INTERVIEW - BERNARD DUNNE: TOM HUMPHRIESvisits the Dubliner in Belfast as he prepares for his upcoming world title fight, the culmination of a lifelong ambition.
HARRY’S HOUSE looks down over Belfast, a hard-bitten boxing town if ever there was one. The northern sky is winter smudged. There are two dogs out front and the huddled streets of west Belfast beyond. The Kings Hall is visible somewhere out there between the floodlight gantries of Casement Park and the hulking signature cranes of the shipyards.
When Bernard Dunne runs the old streets in the morning he thinks to himself about what a hilly town Belfast is. “All the hills somehow go upwards,” he laughs “they’ve no downhills. Belfast! That could be the motto for this city. Where every hill is up.”
Funny. As much as he is a Dublin boxer he is also of Belfast. He has been coming here since he was 16, absorbing the wisdom of his friend and coach Harry Hawkins, sparring a million rounds in the Holy Trinity Club down in Norglen Gardens, fitting into this house and this family and this city. A lot of what he is was made in the CIÉ club in Inchicore and in training with his dad, Brendan. Some more was installed in the Wild Card gym on Hollywood and Vine but most of it, the hard-core and the concrete, was poured into him here in Belfast by Harry Hawkins and the Holy Trinity club.
And here, after the great fall, he has been put back together again. Here after the fists of a little-known Spaniard materialised into his life like two swift wrecking balls, he has returned to doing what he has always done, but he has set about doing it better.
He does his early morning weights session before the traffic has really began to crust the M1 into the city. Home then for a cup of tea and some porridge and a few slivers of pineapple.
On the Falls Road the winos have shuddered awake by mid-morning and with freighted breath they call gruff greetings to him as he runs. He catches the words as a doppler effect as he passes “How’s about ye Bernard son ya . . .” and he pumps onwards to Falls Park. On the way back, as if all animation has been suspended for his benefit, they finish their sentences for him “. . . gonna win son?” And he makes his way home to Harry’s house, shadow boxes a little and hits the shower again.
Suspended animation? You throw a few questions to warm him up, see if his guard is down. Then try to rock him. August 25th, 2007. Bernard Dunne who has never been beaten on Irish soil as an amateur or as a pro in a career stretching back to his first bout as a six-year-old in a draughty hall up in Drogheda, Bernard Dunne who has filled the Point Depot yet again, lands on the seat of his britches courtesy of a Senor Kiko Martinez. Once, twice and then three times – staying there after 86 seconds when the ref waved it off and put his career into suspended animation. What the hell Bernard? He is sitting in an armchair now in the livingroom of his coach Harry Hawkins. The remnants of his mid-morning repast, a rice cake with a thin smear of peanut putter are being licked from his lips.
He looks at you. His blue eyes are so deep-set and intense that he could pass for a serial killer. He is preparing now for a world title fight and you want to talk about Kiko Martinez planting him three times in half a round? Boom! Boom! Boom! Goodnight!
This is what you really want to talk about? Now? You are about to get your own gloves up. Tell him that Kiko Martinez is where a lot of people got off the magic carpet ride, variously wishing Bernard Dunne well but deciding he was never going to do it.
Martinez, not a tomato can but not a fighter for the ages, was beaten in his first defence the following March. And anyway there is a plain old-fashioned curiosity about the poignant business of a boxer in defeat. It takes so much to get into the squared circle. What is it like being picked up off it? He’s still staring. His eyes are burning. He breaks into a grin. Finally.
“Hey! It was 86 seconds, okay! Listen the only thing hurt that night was my pride. You come out. Full house, people roaring. And I got caught cold. I got it wrong. He caught me early on and instead of backpedalling and working my way into a fight I went chasing him. It was stupid. And fair play to him he just picked me off.”
It must have hurt more though. People had barely sat down. Then they were streaming out. Shaking their heads. Suddenly he was just another guy who could have been a contender.
Even those guys have to get up in the mornings and look the future in the eye.
“Dublin and Kerry were playing the next day in Croker. My friends called for me in the morning like they usually would. Old friends. I went down and somebody said ‘good to see you on your feet for a change.’ And that was the end of it. There wasn’t any feeling sorry for myself. Yeah the phone stopped ringing, you notice that and it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger at people that didn’t call anymore because you always know it’s you, your family and those closest to you. If you’re okay and they are okay, you can deal with all the rest.”
He never thought about quitting. He never felt he had become a bad boxer in the space of 86 seconds. He never felt the world had turned against him. He follows a trade that is blotched by braggarts but which is really a living for men of deep humility. When you can get knocked down three times on live TV with the city, the family and the friends watching, you need an acute sense of who you are to go to Croke Park the next day and enjoy the Dubs with 82,000 other people.
And that is why Bernard Dunne is worth coming back to, why his fortunes are worth following. Nothing separates him from his audience apart from the fact that Dunne is the one getting hit and landing the blows.
When it is all finished, no matter how things go, he won’t have enough money to retire, so he plans on becoming a member of the Dublin Fire Brigade.
HE HAS done the exams and the aptitude tests and he will wait until his panel is summoned and then he could be the fella who rescues your cat or helps you as you are lifted into the ambulance tender. There is something right about the fit there, something which makes him even more integral to the fabric of the city.
Early on the following week after Martinez had blown over him, he sat down with his dad and with Harry and with a few people who were close and talked. The mood wasn’t funereal or glum. It was a case of mapping a slightly adjusted future, making a revised survey of how the next few years would look. What had gone wrong was evident. As Freddie Roche, his old US coach had said, Bernard had the tendency to be a bit “chinny” early in a fight. There was a flaw. It had been duly exposed. They would fix it.
He looks at you quizzically when you ask him if news that he had secured his future as a fire brigade man before the Martinez bout caused anybody to ask questions about his commitment to boxing. He stares at you again.
You haven’t been listening, have you? He was five when he went to the gym first. Six when he fought first, 23 years have passed . . . He does three training sessions a day most days now, though he is cutting back on the weights now. He eats less than a bird and spends every weekday every week away from Pamela and his beloved children. His body is an engine handed over to a pit full of nutritionists, trainers and conditioning coaches. Listen, listen. He gave up tickets for Liverpool and Real Madrid. If you know Bernard Dunne – best day in longest time? On Kop, United v Liverpool. Robbie Keane name checks him in an interview in the match programme and Pool beat the Mancs 2-1 – you know that giving up those tickets is like parting with a kidney.
You want to know if people asked about his commitment. He’s living the life that he loves and loving the life that he lives. Commitment? It isn’t even moot.
He changed things but he didn’t look back. You wonder if staring at the roof of the Point Depot he didn’t think back to the days of comparative anonymity in the US, days when he could practise his trade without the hopes of an island pressing down on him and without the forces of spin and hype knocking him off kilter. He shakes his head.
“It’s not just boxing,” he says. “In my own life, my personal life, every aspect of what I am doing, I am happy. A whole lot of things go into being happy as a boxer. Not just people thinking you are in the right place. What makes America the right place? In-house sparring at the end of the day is the biggest difference. Here I fly my sparring partners in. There I sparred with world champions in the gym. You can’t get that here, but you can’t get it many places. You get the next level though. That’s the only major difference. Being happy more than makes up for that.”
So he and Harry, from this house, have worked out how to give him all that is best and most necessary. Two nutritionists, Blie Shinnors and Jason Kenny, come to him from Limerick on a weekly basis and inspect his food diaries. They have given him a knowledge now of what his body is needing at any given time, what it is doing with various food types and he knows that making the 8 stone 10 pound limit is going to be easier than ever before.
(So far today, a day that will see him train three times, he has had that bowl of porridge, that pineapple and the rice cake with peanut butter. Later he’ll have an egg, some scrambled egg maybe, around three o’clock before a two -hour boxing session down in Norglen. After, a fillet of fish probably. Maybe steak or a bit of chicken and veg. And before bed a cup of tea and a rice cake with cottage cheese.)
He has the nutritionists and he has the input of strength and conditioning specialist Mike McGurn who had a stint working with the Irish rugby team. And in a hotel down the road he stores his sparring partners.
IT’S HARD making a living as a boxer and Hunky Dory Fight Nights in the Point Depot are granted to comparatively few practitioners. So decent fighters between bouts will come and spar for money. So he has been sparring with Alberto Servidei, an Italian who is undefeated in 28 pro fights and latterly with William Gonzalez of Nicaragua. Servidei has the ability to mimic the style of upcoming opponents. Gonazalez is not only a southpaw replica of upcoming opponent Ricardo Cordoba but fought him back in 2005.
And on Saturday, March 21st, Bernard Dunne will take his finally tuned body and put it on the line again, test it to the limit one more time. A world title bout. Irresistible. It’s something in the blood, he says, something he loves. Early last month he marked his 29th birthday. This is his prime. He wants to enjoy this time. And he wants to have the wisdom to know when it is over and when it is time do something else.
He has fought three times since the Martinez upset, outclassing three moderate South Americans in low-key bouts. And so, enter Ricardo Cordoba a doughty southpaw scrapper from Santa Marta, Panama, whose 37-bout career has brought him to this pinnacle, defending the WBA Super Bantamweight title in Dublin. He looks formidable until you notice that his record includes just three tenuous excursions outside of Panama.
Once to Thailand four years ago where he lost an epic 12-round slugfest to Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym and twice since to Germany where he had draws in two fights for the bantam weight title with the Ukrainian belt holder Wladimir Sidarenko.
“This,” says Bernard “is what my life has been leading up to.” He talks about the old days, trips to places like Minsk or Belarus to wear Irish singlets, all the mornings heading out the door at 7am for training runs before school, all the nights of doing two hours in the CIE gym before cracking a book open for homework. The leaving. The coming home. The trips he has bene making to this house and this town since he was 16. How Harry and Noreen and Claire, Kevin and Terence just grew to be part of his family and he to be part of theirs. The good days. The bad ones. You see his point.
When he fought Martinez those 86 seconds looked as if they would be the vent which divided his life in two. The life before, with its dreams and it’s upward ascent. The life after, with its humdrum reality. But Cordoba offers a new dividing line, a point on the horizon, a new start.
First fight as a six-year-old? In Drogheda. All the way to here. You wonder does he remember the first decent punch he took. He bursts out laughing. “I’ve had so many decent smacks I can’t even remember the last one!” That’s Bernard Dunne. Irrepressible and looking forward always. It carries you with it this immense hope he has, carries you along and by the time you step out into the Belfast air you can’t remember the last smacks you saw him take either.
