The Man Who Was Never Knocked Down: The Life of Boxer Seán Mannion
246
The Man Who Was Never Knocked Down: The Life of Boxer Seán Mannion
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Overview
In 1977, looking to fulfill a dream as a pro boxer, 17-year-old Seán Mannion flew into Boston from Ireland, straight into a world of gun smugglers, drug dealers, and the world’s best boxers. By 1983, Mannion was ranked the number one US light middleweight boxer.
In The Man Who Was Never Knocked Down: The Life of Boxer Seán Mannion, Rónán Mac Con Iomaire recounts Mannion’s struggles and triumphs in and out of the ring. Despite dubious management and the attention of the Boston Irish Mafia, Mannion quickly climbed his way up from the lower rungs of one of the most competitive weight divisions in boxing history. This biography is more than a boxing story; it’s a personal story that also intersects with notorious crime figures, world-class fighters, and several pivotal moments in history.
Featuring the likes of Micky Ward, Pat Nee, Marty Walsh, and Kevin Cullen, The Man Who Was Never Knocked Down is provides an inside perspective on the boxer, the fighting culture of his era, and on 1980s South Boston.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781538110614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 246 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BIRTH, DEATH
Teresa Mannion was not a violent woman. Yet violence stalked her like a shadow from the moment she was born.
Seán Mannion's mother was born in the South Dock area of inner-city Dublin on Holy Thursday, 1916. Four days later, Patrick Pearse stood on the steps of the nearby General Post Office and read out the Proclamation of Independence. His words proclaimed an uprising in the city that ultimately laid the foundation for the creation of the Irish Republic, but it was an uprising uncompromisingly crushed by the British army. Within six days the Easter Rising was over, 450 people killed, 2,614 injured, and nine missing.
Meanwhile, in 4 Brady's Court, Mary McGrath lay in bed after an extremely arduous birth, her newborn daughter, Teresa, beside her, the roar of battle all around. At 39 years of age, Mary had found the delivery considerably more difficult than the birth of her previous seven children.
Her husband, John, continued to work loading and unloading cargo ships on the quays despite his wife's poor health, despite the fighting all around him. From the banks of the river Liffey, he could see the gunship Helga ploughing her way menacingly up and down through gray-black waters, launching shells into a decaying city. Decay became destruction.
Determined to suppress any future attempts at revolution, troops poured into Dublin from across the Irish Sea. There were random arrests. Random searches. Random shootings. In early May, a squad of soldiers burst into Mary and John McGrath's home. Unable to get up from bed, Mary was dragged to the ground. When John returned home that evening, he found his wife dead on the floor, his newborn daughter, Teresa, crying by her side.
Unable to cope with the weight of raising a daughter on his own, John McGrath sent his infant daughter west to his home village of Ros Dumhach on the Atlantic coast of Mayo, where Teresa was raised by her aunt.
* * *
Less than 100 miles down the coast from Ros Dumhach, Teresa McGrath's future husband was growing up in another isolated village on the west coast of Ireland. Like most of his peers, Peaitín Tom Mannion left home at a young age, looking for a better life in the United States.
That's where he was when he decided that he was going to the fight. Another low-paid Irish immigrant working on another Boston building site, Peaitín had been so enthralled by the 1926 heavyweight world title fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey that he decided to travel the 1,600 miles west to Chicago to witness the rematch.
The first fight had been an epic. A crowd of 120,727, the biggest in boxing history, stood in the pouring rain for 10 rounds to watch Gene Tunney give the heavyweight champion of the world a boxing lesson. Jack Dempsey lost his belt, and there was always going to be a rematch.
A year later, the two faced each other again, this time in Soldier's Field in Chicago. With a gate of $2.6 million, Tunney vs. Dempsey II was another record-breaker, but the fight took its place in boxing history for more than just the takings. It became known as the Battle of the Long Count.
For the first six rounds, Gene Tunney, whose parents came from Mayo in Ireland, was comfortably in control of the ring. In the seventh, however, Dempsey caught Tunney on the chin with four consecutive punches, hitting him a further four times before the champion slid off the ropes and onto the canvas. For the first time in his professional boxing career, Tunney had been floored. It's what followed that ensured that the fight is still being discussed to this day.
With the Queensbury Rules still being refined in the 1920s, new regulations had just been put in place before the Dempsey/Tunney fight. Boxers now had to retreat to a neutral corner before the referee could start his KO count. On the night of September 22, 1927, Jack Dempsey either forgot or ignored the new rule and stood above Tunney after knocking him out. The referee couldn't start the count until Dempsey went to the neutral corner and, by the time he did, Gene Tunney had already spent five seconds on the floor. Dave Barry had counted to nine by the time Tunney got up, having spent a total of 14 seconds on the canvas.
He went on to knock down Jack Dempsey in the next round, and although Dempsey didn't stay down, Tunney went on to win the fight by unanimous decision. Jack Dempsey never fought again.
Years later, by an open fire in Cill Bhriocáin, Ros Muc, a young Seán Mannion listened, hypnotized, to his father recount his witnessing of the Battle of the Long Count.
* * *
A few hundred yards down Snámh Bó road in Ros Muc is a small cottage with red windows and a red door. The thatch roof it once wore has since been replaced by corrugated zinc. Behind a whitewashed stone wall, rhododendron bushes and brambles compete to escape a feral garden.
The house, unoccupied, could easily be mistaken for a small vacation cottage, a refuge in wild isolated Ros Muc for a well-to-do couple from Dublin. But this cottage wasn't built as a vacation home. This was Peaitín Mannion's first home, built after fleeing from London with his new wife, Teresa McGrath, in 1939.
The Great Depression's decimation of the U.S. economy led to Peaitín crossing the Atlantic again in 1930, leaving Boston to settle into a new life in Britain. Another continent, another country, another building site. In London, he met Teresa, a young woman born in Dublin but, like himself, raised on the wild Atlantic coast of Ireland.
If Peaitín, as a construction laborer, held the stereotypical Irishman's job in 1930s London, Teresa fulfilled the employment stereotype on the flip-side of the gender coin. When she met her husband-to-be, she was employed as a cleaner and nanny by an upper-class family in central London.
By 1938, Teresa and Peaitín had married and had named their first child Mary, after Teresa's mother. It wasn't long, however, before the shadow of war cast a pall once more over Teresa's life. On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland left Britain with little choice but to go to war. Fearful of air attacks on London, authorities put in place Operation Pied Piper, a plan to relocate children from the city to other locations around England. When Teresa and Peaitín found out that their child was to be taken from them and relocated outside London, they took an overnight train across the country to Holyhead in northwest Wales and boarded a ferry to Ireland.
When the young couple arrived in Ros Muc, they moved into Peaitín's parents' home in the townland of Cill Bhriocáin. Peaitín's mother, Eileen, couldn't speak a word of English, and her newly acquainted daughter-in-law, Teresa, couldn't speak Irish. She soon learned the local language, however.
With Teresa expecting a second child, Peaitín realized they couldn't stay in the crowded family home much longer, and so he built the small house with the red windows and the red door on Snámh Bó road. The two-bedroom house soon filled up, Teresa Mannion conceiving 12 children. On October 6, 1956, she gave birth to Seán Mannion. Six pounds, three ounces, a white head of hair, and unusually large hands for a newborn baby.
When Seán was three years old, the family moved from the small house in Snámh Bó to the Mannion family house in Cill Bhriocáin. Seán doesn't recall anything from his time in Snámh Bó except for the day they moved, himself and his sister, Josie, running beside the donkey cart that carried all their belongings for the short half-mile journey up the road.
Seán's childhood in Ros Muc was little different from anyone else's in the village, but it was a childhood barely recognizable today. Among his pastimes, he and his friends would visit Cill Bhriocáin graveyard, examining headstones to see where the dead had originally come from. They would move entire haystacks from one field to another, simply to infuriate the local bachelor farmers. But there was no question about what the main pastime growing up in Ros Muc was.
"We used to box in much the same way that other kids played football," Seán said. "We used to spar in the fields, spar on the street, anywhere we could.
"Myself and the other boys used to spar in the Garraí Gamhna [a high-walled field that held stray livestock]. It was carnage in the Garraí Gamhna, we would spend hours sparring there until a grownup came around to tell us we had enough. That was our round. If no one came, we just kept on going."
Seán's brother, Paddy, worked in the local weaving factory, and he and his workmates chipped in and bought a pair of boxing gloves between them. Every weekend, staff members took turns to bring home the coveted gloves. Paddy's turn was a highlight in the Mannion household. Some years later, the eldest brother in the family, Tommy, sent two pairs of gloves home from Boston to his youngest siblings, Seán and Colm. There was little more than 18 months between the two.
"Colm and I were constantly boxing. In fact, Colm was probably a better boxer than I was but he didn't show the same interest. I remember getting mad one day when my father was commentating on my boxing style while we were sparring outside the house, and in my anger, I punched Colm straight on the nose and made him cry.
"I was about 11 years old and I still remember it to this day. It still hurts when I think about it. I threw away the gloves and started crying myself because Colm was crying. I was mad at my father. Even so, we had the gloves back on the following night."
It was a busy time in the Mannion household. Even though six siblings had moved out of the house by the early sixties, Teresa was still attending to eight men. She had four sons at home, Seán, Colm, Briocán, and Paddy, along with her husband and two of his brothers, Tomáisín and Cóilín. Peaitín then received word from the United States that another brother of his, Michaelín, had had a stroke and had been checked into a nursing home. No brother of his was going to spend his final days in a nursing home, said Peaitín, and he traveled to the States to bring his ailing brother home to Cill Bhriocáin.
When summer came, there were even more staying in the five-bedroom house. Teenage students, mostly from Dublin, would travel to Ros Muc to learn Irish. Twelve students used to stay with the Mannions, and Seán and his brothers mostly got on well with them. One day, with the students away on a bus trip, Seán borrowed one of their bicycles. When the owner returned and found out that his bike had been touring Ros Muc without him, he tracked down Seán, gave him a few kicks and told him never to touch his bike again. Seán, furious, went to his father to complain.
"Don't come to me telling me that someone hit you," said Peaitín. "Why didn't you hit him back?"
"I can do that?" asked Seán.
"Of course you can. Why couldn't you?"
Seán went outside and found the teenage bike owner. The young Dubliner was taken aback when the smaller boy from Ros Muc started punching him. The student was about three years older than Seán, and even though he was stronger, young Mannion showed a prophetic tenacity.
"It took me a while, but I got the better of him in the end."
* * *
The late sixties and early seventies bore witness to one of those golden eras that tend to crop up in boxing every once in a while. In the heavyweight division alone, Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and Floyd Patterson were at the peak of their powers. This extraordinary age in boxing was taking place in the United States and, while Irish boxing fans had traditionally gravitated toward the British sporting scene, a combination of emigration and television meant New York was closer to Ros Muc at that time than London.
During a wet January night in 1968, a rerun of a Muhammad Ali fight was being shown on Irish TV. In Ros Muc, Seán and Colm were sparring in the kitchen, imitating their hero on television. They were paying little attention to the actual fight, more interested in their own scrap, and the noise they were making was driving their parents crazy.
"For the love of God, will you two stop, or at least be quiet," shouted Peaitín at them.
But the two tiny boxers paid little attention to the living-room referee. On TV, Ali began to get the upper hand. It was a more evenly contested fight in Ros Muc.
Suddenly, on top of all the commotion, Paddy and Briocán burst into the house, both breathless, both with the same story.
"Michael Choilmín is starting a boxing club in the old school on Tuesday."
"If that's so," said Peaitín, looking over at his two youngest sons, both drenched in sweat, both wearing one oversized boxing glove each, "you two are definitely signing up."
CHAPTER 2ROS MUC
When Seán Mannion walked into the ring in Madison Square Garden on October 19, 1984, he had one word written on his waistband.
Rosmuc.
Around the globe, millions of boxing fans sat in front of televisions, waiting. In Jamaica and Ireland, they waited for Mannion vs. McCallum. In the United States and Syria, they waited for Hagler vs. Hamsho. But it was the same question on everyone's lips, regardless of where they were watching.
"Rosmuc?"
* * *
Sixty kilometers west of Galway city, on the cliff edge of Europe, is the village of Ros Muc. The first thing that strikes you when you get there is the poverty. Poverty of land, poverty of resources, poverty of jobs. Ireland's economic Celtic Tiger boom never made it to Ros Muc. The subsequent crash was barely noticed.
Driving through the area, you will see more local authority housing than in other rural areas. You will see more men on bicycles, not as a sport but as a necessary mode of rural transport. You will see abandoned factories, boarded-up houses. This was the Ros Muc that spawned Seán Mannion.
Right along the west coast of Ireland, from Cape Clear off the coast of Cork to the Rosguill Peninsula of Donegal, small pockets of Irish-language speaking areas survive among the mostly monolingual English-speaking majority. These Gaeltacht areas, as they are known, have maintained their linguistic heritage mostly through geographical accident. These are areas that have been too remote for industrial development to take hold, economically and culturally isolated from the rest of Ireland. Areas where language and poverty have interdependently coexisted. Areas like Ros Muc.
To say that Ros Muc is economically poorer than any other Gaeltacht area in the country is no exaggeration. It's also no exaggeration, or coincidence, to suggest that Ros Muc is linguistically richer than any other Gaeltacht area. It is a village that has been defined by want and lack over the years. A lack of jobs, clean running water, infrastructure. Ros Muc's deprivation can be more easily seen in the fact that there are only three long-term businesses in a village of 500 people. Two pubs and a shop.
Broadcaster and writer Prionsias Mac Aonghusa wrote that the area had reason to complain about every Irish government since the foundation of the Irish State in 1923. Despite Ros Muc being the strongest and purest Irish-speaking area in the country, he wrote, it was the area to have received least economic support from the state.
The association with poverty is nothing new for Ros Muc. In his 1943 autobiography, Mise [Me], the revolutionary Colm Ó Gaora wrote of his home village that it was a place where the impoverished drank their tea black and that many households had never owned a milking cow, a true measure of destitution in early twentieth-century Connemara. According to writer Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, it was one of the poorest places in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.
Ros Muc has never been able to escape the shadow of poverty. When the Irish Times published a study comparing unemployment rates in Gaeltacht villages in 1996, Ros Muc's was 48 percent, over three times that of other neighboring Gaeltacht villages. When populations in Gaeltacht areas increased from 1981 to 1996, the population in Ros Muc actually fell by a staggering 25 percent.
It's little wonder, then, that when the world looks for impoverished Ireland, it settles on the small stony peninsula on its far-western shores. When the New York Times sought to analyze in 1991 the impact of the Maastricht Treaty on Ireland, they turned to Ros Muc:
The people in this wind-whipped village on the bleak western rim of Europe are used to the hard life. They wrestle existence out of a place where big rocks seem to grow overnight in the fields and the soil is thin and poor, the sheep scrawny. A few miles out along an inlet, the Atlantic Ocean yields seaweed and mackerel for the few who have boats ...
"There's a huge lack of confidence among the young people here," said Thomas O'Malley, who keeps a large shop in Ros Muc. "They feel that if anybody tries to haul himself up, he'll always be beaten back down again."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
PREFACE, ix,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xiii,
1 BIRTH, DEATH, 1,
2 ROS MUC, 7,
3 PALE BOY, 12,
4 BOSTON, IRELAND, 24,
5 THE SOUTHPAW, 33,
6 THE MOB, 41,
7 A NEW STAR, 50,
8 DRINK, 59,
9 EL NINO, 70,
10 THE LAWYER, 83,
11 RESURRECTION, 96,
12 THE FOUR KINGS, 105,
13 THE DEAL, 117,
14 BORSCHT, 126,
15 THE FIGHT, 136,
16 ROCKY ROS MUC, 153,
17 THE SPLIT, 159,
18 ANGELO, 165,
19 FINISHING TOGETHER, 176,
EPILOGUE, 187,
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 191,
INDEX, 203,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 213,