LOCKER ROOM:Bernard Dunne stood up to a great test when he survived a pummelling to come back fighting harder and stronger, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

THERE IS something very heartwarming and very endearing about Bernard Dunne and his long walk to this week, when he can wake up and remember he is world champion. And there is a timeliness to his emergence or re-emergence that is fascinating. Boxing isn’t really a sport for the good times and its best practitioners seems to come from places and backgrounds that add a bit of edge to their hunger.

Among the smaller men, where the hitting is fierce and frequent, central and South Americans have come to crowd the centre of the stage. Saturday night’s beaten foe Ricardo Cordoba had seldom fought outside his native Panama but a breezy sense of confidence about beating Dunne, and the possibility of a more than decent payday for visiting Dublin, was enough to lure him to Europe. After that Dunne’s heroics did the rest.

There were some of us who thought that Dunne was rudely placed on the seat of his pants after 86 seconds through the offices of Kiko Martinez back in August 2007, placed on the canvas not once, not twice but three times. We thought it was all over.

What happened that night was as humiliating a setback as anybody in the achingly lonely sport of boxing has ever received. You’re there in front of your people and your family and your city and you don’t take a beating, you take a brief pummelling which raises a million questions about you.

Dunne says it never occurred to him but for most of us walking away and hiding under a large rock would have been the easiest option.

I can’t remember a more stark reminder that boxing – for all its silly panto trappings like trash talking, preening and opponents staring at each other like schoolboys in the yard – is the sport which most resembles a tightrope walk with no net beneath. Even the most civilised boxing man must strut and behave not just as if he is unafraid, but as if he is a stranger to the very concept of fear. That little bit of macho is as important as a cup and a gumshield when you duck between the ropes.

But to hit the deck three times in your own livingroom, that is being stripped naked. It is a test of the human being you are. Dunne got up and went to Croke Park with his friends the next day. He sat down and told those around him that he was happy to do this again, to take the risk of tumbling from the high rope once more.

A few years ago, before that defeat became a reality, he considered a famous and beautiful piece of journalism by Gay Talese, who wrote one of the greatest sports pieces ever, an article about Floyd Patterson, called The Loser.

Talese’s work was a biopsy of fear. When Floyd Patterson lost to Sonny Liston all those years ago that sense of humiliation just mugged him. Patterson left his dressingroom in disguise. He drove 30 hours from Chicago to New York still wearing his disguise and then boarded a plane to Spain. Still in disguise. He booked into a Madrid hotel under the name Aaron Watson and stayed hidden there for a week. That sense of humiliation haunts every fighter.

Everyone of us can understand that occasional yearning for disguise and escape. I get it every time I write about rugby.

“It’s a confidence sport,” he said “ It may come across as cocky, but you have to bring that into the ring. It’s about hurt in there. I have to be confident. Some people call it cocky.”

“I have been defeated as an amateur,” says Dunne. “There’s an embarrassment. You go home to the family and friends. I’m from a traditional boxing family. My ma’s brother Eddie Hayden was a middleweight champion. Everyone in Neilstown always knew what I did. Yeah, there’s that flip side when you don’t win. I’ve never been beaten here in Ireland. Always on foreign soil when I lost as an amateur. If there’s a little fear, that’s it.”

There was a little fear and it broke through his psyche like water through dam. And he stood up and got on with life. What a boxer does is fundamentally different from anything we celebrate in a team sport. Colleagues who share the workload buttress us when we need to find courage. Dunne has a team who tune his engine as if he is a Formula One car, but when it comes down to Saturday nights and the lights dip, he is as alone as it is possible to be in the world of sport.

But that is the man he is. He was 21 when he left Neilstown and flew to Los Angeles on his own one November with no certain picture in his mind of where he would stay or precisely where he would go.

Steve Collins once said of his own apprenticeship in Boston that if he had wanted to learn opera he would have gone to Milan. You want to learn how to box, you go Stateside. Dunne fetched up in Burbank in the Wild Card gym, home of champions and celebrities. He bust his gut from there on. An hour in on the bus from Santa Monica every morning, staring out the window all the way to avoid eye contact with the crazies. Wondering if he wasn’t a crazier diamond then the rest of them anyway.

Everything about the Wild Card was a different world. James Toney. Israel Vasquez, Manny Pacquiao. Johnny Tapia. And the characters straight out of FX Toole’s short stories. Guys like the trainer Macka Foley, a gravel-voiced old marine with fight in his blood. Or Justin Fortune, his own trainer, an old Aussie heavyweight who was once fed as grist to Lennox Lewis.

Celebs. Frank Stallone. John Travolta. Cuba Gooding Junior. Mario Lopez. Denzel Washington. Hilary Swank.

There was enough there to live off for a lifetime. Not in dollars and sense, but in the eternal currency of bullshit. He could have come home and yucked it up, sold his vibrant personality to RTÉ for commentary work, been the archetypal guy with a good future behind him. He would have had some great tales for the grandchildren.

But this was a guy who had Setanta piped into the house, who sat down for every Dubs game and every Ireland match as if they were religious feast days. He’d get home early in the afternoons and listen to the Dublin radio stations on the internet, read the Irish papers. A Tricolour hung from the apartment window.

He wanted to be a great Irish boxer. On Saturday it happened. The cliche suggests that a dream came true. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a work goal and a life goal. Dreams are too ethereal, too much like soapy bubbles floating lazily across our consciousness.

Dunne, who began boxing at five and made just about every sacrifice it is possible to make to the trade, became the conclusive proof that the world is inherited not by the meek but by those with the guts and courage to keep placing one foot in front of the other day after day after day.

On a weekend when we must genuflect to heroics in every corner of Irish sports, Dunne gave us something to hang onto as we lurch into the bad times.

Perhaps, that’s the role of boxing in our culture, a hardscrabble sport that comes to the fore when times get hard. Let’s get ready to rumble.