Christina’s Pals: An Irishman’s Diary about the making of a champion boxer

The biggest pay-day of my pre-adult working career was thanks to a greyhound called Christina’s Pal, which for a period in late 1975, I was under contract to walk daily.

I’ll come back to his name shortly. But first I must explain that the financial part of my contract was entirely performance-related – I got paid only if we won.

On the other hand, there was an attractive support package, including free entry to the dog tracks at Dundalk and Mullingar, plus a mineral and a bag of crisps per meeting.

Earnings

Potential earnings in the event of victory, meanwhile, were dizzying. I was promised £10 at a time when typical race prizes were only twice that. But the dog’s owner, my neighbour

Jim Marks

, was trading on potential too.

Rather than compete with big trainers, his strategy was to find a pup that might win first time out, and could then be sold.

Christina’s Pal had yet to race. We were preparing for his debut.

I walked him morning and evening for three weeks. Sometimes, before school, we would also take him and another greyhound to the golf course, where I would sprint up the fairway of a par 5 and, when I had a 400-yard start, Jim would release the dogs after me. It sounds worse than it was.

We must also have taken Christina’s Pal out to Wildgoose Lodge, a place synonymous with a 19th-century massacre (now the subject a film), but then also the site of a “schooling” track, where greyhounds were taught to chase an electric hare over race distance, with accurate timing provided for owners hoping to massacre the bookies.

Nothing was left to chance. On the big night, at Mullingar, I even walked the dog in the pre-race parade and personally installed him in trap one.

It was a murky sport and I didn’t want anyone giving him a mineral and a bag of crisps beforehand.

Tayto

The preparations paid off. He led from trap to line and won in 31.97 seconds.  It would remain the most lucrative half-minute of my life for at least a decade.

Enjoying my coke and Tayto in the bar, while counting banknotes, I was suddenly a big shot. I felt like blowing smoke rings – and it being the 1970s, I probably could have, from passive inhalation.

The dog was duly sold, undefeated, for 450 guineas. But to get back to his name, it had been given to him in honour of Jim’s first-born baby, a dark-haired little thing who was still in a pram then and blissfully unaware of her celebrity.

She has grown a bit in the intervening years, although even today, remains diminutive, tipping the scales at 52kg (about 1.7 greyhounds). I know this because she herself is now a sports star.

And 52kg will be her limit this December when she enters a ring at the National Stadium to fight for a World Super Flyweight boxing title.

Christina McMahon, as she is these days, has already enjoyed a stellar career.

She was a world-champion kickboxer in her 20s before turning to the gloves-only version, where she was unbeaten when having to retire at 35 under the amateur game’s then rules.

After that, there was nowhere to go but professional boxing, which for murkiness makes 1970s greyhound racing look like Presbyterian lawn bowls. Fights are few for women and prizes negligible but politics is everywhere. Despite this, and frequently having to go above her weight to find willing opponents, she was unbeaten until last year, in the process picking up an "interim" world title in Zambia.

She was only offered that fight at short notice, after the one she had trained for (in Berlin) fell through. And she would surely not have gotten the chance had her overconfident opponents suspected she could win. Since then, she has fought another title fight against a Mexican, in Mexico, where – to use the technical boxing term – she was "robbed". The campaign for a rematch from the World Boxing Council continues.

For now, she has been offered a shot by the rival World Boxing Association, against the champion from Peru, on December 3rd. It's a big challenge. But for a change, this time, she'll be fighting at home.

She will also be at her own weight. And there is at least one other good omen, I hope to be making my debut appearance in her audience that night, in the role of a two-legged Christina’s Pal.