George Kimball America at LargeWhen Howard Eastman walked into the King's Hall the other night, he must have felt as if he were in the Plaza De Toros and he was the bull.

With a sell-out crowd of 6,100 prepared to passionately embrace one of their own, Brian Peters managed to effectively replicate the McGuigan-era atmosphere for his first boxing card in the North. Saturday night's passion was reflected in an ear-splitting roar that seemed to sustain itself throughout the night, and you had to wonder whether Duddy might be even more daunted by the burden of overwhelming expectation than the veteran Eastman by the prospect of being fed to the lions for the amusement of the howling crowd.

I mean, there are fight towns and then there is Belfast. I spent barely 24 hours there last weekend, and from the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport to the barman who brought the coffee the next morning and everyone I encountered in between, every conversation seemed to revolve around boxing.

Just a few weeks earlier, Juan LaPorte had dropped by my house in New York. To the best of my recollection, the subject of John Duddy never came up that evening, but the old featherweight champion of the early 1980s did recall that in a 68-bout pro career he'd performed in hostile environments all over the world - LaPorte fought Kostya Tszyu in Australia, Wilfredo Gomez in San Juan, and Salvador Sanchez in El Paso, a stone's throw from the Mexican border - but in terms of sheer intimidation, nothing on earth could have prepared him for the crowd at the King's Hall the night he fought Barry McGuigan in Belfast.

It had been more than a dozen years since I'd experienced a fight card at the King's Hall. The most enduring memory of that evening's Barney Eastwood-Don King joint promotion came just before the main event between Chris Eubank and Ray Close.

With the entourages still milling around in the ring just prior to the introductions, a member of Close's posse wearing a leprechaun costume sneaked up behind Eubank and, to the delight of the crowd, pelted him with a fistful of what was supposed to be some sort of magic pixie dust.

What no one had taken into account was that, just before leaving his dressingroom, Eubank had liberally slathered himself with a coat of petroleum jelly, so that once he removed his robe his finely-chiseled physique revealed a well-muscled sheen that resembled polished ebony.

After the sneak attack by the leprechaun, the fight had to be delayed for several minutes while the champion's cornermen frantically scrubbed away in an attempt to remove the thousands of bits of glitter that had stuck to his greased body.

In contrast to the controversy that would precede Mayweather-Hatton in Las Vegas several hours later, there were no pre-fight anthem moments at the King's Hall on Saturday night. In obeisance to the season, the main event was instead preceded by the Shane McGowan/ Kirsty MacColl rendition of A Fairytale of New York. The audience so enthusiastically joined in on the derisive chorus - "You're a bum/ You're a punk/you're an old slut on junk" - that the two-decade old song might have been written with Howard Eastman in mind.

It had been anticipated Eastman would provide Duddy with his sternest test to date, and he did, unpacking the contents of a kit bag of veteran tricks accumulated over the years in 48 professional outings.

As the fight reached its midpoint it appeared that Eastman had a nose in front. Indeed, I was told later that after six rounds several Derrymen seated in the balcony left in disgust, convinced that their man was inexorably beaten.

But Don Turner has been around even longer than Eastman. (Forty years ago in Harlem, Turner was already a renaissance man who ran with Sugar Ray Robinson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Black Panther leader H Rap Brown - simultaneously.) The old trainer barely seemed exercised as he reminded Duddy of what he needed to do, and once the Irishman began to use his jab and box, the puzzle quickly fell into place.

Duddy's 96-94 win on the scorecard of referee Seán Russell seemed just, and coincided precisely with our own. The delighted audience slowly filed out of the building, but on this magical evening they were only warming up. The best we could tell, it appeared that every man, woman and child among them had figured out some way to watch the telecast from Vegas.

I spent a few moments in the dressingroom with Duddy and Turner, and then raced back to the hotel to file my copy. Peters had arranged a viewing of the Mayweather-Hatton fight in the bar of another hostelry up the road, and in the wee hours of the morning we settled in with a clientele of fellow scribes, boxing officials, referees, undercard fighters, and fans to watch the ritual slaughter at the MGM Grand.

The loyalties of the company in which I watched the fight in Belfast were even more pro-Ricky than at the Vegas venue itself - and it wasn't just Englishmen making all that noise at the MGM. (Mayweather might just be the best practicing boxer extant right now, but he's pretty easy to dislike.

Throw in his Uncle Roger in the corner and it's a safe bet that not a few American sportswriters were secretly harboring hopes for a fluke upset, too.) Far too much was made of the predictable hissing and booing that accompanied Tyrese Gibson's tone-deaf rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. (If I'd been there, I might have booed it myself.)

A day later I heard one British television commentator suggest that the disrespectful episode might have cost Ricky the fight by predisposing referee Joe Cortez against the Englishman; the truth of the matter is that the outcome would have been the same even if Ray Hatton had been the referee.

A few days before the fight I had somewhat facetiously noted that Hatton's best hope might lie in trying to damage Mayweather's fists with his face, but Ricky apparently took the advice to heart.

Apart from the hotel where we'd watched the fight, Eglantine Avenue is a residential neighbourhood. As I walked back to my own quarters at six in the morning I was startled to hear a familiar voice booming from an open window. I looked up and saw a large gathering in a third-storey apartment. The inhabitants had thrown open the windows and turned up the volume so their neighbours could share in the transmission from Las Vegas. So here I was standing on a deserted street where I'd never been before, listening to Larry Merchant interview Floyd Mayweather. It would have been a positively surreal moment anywhere else in the world. In Belfast, it seemed almost normal.