Wayne McCullough's soft brown eyes dance around nervously as he negotiates the tricky high wire between the past and the present.
Atlantic City. Present. His black silk shirt hangs on a tight tanned body, his lantern jaw has strategic growth on it and his pirate's earring sits beneath a haircut that looks like he's had an expensive accident with a pepper shaker.
Home. Past. He was the wiry wee kid from the Highfield Estate at the top of the Shankill. He has gone Vegas now, padding in a world of pink Cadillacs and big hair, yet some imperishable decency in him won't let him forget where he came from. He grew up on streets where the kerbs were tattooed with union flags and that hard place still grips him. More so than the town where the sidewalks sing to the sound of slots and sin.
Present. Cheryl, who he married beside a swimming pool under the Nevada sun five years ago, is with him here in Atlantic City. Big-haired, small woman in a suit of shimmering lavender, her nails are painted silver and her hands are busy as she dandles seven-month-old Wynona on her lap.
The McCulloughs are one of the wonders of the testosterone-driven boxing world, sitting here playing happy families on the eve of the fight which will define Wayne's working career. They look more Nashville than fightville.
By the way that's YYYYYY-nona.
This has been a long and strange journey, geographically and emotionally. Regardless of the odds any casino will lay on a happy ever after ending, Cheryl and Wayne's story started like a fairytale. She, 16 and at a loose end, was summoned by her dad to watch a wee lad from Belfast box in the finals of the Commonwealth Games. She watched him on the living-room telly, pronounced him cute as a doll and sent him a congratulatory postcard.
Of all the letters in all the post-bags in all the world Cheryl's was the only one he chose to reply to. Three weeks later at the Belfast Hall she got his autograph and slunk away shy and happy. Her mother, supervising the visit, notified Wayne that this was the wee girl that had written to him. He finagled her number. The rest is his story and her story.
In Atlantic City they have booked adjoining rooms. They reckon they spend 24 hours of every day together. A team. If the baby cries at night Wayne will rise and walk through the doors and lie down in the adjoining room while the rest of the team hush themselves. She doesn't cry. She is serenity itself and at seven months this is her third time to go with her daddy to the fights. If the odds posted just off the boardwalk have any value, she might be glad she remembers none of it.
For now Wynona sits on Cheryl's lap and sucks the goodness from a bottle. Cheryl is wife, mother and co-manager. Much else apparently too.
"I'm supposed to be Frankenstein's bride," she says. "A bitch on wheels. I've been called every name there is. It doesn't matter to me if it helps take the spotlight and the pressure off Wayne. I'll take all of it."
While the people around Wayne have fallen away, Cheryl has taken the heat. She is as sharp and formidable as Wayne is soft and reticent and it's easy to see why she draws the shellacking from the fight crowd.
The McCulloughs have hired Kevin Kelley, one of Naseem Hamed's more successful opponents, to spar with Wayne before tonight's fisticuffs. When Naseem announced this snickeringly at a pre-fight press conference it was Cheryl who was on her feet shouting: "Isn't he the guy who nearly beat you?"
"Nearly wins no points," replied Hamed, but his princely cheek subsided quickly.
The casualty list along the way has been impressive. Mat Tinley, the TV suit who offered McCullough his pro forms and lured him to America, has been bumped from the management team and now merely promotes. Eddie Futch and Thel Torrence, respected trainers with a list of alumni that makes them the Ivy League of boxing, have been shunted to the shadows.
Cheryl co-manages her husband now and though it draws the derision of the ring rats, she has taken the pads at times when he spars in their Vegas garage.
"I take the pads sometimes, yeah. It keeps me in shape and it's a lot of fun. That's all. I learned it from watching him train. I'm not as good as his coach Kenny Crooms, but it isn't a big deal."
But the taunts and the hooting are out there. McCullough, the quiet guy whose cojones are being vice-gripped by a woman who's always ready to rumble.
"He hasn't fought me because his wife wouldn't let him," says Naseem.
"Wayne is his own person," says Cheryl. "We make decisions. Either he'll make a decision or we'll make a decision. For this fight when Stuart Campbell called and told me he had the fight I told him `yes we'd take it but let me talk to Wayne', but the answer will be yes. I already knew that this was a fight he wanted."
She went and asked Wayne: "I have a fight for you, do you want to take it?"
Wayne said: "Who is it."
"Naseem."
"You should know that."
"I've already given the answer."
And there it was.
"We offered Naseem $2 million to fight two years ago and he wouldn't," she adds. "That's the sort of thing he never publicises." The business of Cheryl metamorphosing into the Gladys Hacksaw of the boxing world is of concern to them both. The stories are amplified by the indignation of sportswriters who have found the business of crawling through the barbed wire of Cheryl's protectiveness a little trying. Wayne points out that Cheryl doesn't do anything different than she ever did it's "just that Mat Tinley doesn't get 25 per cent, Wayne McCullough does."
Cheryl herself sees her role as a buffer between the good of her husband and the bad and the ugly of the professional boxing game.
"He asked me would I be his manager. That's what he wanted me to do. I didn't want to be any more than his wife. I know everyone else goes to watch their husbands etc. and they sit in the seats and worry, but now I'm his manager. Stuart makes the deals and talks to business, I talk them through with Wayne and then myself and Stuart try to make the deals work.
"It hasn't been hard, I'm dealing with two people I love very much, the two people I love the most in the world. Wayne and Wynona. It's not hard at all but it all gets magnified. I'm now his trainer they say. That couldn't be further from the truth. I don't need another job. I'm wife, mother and comanager."
Whatever the precise nature of her role, it doesn't look like being a job for life. If McCullough's career doesn't end tonight - and he is as adamant that it won't - he has his eyes on retirement within the next two years any way. The little men take a lot of punishment and the wear and tear of ring life. The arrival of Wynona has changed the hue of things too.
"People ask how will I cope with Naseem's big punches. Can I take them and stay on my feet. I don't want to take any of his big punches. I'm keeping my chin down."
That's their story. America has been good and bad for Wayne and Cheryl. Sunshine and low-wattage celebrity are only a small down payment on fulfilment, but in a casino in Atlantic City Wayne might just land the jackpot punch tonight, the one that sets up a rematch where he gooses more than a quarter of Hamed's purse.
"For the moment I'm just going to go in there and do what I always do. I love to fight I enjoy training. I'm just going to do what I always do. I've fought better guys."
Or it could end in blood and tears and the wee man will pack the family on the plane and fly back to the sun and get on with his happy life without expending one nostalgic thought on the phoney baloney professional pug life he's left behind.
"We never dreamed of anything in Belfast," says Cheryl. "Not anything like this. We came out for his career and it's been successful until now and it is going to keep on. I don't want to be part of it but Wayne wants me there with him so I am not going to let him down. I am there to support him 100 per cent. Anyway he's not on the way out. He's in his prime."
As a fighter McCullough still has much to offer and much to learn. He still produces the punches as if his wage depended on the number thrown but under all the whaling fury lies a predictability which serves him poorly. A man who can dance and pick his shots can cope with the odd bee sting which McCullough throws. Jose Luis Bueno knew sufficient of that to puff Wayne's face up like a balloon in Dublin. Daniel Zaragoza knew it enough to finish him in Boston.
But it's 21 years since he was the little splinter floating about in the dank crumble of the Albert Foundry gym. It's a hard glittering amateur career the ethos of which seemed to suit his decent streak followed by a scalding immersion in the acid bath of the professional game. Tonight will be either a new beginning or a sad end. The gambling men call it only one way.
Present. It's Atlantic City now. In the distance when he is silent you can hear the slot machines ringing out their clanking chorus as they suck the dust out of suckers' pockets. In a room upstairs Naseem Hamed is planning to do mean things to him, to "beat him up so good that he will never fight again, know what I mean?"
The Pocket Rocket has no turbo booster for this phoney hype world. When he got a word with Hamed he just asked him how his brother Ali was keeping, if he was over for the fight.
"You gotta respect everyone," he says and trails his fingers across his daughter's scalp. "I hate all this hype stuff. I'm sure Naseem does it because he's nervous. He can't look me in the eye.
"What it'll be like in Ireland if I win?" he muses a minute later. "Aw maybe a public holiday. Wayne McCullough day!"
And again his eyes dart about the place searching out the other Irish eyes to see if eyebrows are hoisted smilingly above them. He's talking to Americans, trying to be what he's not comfortable with and for a moment in his wariness he looks just like a Belfast man, far from home and wondering why the streets have such a different meanness about them.
