“I THINK YOU’RE onto something, but I’m not sure if I want to get too far into it, to be honest,” says a chuckling Dennis Hogan, who has just wrapped up training 16,600 kilometres away.
The question, in summary: Why does it seem that winning a world title would mean more to Hogan than it would any other boxer, or is this writer simply guilty of reading too much into his ennobling declarations from half a world away?
After initial hesitation, ‘The Hurricane’ continues: “Look, I suppose… Not only would I be achieving my lifelong dream – like every boxer – but I’d be giving myself a platform to make a few changes that I feel are needed – not only here in Australia, but hopefully back home in Ireland as well.
“That’s a real driving force, for me. To be in a position where I can maybe change things for the better. Being a world champion would help hugely with that. That inspires me as much as any belt or title.”
When he emigrated Down Under in 2011, the Kildare man was an elite-level boozer more so than a bruiser. Tales of his battles with the bottle are well-worn, at this stage, and in any case Hogan has always been more of a forward-thinker; aged 33 and nearly seven years sober, he now provides paid talks to businesses around his adopted home city of Brisbane about his life on either side of the ropes.
Currently the WBO’s number two-ranked light-middleweight in the world, a win versus Manchester’s Jimmy Kelly at Convention & Exhibition Centre, Brisbane on Saturday (1:30pm Irish time, free stream details here) will all but guarantee his shot at global honours later this year. He stands on the precipice of achieving the aforementioned platform he so craves, and for all the right reasons.
“I don’t want it to sound corny, you know? And tell me if it is too corny,” he says. “But I found myself under tremendous pressure as a youngfella in school, where I couldn’t concentrate on any sort of subject or studies. I was no good in the classroom, but I could head out onto a football pitch after school and I’d be running rings around fellas.
“And even boxing – I used to have quite some success. I enjoyed all of that, but then back in school, I just didn’t have the concentration for it: my values at the time lay elsewhere. I felt free when I was playing sport or while I was boxing, but school was an extremely daunting prospect.
I’m not academically inclined, and therefore when school stuff would come around, I’d feel so inadequate – just not good enough – because the other kids would answer questions faster than me and get their pat on the back. I couldn’t keep up with them.
“There I was getting absolutely no praise for sport,” he says, “and having so much fear and anxiety because I wasn’t able to keep up with the rest of my peers in a classroom setting.”
It says plenty for Hogan that a question about world titles instantly sees this prospective boxing interview – conducted three days before his WBO eliminator bout – diverge into something else entirely.
Make no mistake about it, the Kilcullen native is besotted with his craft: his Stretton Boxing Club gym-mate and sparring partner Jeff Horn – who toppled Manny Pacquiao to win the WBO World welterweight title last August – recently described the Irishman as ‘inspirational’ such is his barbarous appetite for work.
But where Hogan differs to your average boxer is that while he’s obsessed with the sweet science, he’s not remotely defined by it: instead he’s a well-read introspector who revels in a wide range of interests. The father of one already has several start-up plans in the pipeline for life after lumping the heads off lads, and he spends much of his limited spare time studying societal issues and personal betterment.
And he hated school.
“That anxiety – just from finding school so difficult at times – followed me for many years, truth be told,” he says. “It probably filtered into other aspects of my life, too. You have this inner-dominating thought that you’re just not up to scratch as a person – you’re not ‘clever’, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And for the most part, nobody tells you otherwise, because they probably think the same thing.
“It’s only years later when you see that this perceived inadequacy was just something that formed when you were a child.
“I go and do seminars now – and I do personal development and stuff – and I can sit in a classroom for a full week, learning about myself and all that. I can get right into it – paperwork, the lot. Even for my own business now, as a boxer and everything else, I get right down to the finer details and it’s all good.
There has to be a better way around it – that’s all. I just feel so many of these systems, curriculums and whatever else are outdated now, in 2018. You’re told exams or studies will determine the rest of your life, so if those don’t go well, could you blame a kid for thinking he or she is completely screwed?
“And these are kids that might very well be excelling in other fields. For me it was often a field quite literally, but mainly the boxing ring. And literally by focusing on boxing, I’ve forged a good career for myself that’s only about to get better.
I absolutely adore what I do, I have a great life, but you can’t help but think of the kids who might have dreams but wind up going down the wrong path altogether – purely because there was no outlet or encouragement to pursue them if those dreams weren’t, say, ‘normal.’
Hogan is certain, too, that the toils with alcohol which plagued so much of his 20s stemmed from the misguided sense of unworthiness that he carried with him out of school. Where his relationship with boxing becomes somewhat more conventional, then, is that it hauled him from this personal abyss and pointed him in some sort of direction.
“Oh, 100%, those worries played a huge role in the sort of stuff I wound up going through,” he says. “I know it did. And all along, all I had to do was… With any of those things I perceived I couldn’t do, I just had to marry them with the things I could do – things I wanted to do. Apply the focus I might use in boxing to completely different areas.
“And all of a sudden, the results were there. But nobody told me that, and I think kids today should be told that.
“I didn’t know this about boxing for a long time, but boxing – and fighting in general – is one of the smartest endeavours you’ll come across. There are so many factors to it, all of them pretty much simultaneous. We have to work at such an amazing rate just to make sure everything is up to speed: angles, footwork, attack, defence, energy levels, breathing – you’ve got all this stuff going on at once. And it’s just something that you add to your arsenal and go with – not only in the ring, but outside as well.
And it was only when I realised this that I started to think: ‘Maybe I’m not as bad as I thought I was?’ You start to see that you just didn’t apply yourself to the things that you actually wanted to do, probably from fear of not being able to apply yourself to other things – school being one.
“See, I wanted to play football, I wanted to box, whereas in school I didn’t want to do much. In school, you’re taught all this history of everything that’s happened before, but there was nothing there to tell us how we should be feeling or how to make sense of the stuff that was going on in our heads – stuff that might have really helped the likes of myself. Do you know what I mean?
“Instead you’re given this education – most of which is completely forgotten about as you get older. I can’t remember any of that stuff. I mean, English is good – you learn how to read, and maths is clearly handy and necessary for certain things, but…
“Like, ‘FYVP = Y-squared W’: WHAT? What does that mean? When am I going to need that when I’m doing my taxes? I’m never going to need that again. Of course, if you’re going to go into a mathematic profession, by all means go down that route – it’s brilliant for some people! Just not for everyone.
“The thing about it is: the guys that are really good in school? Well done, obviously! I used to look at them with a little bit of envy. I used to sit down to do my homework, and before I knew it half an hour would have passed, I wouldn’t know what was going on. Suddenly, the whole day is gone, and I’d just get up and not do it, then, because I’d have wasted so much time on trying to get through one simple problem.
“Other people would come into school the next day – they had everything done, they had everything correct. Their minds were just that way inclined. I used to look at them in envy and think, ‘Aw, that would be great, just to not have this fear and anxiety over not having homework done or not understanding a question.’
Then, P.E. would come around, and all of a sudden I’m skinning everybody, doing laps around them, and they wouldn’t have any fear or anxiety about that because it’s only recreational. Whereas when I’d get back into the classroom, all of a sudden I’m being pulled and dragged out of it at the top of the classroom – in front of everyone – because I can’t do a maths problem.
“And again, that’s nothing to do with the kids who were good academically – it’s not their fault at all, obviously. I just feel the system should be changed, because it only caters to one group of kids.”
This is where ‘The Hurricane’ hopes he can brew up some kind of storm, even as an Irish blow-in in OZ.
But alongside positioning himself to influence potential change for the better, and the culmination of a life’s dream, there’s a third prong to Hogan’s longing for a world title: he wants to prove to Ireland and Australia’s up-and-comers that it’s more than possible to bypass scholastic struggles and find success in your field regardless, be it in sport or otherwise.
“I meet kids here and there that tell you they’re no good at school and they’re just not happy about it, and my heart goes out to them – I used to be that kid,” he explains.
I know what they’re feeling. I know that on Sunday night, some of these kids are feeling immense fear and anxiety – like I did: it kicks in as the new week is about to start, your escape from school – and not being particularly good at it – is suddenly over. If I can win a world title I’ll show kids like me that there is always another way. That’s a huge inspiration for me. I’m doing it for them as well – I’m doing it for the anxious kid that I was.
“I just think surely we can implement something whereby these kids have some sort of better way of doing it, so they don’t feel terrible about themselves. That’s torturous for a kid, like.
“I feel there are too many people out there that are suffering the way I used to. They’re anxious, fearful and whatever else, when all it comes down to is that they’re just not that way inclined when it comes to academics or things like that.
“And it’s just simple changes – that’s all that’s necessary. To be honest, all a kid might need to know is that information, and they might no longer feel that way.”
Hogan pauses contemplatively, then adds:
Look, to be totally honest with you, I definitely would have been diagnosed with ADHD – no doubt about that. No doubt. And I know that I would never have needed medication for that: it would have destroyed me. There’s a lot of kids on that stuff that don’t need to be. The perception is that there’s something wrong with them because they’re not great in school, but the reality is that they’re just not inclined towards school.
“They’re been given these drugs just to pipe them up and whatever else, and it’s just a tragedy, to be honest with you. These are kids, and they’re being put on stuff like that. How are they putting kids on this stuff? How?
“For me, I never got diagnosed with anything, I was never put on medication, and funnily enough, things haven’t worked out too badly.
“I feel with humanity, we’re all born to do different things in different ways. Why are we all treated the same? People should be given separate ways of going about it: ‘what is it that you enjoy doing? What is it that you want to do?’ It’s much easier to follow your passion that way. And when you follow your passion, you’re inspired.
“That’s what I think, anyway!” he laughs, taking a breather.
For all his best laid plans, though, there’s a bit of work to do yet. Hogan’s fight with Jimmy Kelly on Saturday only takes up a small portion of the conversation, but given its significance – a potential career-definer for the Irish contender and one of the boxing events to take place on Aussie soil in years – it’s more than worthy of a quick natter.
Kelly, a Mancunian descendant of Carlow and Kilkenny, is eight years his opponent’s junior, and is poised just one rung below Hogan in the WBO’s ladder.
Where Hogan generally chooses not to verbally spar, Kelly has been firing barbs aplenty: in a recent interview with an Austalian publication, he said of his Irish adversary: “Hogan is a lot older than me and he’s knocked himself around in earlier times. I’m young and fresh and coming into my peak. It’s my time now. I’m going to put on a master class and give him a boxing lesson.”
Hogan hears the quote for the first time over the phone, and bursts into laughter.
“That’s fucking funny, that is! I think they [Kelly and his team] feel I’m an emotional type of person, that by having a few digs I might get emotional and they’ll get under my skin. Sure I couldn’t care less about any of that rubbish – I’m here to fight, not talk.
“And they’ve been having a few goes off me, but then in person they have nothing to say.
“We had the press conference today, and Jimmy Kelly went back into his box completely. He was actually really nice, and to be honest with you it was nearly annoying. I’m just like: ‘Shut up, mate – you’re after been dragging me around the place and now you’re backing away because you’re in it. And you know you’re in it.’
Any time I looked in his eyes – and I don’t say this lightly, because it’s only happened me once before – but you look in someone’s eyes and you just fuckin’ know. He’s one of those guys. When I looked in his eyes while he was talking, he backed up instantly.
“I think he just knows. I don’t know if I was making faces at him or what, but the last time I got this feeling, where my opponent seemed scared, I got in and I destroyed him – TKOed him.
“Kelly is saying he’s going to do me in five rounds. I’m like: ‘This is a complete reversal.’ When I spoke to him about taking him into the 11th and 12th rounds, his eye started twitching. He really looked sad and concerned.
“He’s not that certain about himself, you know?”
"See ya tomorrow buddy, take care."@dennis_h_hogan v Kelly pic.twitter.com/N1VIhULVlw
— Kevin Byrne (@KevByrneBox) April 6, 2018
Whether he’s certain of himself or not, Kelly faces a man who couldn’t be more assured of himself this Saturday, and on the latter’s home soil – so to speak.
Hogan, however, has plans of fighting at ‘home-home’ should he prevail in his pursuit of world honours in the coming months.
“My first intention is to bring the world title back to Ireland and defend it in the 3Arena,” he says. “I have my song picked out and everything!”
He’s reticent to reveal too much, but then somehow remembers he’s on record in a 2012 interview with the Kildare Nationalist as having spilled the beans where his prospective walkout tune is concerned. And so he spills them again.
“It’s ‘I’m Coming Home’ by P. Diddy,” he announces.
“There’s not a week goes by where I don’t listen to it and visualise walking into the 3Arena with my belt, with the Irish people there, and it’s a magical feeling every time. I look forward to experiencing that moment in the flesh.”
Dennis Hogan vs Jimmy Kelly will be streamed around the world for free on Epicentre TV. His ringwalk is expected at 1:30pm Irish time.
