting conversation starter with women in bars but at that moment in time he only had eyes for one.
Mary Grogan grew up in Balholm Drive, a couple of streets away from Holmdene Gardens, but she had never before met Eamonn Magee. Her father, himself a boxing fan, managed the Crumlin Star Social Club where Isobel waitressed, but while she had heard all about the Magee boys and what great fighters they were, Mary had never actually laid eyes on Eamonn. More than boxing, the Grogans were a Gaelic games family, heavily involved with the local Kickhams GAA Club. It was in the clubhouse bar one night just before Christmas that Eamonn approached and introduced himself.
‘I’ve been chasing you for months and you haven’t even noticed me,’ he opened with a roguish smile.
He called her Mary Doll and they chatted all night. There were nine years between them but it didn’t seem to matter. Now in her fifties, Mary is still a beautiful woman, but back then, as the 1980s drew to a close, with her big shoulder pads and even bigger blonde hair, she turned heads on the street.
In January 1990 they got together and the following month Eamonn helped her move furniture into a new house on Rosapenna Street, just outside the Ardoyne between the Oldpark and Cliftonville Roads. A mutual friend decorated the property to make it look like a home and Eamonn liked it so much he decided to stay. Soon Mary was pregnant. They were in love.
***
Now aged eighteen, Eamonn had his first full year as a senior in 1990. He made the final of both the Ulster and Irish championships and each time dropped a decision to fellow Belfast man Eddie Fisher. Indeed, Fisher got the better of Magee on the three occasions they met as seniors, although both Patsy and Eamonn are convinced that they deserved the nod in at least two of those contests.
There were other narrow defeats around this time as well, however. He won one and lost one on a tour of the US, before Robert McCracken, the future middleweight world-title challenger and head coach of the British Olympic boxing team, beat him by a point in the 1990 World Cup. Such was Magee’s undeniable talent, Patsy wouldn’t accept the losses as a case of the better man winning. He knew the difference was the lack of dedication on the part of his charge. He also knew that Eamonn’s inability to live right between tournaments was forcing him to compete at least one weight class above where he should be operating. But Patsy had learned within weeks of meeting Magee as a precocious five-year-old that if there was one thing he did not like, it was being given a direct order. He would have to believe that the idea to drop a division came from himself and, when Fisher nicked another one from Eamonn in the 1991 Ulster final, Patsy began the process.
‘You’re the quickest welterweight I’ve seen, Eamonn,’ the wily old trainer surmised as Magee shadow-boxed in the gym one night. ‘As quick as any light welter in Ireland, that’s for sure.’
As they walked home together a month later, he poured some water over the little seed now germinating in Eamonn’s mind. ‘Did you hear Billy Walsh is coming down from 71kg? He’s campaigning as a welter now. And Joe Lowe has just switched in the opposite direction. Last year Fisher moved from light welter to 67kg. Just shows you, guys are moving up and down all the time.’
And then he fertilised the soil while holding the heavy bag as Eamonn whaled away during training. ‘You’re hitting it hard, son. Imagine if you could bring that power down to 63.5kg.’
A few weeks later, Patsy’s flower sprang forth.
‘Patsy, I’m thinking of trying to get down to light welter,’ Eamonn said one night. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘That sounds like a fine idea, Eamonn,’ Patsy beamed.
The weight came off relatively easily. Eamonn always worked fiercely when he was training but, perhaps lulled into a false sense of invincibility by his natural gifts, he had often undone a lot of that good work in Ardoyne watering holes as soon as he left the gym. For a couple of months after his decision to switch class, he drank less beer, ate less pizza and ran a few extra miles per week and by late 1991 he was comfortable operating in the 63.5kg light welterweight class.
His first outing in the new division came at the 1992 Ulster senior finals in Belfast, held in November and December 1991 with an eye on affording the country’s top boxers the best preparation possible for the upcoming Barcelona Olympics. Any lingering doubts over whether it was the right weight for Magee were dismissed in explosive fashion as he powered his way to stoppage victories and his first senior Ulster title. In the final he knocked out the accomplished Billy Cowan barely a minute into the contest, as if to underline his intent to dominate the domestic light welterweight scene.
The change in division did nothing to ease the journey to a national title, however. In addition to the likes of Cowan and his nemesis Eddie Fisher, quality, seasoned campaigners such as Neil Gough and Billy Walsh were also fighting as light welterweights during this period. Gough, from the St Paul’s Club in Waterford, appeared in eleven consecutive senior finals, won eight of them and also fought a record seventy-five internationals for Ireland, while Walsh, from St Colman’s in Cork, appeared in three consecutive finals, winning one. Magee knew he would probably have to face one or both every time he travelled south to fight for a national title. But before that he began 1992 with a bout against a man who would go on to become a bona fide legend of world boxing.
Sugar Shane Mosley was born just a couple of months after Eamonn in California, USA, and while Magee was sweating his way to a silver medal in the world junior championships in Puerto Rico in 1989, Mosley was doing the exact same thing two divisions below the Irishman. By 1992 the American had filled out and when he arrived in Ireland in January of that year, he was already widely regarded as one of the best amateur light welterweights on the planet. As the American champion of that division, he was following in the footsteps of the likes of Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns and Don Curry, so his pedigree was indisputable. Eddie Fisher was actually scheduled to share the ring with Mosley in the Irish capital that day, but Mickey Hawkins withdrew his charge as he feared a bad beating would hurt Fisher’s chances in the upcoming national finals. Magee didn’t need to be asked twice to fill the void and ensured the future three-weight world champion Hall-of-Famer did not make a wasted trip to the Emerald Isle.
‘He was good,’ Eamonn admits. ‘Very good. Fast hands, strong, just a very good fighter. But I still reckon I beat him that day.’
The judges disagreed, however, awarding Mosley a 25–17 victory in a bout that remained highly competitive until the final bell. Despite privately disputing the decision, Eamonn for once took the positives from defeat. Everyone knew Mosley was destined for greatness, yet this twenty-year-old, flame-haired tearaway from the Ardoyne pushed him all the way. The way Eamonn saw it, if he could mix it with the best in the world, the best in Ireland should not provide him with too many problems.
To be crowned the best amateur light welterweight in Ireland, he would have to beat three other contenders to the throne inside a week in the Irish capital’s National Stadium. Located a couple of miles southwest of Dublin city centre, the National Stadium was the first purpose-built boxing arena in the world. It is a mini Irish amphitheatre with the ring sitting proudly in the heart of the room and shallow banks of seats spreading out from ringside to a ceiling so low you can practically touch it from the back row. It is a claustrophobic and atmospheric setting when 2,000 souls, high on bloodlust, cram in, particularly when a busload of Magee’s nearest and dearest are positioned ringside.
In the amateur game, with the protective headguards and oversized 10oz gloves, elite-level boxers rarely blast one another out of the ring as can happen in the professional ranks. So it proved during the 1992 national finals as Eamonn put on a display of counter-punching, distance control and ring management that defied his tender years and earned three deserved points victories over vastly more experienced opponents. He negotiated fellow Belfast man Steven McCloskey in the quarter-finals before out-boxing Donore’s Greg Ormond, uncle of future European lightweight champ Stephen, in the semis. The final, against the reigning champion, Neil Gough, was the toughest assignment of all, but after three closely fought rounds the Sacred Heart man’s hand was raised in victory. Midway through his twentieth year on earth, Eamonn Magee had come of age in the boxing ring. He was the champion of Ireland and as his family and friends erupted inside the stadium, Eamonn scanned the crowd until he found Mary Doll, sat a few rows back with a huge grin on her face and an even bigger bump on her belly. A fortnight later, Áine Máire Magee was born.
Eamonn was on top of the world. He could see his life mapped out in front of him and he liked how it was looking. His own family was growing fast and he was about to go to the Barcelona Olympics as the Irish and Ulster champion. He would win a medal in Catalonia and return home to decide which big-money professional contract he would sign to begin making his millions in the paid ranks. Barney Eastwood was endorsing him in the press again, describing the light welterweight as ‘the most professional-looking amateur of the championships’ after he knocked out Cowan to win the Ulster final. But Eamonn couldn’t help wondering – if Barney had been begging him to turn pro after a silver medal in the world amateur championships, imagine what the likes of Frank Warren, Barry Hearn or Mickey Duff would do to get an Olympic champion on their books. And few doubted his ability to both medal in Barcelona and make a successful transition to the pro game.
***
Nicolás Hernández Cruz, the Cuban coach who was so instrumental in revolutionising the training regime within Irish amateur boxing, was convinced that Eamonn and Wayne McCullough were the two best medal hopes Ireland had. He remembers the first time he met the seventeen-year-old Magee on the platform of Heuston Station in Dublin city. The team for the 1989 world junior championships was gathering for a training camp in Kerry but Eamonn stood removed from the other boys. He seemed older somehow, stronger. Not in physique necessarily, but he had a silent self-confidence and he was clever and he was hard. All the perfect attributes for a fighter, Cruz thought.
The two bonded over best-of-five table-tennis epics in the Kerry hotel. There was mutual respect between them because the Cuban treated Eamonn as an equal. He socialised with him, ate with him, spoke to him man to man and learned about Eamonn’s life. When he caught him watching a risqué movie one night he sat down and watched with him. When he knew the boys would be on the prowl for girls, he asked if they had protection with them. It was about forging a strong enough personal relationship that they would respond to his strict and, at the time, unique methods in the gym but, with Eamonn at least, it was also entirely genuine. Cruz heard other members of the IABA describing Magee as wild, a lost cause beyond control, and he personally caught the Belfast boy drinking and smoking and breaking curfew plenty of times. But Nicolás saw a misunderstood kid, a good kid, one that only needed an arm around his shoulder every now and again to excel.
He also saw one hell of a boxer. One who could fight or box, who had great footwork and defence, who had a natural right hook from hell, who was determined and fearless in the ring. He saw a heart too big for his chest at times, a warrior who had survived bullets in his barrio and so would stop at nothing for victory in a mere boxing match. Magee was everything Cruz looked for in a young boxer and he couldn’t wait to see him medal in Barcelona and then turn pro. Such was his opinion of Eamonn’s capabilities that he believed he’d go on to surpass anything any Irish fighter had ever achieved as a professional.
Áine was barely out of the hospital when the shock news filtered through from Dublin. The IABA’s Central Council had voted and decided that Magee must fight Gough again in a box-off to decide who was to go to the Olympic Games. Even the Ulster representatives failed to argue on their own fighters’ behalf. The rationale was that the All-Ireland final between the pair had been so close that it would be unfair to choose the Olympian based on that contest alone. Although this was not without precedent, there were plenty of examples of similar situations in which no extra trial was demanded for Eamonn to choose from as he began his assault on the powers that be.
‘How come they didn’t give Paul McCullagh a trial before Seoul four years ago?’ he angrily demanded. McCullagh had suffered a narrow and controversial loss to Kieran Joyce in the Irish senior final and yet Joyce was sent to South Korea, despite major struggles continuing to make the 75kg middleweight limit, with no further questions asked. ‘I’m sick of the way we are treated as amateur boxers,’ Magee continued. ‘It’s time everyone knew why these trials were called for. They’re nothing but a political move by Dublin after seven out of twelve national titles ended up in the North. Frankly I’m disgusted. If they want this Olympic place for Gough, let them have it.’ These were Eamonn’s final words to the press on the matter.
To many commentators in the North, it was indeed nothing more than a cruel boardroom ploy from the Dublin hierarchy, driven by a resentment of the recent Ulster domination of the All-Ireland scene. Eamonn has always been convinced that it was personal as well. Put simply, he was not well liked in the corridors of power within the Irish amateur boxing set-up. Magee was, and always will be, as far from a company man as you will ever find. He is keen on telling people that he shoots from the hip, but only when you spend a little time in his company do you appreciate how often he fires and how deadly his aim is. His extra-curricular activities and extreme aversion to authority figures certainly did not help, but if this was punitive bias being shown towards him, it was an entirely disproportionate response to any trouble he caused as a teenage firebrand sneaking out to bars on an international trip abroad.
Art O’Brien, currently the national secretary of the IABA and a recent inductee into the Irish Amateur Boxing Hall of Fame for a lifetime of service to the sport, is the sole surviving member of the National Council from that period. He remembers only too well how difficult Eamonn was to manage but there is no anger or bitterness in his voice as he reminisces, and he baulks at the suggestion of an agenda against either Ulster or Magee. Like Cruz, O’Brien was blown away by the natural talent Eamonn possessed but, unlike Nicolás, he was never able to forge any meaningful relationship with the kid. Art recalls a young man carrying a lot of emotional baggage that he presumed derived from a troubled home life. According to O’Brien, Magee mistrusted everyone around him, particularly if they were perceived to be in a position of authority standing over him. He cites Felix Jones, the IABA president, as an example. Jones was Eamonn’s biggest fan in the early days but, like the rest of the council, he grew to regard him as someone who couldn’t be depended upon, as the kid who would always let you down on tour or in training camp.
Despite all those sentiments, however, O’Brien strongly denies that the personalities or reputations of the fighters involved influenced the council’s decision. He is adamant that the demand for a box-off between Magee and Gough was the only sensible call to make after the close competitiveness of their recent All-Ireland final. And, rather than dislike, O’Brien believes that Eamonn’s difficult character inspired nothing more than disappointment and a sense of frustration that they had a world-class fighter on their hands who appeared hell-bent on wasting his God-given talents.
To this day, Patsy McKenna finds that hard to believe. He is convinced that Dublin had been out to get his boy for years and points to a series of incidents that, when taken together, could suggest something of a campaign against the unruly kid from the Ardoyne. There was the blame for a £100 phone bill that another fighter had actually run up in a Canadian hotel. There was the Irish referee using a previously unknown European rule to deduct a point without warning from Eamonn when the gum shield slipped out of his mouth mid-round. There were the accusations of stealing beer at a tournament in East Kilbride when the beverages in question disappeared while Magee was boxing a local champion. There was the tip-off Patsy received upon registering at the national finals one year that the referees had discussed and agreed to disqualify Eamonn the first moment he spat in the ring, an admittedly unfortunate habit he had acquired since he upped his daily nicotine intake. Then there was the £4,000 grant from national-lottery funding that Eamonn was awarded to help cover his training expenses but never received.
It is still an emotive debate and common sense suggests that neither side is entirely blameless in the controversy. At the very least, it does appear that as time went on the IABA grew less inclined to throw any favours the Sacred Heart fighter’s way. At the same time, Eamonn didn’t make life any easier for himself with his attitude and some of his actions. But in his and Patsy’s eyes, the IABA were attempting to deny Magee his dream, a punishment far too severe for whatever crimes he may have committed.
Regardless, most presumed Magee would back down, fight and beat Gough again, and conclude an exceptional amateur career in Barcelona. After all, the Olympic Games is the pinnacle of any amateur boxer’s career. It is what every kid dreams of when they first lace up a glove and Eamonn was on record many times agreeing that it had always been his ultimate goal before he started earning money from the sport. This was his one and only chance of representing his country as an Olympian, so surely he would swallow his pride and box nine more minutes to achieve his dream.
All those who made that presumption simply didn’t know Eamonn Magee very well. There is a bull-headed stubbornness within the man that borders on a mania. Even when he is wrong, he’s right, and he will never be convinced otherwise. And when points of principle are at stake, he digs his heels in until the tops of his ankles are covered. It is a personality trait that wrecks friendships and relationships with wild abandon, but that, when managed correctly, drives individuals at the very top of their chosen professions. Professional sports probably contain more such characters than most walks of life and perhaps Roy Keane, the footballer who famously walked away from captaining his country at the 2002 World Cup in a dispute over training conditions, or Muhammad Ali, who sacrificed his peak years as the heavyweight champion of the world on account of a religion-inspired anti-war stance, can relate to this extreme obstinacy. Maybe they understood better than the rest of us Magee’s mindset when he declared one last time on the eve of the planned box-off, ‘I’ll not box a trial with Gough or anybody else.’
And so he didn’t. On the night the IABA expected him in Dublin for the contrived rematch, Magee was drinking with friends in the Shamrock. Gough was immediately announced as the Irish Olympic squad’s 63.5kg representative and Eamonn was instead included in a second team scheduled to fly out to Tenerife for an international meet with Spain. Such was his sense of anger and disillusionment, few thought Magee would turn up at the airport for the flight to the Canary Islands, but he was there, surprisingly chipper given the circumstances. His relative joviality masked the bitterness burning within him but no sooner had the flight taken off that the explanation for Magee’s appearance became clear. He was drunk by the time the four-hour flight touched down in Santa Cruz and he barely sobered up for the duration of the tournament. Each morning when Nicolás Cruz gathered the men together to begin training and counted the bodies in front of him, there was always one missing.
‘It’s Magee,’ one of the other boxers would say. ‘Shall I go and get him up?’
‘Forget it,’ Cruz would reply before beginning the early morning run without the team’s star man.
Cruz had a lot of sympathy for Eamonn after the Olympic snub and he also knew there would be no reasoning with him in this mood. Magee was not on this island to box, he was here on an IABA-funded holiday. As long as Eamonn could keep his eyes open that week, he was drinking. He actually turned up for one of his designated bouts and was foolishly allowed in the ring. In the opening seconds Magee sank his teeth into an unsuspecting Spaniard’s neck and was disqualified as the poor man squealed in terror. Eamonn headed straight back to the bar without even showering. He was in full free-fall mode. Boxing, the only thing that had kept him vaguely near the rails over the past decade, had now conspired to send him careering off the track and into the dark unknown. The following night he was propping up the bar in a club in the early hours when a fellow fighter started fidgeting with the drawstring of his shorts. Eamonn looked on with interest as he finally coaxed a small white tablet from the elastic around his waist.
‘What’s that?’ Magee asked.
He was handed the pill. ‘Just take it,’ the other boxer advised. ‘You won’t be disappointed.’
That ecstasy tablet was the first hard drug Magee ever took. As a kid in the Bone Hills that rise up alongside the Ardoyne, he’d tried a joint but quickly decided he preferred the buzz that alcohol gave him. Later, sitting in the abandoned Flax Street mill, listening to rebel music under the British snipers in their watchtower, he learned to love the relaxing effect of marijuana, but witnessing friends hallucinating on glue, rolling about in garbage believing it to be gold coins, or hurling imaginary fireballs at one another, had been enough to put him off any further experimentation with narcotics. The risk of being tested and found with something in his system at a major boxing championships had been another deterrent, but by this point he just didn’t care.
The fighter was right; Eamonn wasn’t disappointed. The ecstasy removed him from life just like the booze did, but the tablet placed him in an altogether different reality. Whereas alcohol exacerbated the darker thoughts that swirled around his head and rendered him heavy and sluggish as the night wore on, MDMA lifted his spirits and propelled him forward at breakneck speed into the small hours where mayhem resided.
As soon as he returned home to Belfast he threw himself into his new habit with the same single-mindedness with which he attacked everything in life. The early-1990s rave culture was in full effect in north Belfast and illegal pills to keep the party going were easy to find – particularly as Eamonn was now working the door of a city-centre bar frequented by the likes of Mickey ‘Moneybags’ Mooney, Paul ‘Saul’ Devine, Brendan ‘Speedy’ Fegan and Brendan ‘Bap’ Campbell, some of the most prominent drug dealers in Belfast. Magee’s naturally sharp business mind immediately noted the ample supply available and limitless demand that existed on the street and in the clubs. Within weeks he was tapping into the market.
The twenty-fifth Summer Olympics commenced in Barcelona on 25 July. Eamonn pretended he didn’t give a fuck, that he wasn’t paying the games any attention. But he sat in Rosapenna Street with Mary, two-year-old Francis and six-month-old Áine and watched every round of it. Three of his closest friends in boxing competed. Flyweight Paul Buttimer and featherweight Paul Griffin lost their first round encounters but Wayne McCullough blasted his way to the bantamweight final where he was defeated 16–8 by the exceptional Cuban Joel Casamayor. Welterweight Michael Carruth went one better than McCullough and claimed Ireland’s first-ever Olympic boxing gold medal when he edged out the formidable Juan Hernández Sierra 13–10. The fifth and final member of the team, heavyweight Paul Douglas, lost a quarter-final to Arnold Vanderlyde in a division in which the legendary Felix Savon marched to the first of his three Olympic golds. Two out of five fighters from a small country like Ireland medalling at the Olympic Games was an outstanding achievement, and while Magee was happy for his teammates, their successes deepened the bitter resentfulness that swallowed him whole when he sobered up enough to let his mind wander into the realm of what could have been. Success breeds success. One member of a team winning creates a momentum that can sweep others along to their own glory. To this day Eamonn is convinced he would have returned from Spain with a medal. The fact that Neil Gough, the man chosen in his place, had fallen at the first hurdle of a pre-qualifying tournament in Italy and failed to make the final Olympic team rubbed further salt into the raw, seeping wound.
Fuck the IABA, he said to himself. Fuck the Ulster Council. Fuck Patsy even. Fuck them all. I’m through with boxing. I’m a drug taker and a drug dealer now.
***
The IRA didn’t like drug dealers operating in their districts. For most of the year they had been monitoring the influx of ecstasy into the working-class nationalist neighbourhoods and gathering intelligence on those responsible. The IRA didn’t like the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation (IPLO) either. Despite the grand title, this small, republican paramilitary group was more involved in drugs, prostitution, racketeering and internal feuds than in any campaign to free the Irish from 800 years of British oppression. They sprang forth from a split in the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in the mid-1980s and by the early 1990s the IRA had decided that their propensity for intra-republican violence, and the fact they operated outside the control of the Provos, meant it would be better for the overall republican movement if the IPLO ceased to exist.
It became known as the IRA’s version of the Nazis’ Night of the Long Knives. A few days before, they publicly warned locals in the areas concerned that a purge would soon take place. Isobel was sitting in the Shamrock with a couple of friends when a pair of balaclava-clad IRA volunteers entered the bar and read a statement to that effect. She had no idea her youngest son was on their list.
The operation was planned for Halloween night so that the sounds of firecrackers exploding would obscure the hollower crack of gunshots. One hundred IRA members were involved across the city and it began when Gerard ‘Jock’ Davison walked into St Matthew’s Social Club in the Short Strand area of central Belfast and assassinated the IPLO’s second-in-command, Sammy Ward. Throughout the night, over a dozen other men were taken out of pubs, clubs and houses across Belfast and received a bullet behind each kneecap. How many of these other victims were actually members of the IPLO is still debated to this day. Authorities declared the shootings the result of an IRA–IPLO feud, and it is true that the Provos soon ordered remaining members of the IPLO to hand over their weapons and leave the country. But the facts suggest it really was primarily a republican drive to eliminate local drug dealing. That the IRA also managed to forcibly disband the already weakened IPLO in one bloody night of violence was, it appears, more an unexpected bonus than the ultimate goal of the synchronised attacks.
Certainly, Eamonn Magee never had any involvement with the IPLO. He was also not in any of the usual drinking dens or houses that the IRA called upon that night as they sought to admonish him for his recent dalliance in the drugs trade. When he woke to the bloody carnage around him, he went straight to his father. Doc attempted to reason with the top rank of the Ardoyne IRA, but his son was guilty as charged and there was nothing Terrence could do to change that. With a heavy heart he told his youngest child that he would have to take a bullet. Eamonn accepted his fate and that decision saved his boxing career. The local OC offered a degree of leniency if Eamonn was waiting for the knock on the door the following evening and promised the bullet would rip through flesh rather than shatter bone in the fighter’s leg.
Eamonn was waiting, sitting in the silence of his mother’s kitchen in Holmdene Gardens, drinking a beer alongside Isobel, Terrence, Noel and Patrick. Mary stayed at home in Rosapenna Street with the two babies. When the rap was heard on the back door at 6 p.m., Eamonn rose on his own and left the house as his mother tried to hide her tears. Solemnly, he walked a pace ahead of his foreboding companion along the alleyway that lies parallel to Holmdene Gardens, took a left onto Berwick Road, crossed Brompton Park and stopped a few paces into a narrow entry that runs alongside his old primary school and into Old Ardoyne. A second man, this one masked, appeared and quietly instructed Eamonn to place his hands on the wall and spread his legs. With no warning, the shooter bent down so the muzzle of the gun was practically touching his quarry’s trouser leg and fired a bullet through the left calf. The two Provos then walked away without another word spoken.
Noel and Terrence heard the shot as they sat in Noel’s car on Holmdene. That was their cue and they immediately took off to the designated meeting point. It was a new Ford Escort, Noel’s pride and joy, so he had meticulously lined the rear seats and floor with plastic bin-liners so none of his brother’s blood would stain the upholstery. For his part, Eamonn had worn a pair of old trousers that he didn’t care would now have a bullet-shaped hole in them. It all added to the macabre sense of surrealism of this prearranged and carefully managed maiming of the youngest member of their family.
By now, Eamonn had limped onto Brompton Park and was waiting by the kerb. Blood flowed freely from the gunshot wound but he was remarkably calm as his father applied pressure with flannels and his brother drove to the Mater Hospital. Shock does tend to numb most physical pains.
The incident had a profound effect on the entire family. Terrence, who had effectively negotiated the shooting of his own son, slipped further into himself and the bottle. Noel and Patrick went back to their families outside the Ardoyne but were tormented by the memories of having to sit idly by when a man came to their family home and took their baby brother away to be shot. Isobel’s heart was broken. She has since forgiven every bad deed Eamonn has ever committed, but his involvement in drugs was the toughest for her to get over. She was also most conscious of the stigma attached to dealing and how attitudes towards a family in the district could be forever altered by one member’s involvement in the life-wrecking trade. Sitting in the back of a black taxi on the way to visit her son the next morning, she listened in silence while the driver, unaware of who his fare was, chatted freely about no cab being willing to pick the drug-dealing scumbags up from the hospitals when they shuffled out on crutches and knee braces. Eamonn’s mother was too hurt to speak up on behalf of her boy that day.
For Eamonn himself, positives could be taken out of the harrowing incident. He didn’t stop using, but he ended his dealing days at the cost of a flesh wound. He looks back now and realises it was a small price to pay to keep breathing. Before the new millennium dawned, Mooney, who let Eamonn off a thousand-pound debt after his shooting, Devine, Fegan and Campbell, had all received bullets from which they never walked away.
Eamonn also reconsidered his decision to never fight again. His dad had put his neck on the line to save his son from a life-altering, crippling injury. Dozens of limbs have been amputated in Belfast after punishment shootings and doctors estimate that one in five suffer some form of permanent debilitating injury. Terrence had argued that Eamonn was one of the best amateur boxers in the country, the pride of the district, and he would one day be a great professional champion. He owed it to his father to get back in the gym.
The Ulster senior finals arrived too soon for him to defend his title, but Patsy was working him hard to ensure they’d be in Dublin for the national championships at the end of January. Magee hadn’t boxed for over half a year, but such was his class you would never have recognised that fact. In a repeat of the 1992 semi-final, he met Greg Ormond in the quarters this time and emerged a comfortable 19–12 victor. Wary of having to fight three times against elite opposition in a short space of time, and unsure of his stamina having been out of action for so long, Eamonn was happy to do just enough to keep himself ahead and out of range until the final bell. In the semi-final he met Fergal Carruth, younger brother of the gold-medal-sporting Michael, and, as big brother looked on in the National Stadium, Fergal was totally outclassed in a 16–8 defeat to Sacred Heart’s finest. Only Billy Walsh stood between Magee and his attempt to retain his crown as the best amateur light welterweight in Ireland, and Eamonn put on a masterclass of aggressive counter-punching to dominate the bout from the opening bell. Midway through the second round, the bullet wound on his calf, which he had carefully bandaged and hidden beneath white socks pulled up to his knee, began to open. As he boxed he could feel the warmth of the blood seeping out and a small red spot on his sock slowly grew as the fight went on. But Eamonn fought with such a focus that night that you could have put a bullet in his other leg and he still wouldn’t have missed a beat. At the end of the third round of a high-scoring fight, his hand was raised aloft in a 29–16 victory.
It was the beginning of a great run for Magee. In February 1993 he knocked out Jamie Scanlon inside forty-five seconds as Team Ireland claimed a famous victory over Great Britain in Dublin. In March he was part of a three-week, eight-state, boxing odyssey around the US, in which he was once again voted fighter of the tour.
But it seemed like Eamonn managed to taint every boxing success abroad with his ill-discipline outside the ring. The Irish team were treated like kings in New York, even given their own float to take part in the famous St Patrick’s Day parade. Eamonn found himself caught short and was forced to urinate off the back as it cruised through the Big Apple, the sheer quantity of beer he had necked prolonging the ordeal for what seemed like three or four blocks. The mayor’s office also provided a high-spec RV, usually reserved for the families of visiting dignitaries, for the boxers to use. This time the whole team were guilty of excess and a famous photo depicts a line of Irish boxing’s bright young hopes pissing up against the mayor’s prized vehicle.
One day Magee, Griffin and John Erskine decided to jump in a yellow cab and instructed the driver to take them to a McDonald’s drive-thru, at the time still a novelty for anyone from Northern Ireland. Not being used to the menu or system, they were taking a little longer than expected to make their order when the car behind decided to hurry them along with a horn blast and bumper-to-bumper jolt. Then, as the boys sat eating in the cab in an empty car park, the same car provocatively parked right beside them and glared in. The taxi driver hurled verbal abuse out the window, but his bark was clearly worse than his bite so Eamonn decided it was up to him to teach today’s lesson. After Magee gave Griffin and Erskine their instructions, the trio bounded out of the cab, pulled open the doors of the neighbouring vehicle, and proceeded to give the occupants a kicking severe enough to ensure they’d have more patience the next time they were in line behind a group of Irish tourists at a fast-food joint.
At the airport at the end of the tour the team were told that Muhammad Ali was sitting around the corner in the terminal and Eamonn shadow-boxed with the Greatest while they waited for their delayed flight and then received a signed prayer card that he still treasures to this day.
His good form continued the following month when he went to Denmark and beat a local favourite 31–4 in as one-sided a contest as you will ever see in the boxing ring. But his ill-discipline also continued. In the 1993 world amateur championships in Tampere, Finland, a fellow boxer was on the other end of Magee’s bare, wrathful fists. Eamonn was hosting a drunken hotel-room party when an inebriated Russian heavyweight thumped on the bedroom door and demanded entry. Once inside, the 200-pounder began throwing his Vodka-soaked weight around and putting others on edge. A few tried to ease the non-English-speaking big man out the door but Eamonn did not have their patience and the Russian was soon knocked unconscious and then dragged out onto the carpeted hallway. The next morning when the lift doors opened as Magee waited to descend to the breakfast room, his heart skipped a beat when his victim gingerly stepped out accompanied by two Finnish policemen. Thankfully the Russian was either too hungover or concussed to recognise his attacker. Or perhaps he was just too embarrassed to admit that a light welterweight had stretched him out.
Through it all, the lure of these alcohol and drugs binges was pulling him back into the life he could not afford to be living. Even away at boxing tournaments, he was soon out in search of dope to smoke and take the edge off the day when the sun went down. On that US trip, for example, he found himself lost in Hell’s Kitchen after taking advice from some less than savoury street characters he approached for directions. On European ventures, he had more success, after striking up a friendship with a like-minded fighter who tended to arrive with his own supply. Eamonn was only too happy to be his most loyal customer.
***
He rattles the letter and numbers off as you might your date of birth.
‘A9918.’
We are driving up the Crumlin Road, passing the Mater Hospital on our right and the grand but derelict courthouse on our left.
‘Sorry?’ I reply, slow to catch Eamonn’s meaning.
‘A9918. My prison number in the Crum,’ he clarifies and, looking out my window, I see the old four-fingered jailhouse next to the hospital.
***
Eamonn Junior had been born in April 1993, but the new arrival did little to calm the wild heart that continued to propel his father towards the pursuit of extremes. In August he was sentenced to three months in prison, suspended for two years, following a conviction for common assault. He had badly beaten an old primary school classmate behind the Shamrock one night in what Eamonn had regarded as a fair fight between two men settling their differences as men should. In November he was pulled over by police for speeding erratically down the Crumlin Road. High as a kite, he refused to provide the arresting officers with a specimen and so resisting the police was added to the charges. He already had a long list of driving offences on his record, including driving with no licence, no insurance, no lights, obstructing the police and providing a false name and address. A raft of fines and disqualifications was the judge’s verdict. Twenty-five years, and many more driving offences later, he still doesn’t have a valid licence and claims the only car accident he ever had was deliberately crashing into a wall in Rosapenna Street in frustration after enduring an earful from Mary for the duration of the journey home.
It was these traffic violations that first put Magee behind bars. ‘Just doing fines,’ is how he terms it, enduring a few days inside in lieu of paying what the state had decreed he owed them. In doing time in Crumlin Road Gaol, he was also following in the footsteps of more illustrious prisoners such as Éamon de Valera, Ian Paisley, Martin McGuinness, Bobby Sands and Michael Stone. Built in the 1840s, it was a grim place with its harsh Victorian austerity basically untouched until late twentieth-century renovations converted it into a now popular tourist attraction. With two men in cramped cells, inadequate and inedible meals, and just one hour of social time per day, prisoners in the Crum certainly knew they were in jail. It begs the question why Eamonn didn’t just find a way to pay the fines, but short-term incarceration was such a normalised state for males from his district that he didn’t bat an eyelid when his time arrived.
During this period he was only sporadically calling in on Mary and the kids, preferring to party all night and sleep off the excesses in another woman’s bed or on the floor of some desolate flat the following day. When he did arrive home, he’d wander about in a drunken fugue state or sit spaced out on ecstasy pills staring at the television until The Hitman and Her came on and he’d bounce about like he was there in the nightclub with Pete Waterman and Michaela Strachan. Mary grew to prefer him staying away at these times, particularly when he became prone to opening the family’s doors to anyone even vaguely connected to his core gang of drink-and-drugs buddies.
Naturally, his boxing suffered. He lost 13–3 to a future professional opponent and world champion, Oktay Urkal, in the 1993 world championships in Finland. He’d never been on the receiving end of such a comprehensive decision. Then a Georgian by the name of Kahaber Chikvinidze beat him in their preliminary stage bout at the European championships in Turkey. He returned to training in time for the 1994 Ulster senior championships but, while he gave it all in the gym as usual, it was never going to be enough to paper over the unseen cracks that a wild lifestyle will leave in a fighter’s armour.
Antrim’s Mark Winters was a good boxer, good enough to win the All-Ireland lightweight title in 1993 and a silver medal in the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Canada. As a pro he would win a British title and mix it with the likes of Ricky Hatton, Junior Witter and Graham Earl. But even if it is not immediately apparent in the comparison of records on pieces of paper, there are distinct levels in boxing and Winters shouldn’t have been able to lay a glove on Magee. Instead, he forced the pace throughout the three rounds of the 1994 Ulster final, bullying a notably lacklustre Magee at times and regularly catching him with shots the Ardoyne man would normally slip in his sleep. By the third stanza, a trickle of blood escaped from Eamonn’s nostril and his mouth hung open as his lungs gasped for oxygen. There were no complaints from Magee or Patsy in his corner when Winters was announced the winner by twelve points to eight.
Half an hour later, Patrick Magee found his brother sitting on the ground with his head in his hands in a dark and empty corridor of the Ulster Hall. Paddy couldn’t see the tears fall but he sensed they were there. He had just watched a shadow of his younger brother bossed about the ring by someone a prime Eamonn could have dealt with one-handed.
‘Are you all right?’ he finally asked.
‘No,’ came the muffled reply. Eamonn then raised his head and gazed up at Patrick through tear-reddened eyes. ‘What the fuck was that out there?’
What could Patrick say? They both knew it was a rhetorical question. That out there was a most public exhibition of a wasted talent, of a man falling apart. Aside from the drug and alcohol abuse that was neutralising the God-given physical gifts he was born with, there was a constant, sneering voice in his head that prevented him from committing to a path and trusting where it led. You should have gone to the Olympics, the voice said. You’d have won a medal, it teased. You ought to be a pro making millions and fighting in stadiums rather than this amateur shite in front of a couple of hundred in the Ulster Hall.
Patsy phoned him a week later. ‘The Ulster Council have called for a box-off between you and Winters to see who goes to the Commonwealth Games,’ he relayed.
‘Fuck off,’ Eamonn immediately replied. ‘He won, he’s Ulster champion, he goes.’
‘I thought you’d say that,’ Patsy sighed. ‘Okay son, I’ll be round to pick you up tomorrow morning. I’ve lined up some sparring for you across town so we can make sure we’re ready for the All-Irelands.’
‘All right, Patsy.’
The next day Patsy was met at the door by one of Eamonn’s heavy-drinking pals. It was a bad sign but he was invited into the living room and told that Eamonn was just getting ready and would be down in a minute.
‘Can I get you a glass of water, mister?’ he was asked in a suspiciously and comically polite tone by his startled and drunken host, who was still clearly trying to get a handle on the situation.
‘I’m not a fucking invalid,’ Patsy retorted as his notoriously brittle patience snapped. ‘I know where the bloody taps are, I’ll get it myself.’
He rose and walked to the kitchen but when he pushed open the door, his heart sank at the sound of the empty beer cans scraping across the linoleum floor. It then almost broke when he saw a semi-conscious Eamonn lying amongst the remains of an all-nighter in a drunken stupor.
‘That’s it,’ Patsy said with a sad shake of his head. ‘We’re through, son.’
And so they were. The next time Eamonn entered the ring it would be as a bare-chested professional, twenty-one months later.