ON 9 NOVEMBER, 2018, Fergal McKenna’s brow furrowed as an unidentified man strolled into his son’s changing room at Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio, California.
Aaron McKenna, then just 19, was moments removed from walking to the ring for his sixth professional boxing match. His unannounced visitor, about five-foot-five in height and partly obscured by the hood of his Nike sweater, approached to embrace the Monaghan welterweight.
Father and co-trainer Fergal was on his way to intervene when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a whisper in his ear from Aaron’s older brother, Stevie.
“Dad, it’s grand. That’s Kendrick Lamar.”
“Oh aye?!” came the sarcastic response from Fergal, whose interest in West Coast music stretches about as far as The Saw Doctors.
Lamar, however, was given the leeway to greet Aaron, fist-bumping the rest of his team and posing for a picture before promptly returning to his ringside seat.
A keen boxer, The King of Hip-Hop had a week earlier encountered the McKenna brothers at a gym in Los Angeles. After his own boxing lesson, he observed intently from the bottom rope as Aaron and Stevie sparred in preparation for the younger brother’s upcoming bout with Abel Reyes.
He was sufficiently impressed that he stuck around to consult with them after their session. The brothers, who would routinely listen to Lamar’s music as they ran the Santa Monica Steps during camp, were starstruck. The usually introverted Aaron chanced his arm and invited the 12-time Grammy winner to his fight on a Golden Boy Promotions card the following Thursday night. Naturally, he presumed that the VIP pass left under Lamar’s name at the Fantasy Springs ticket office would go unused. Lamar, however, drove three hours across the state of California to show face.
Aaron McKenna celebrates his world-title success in Dublin. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
McKenna’s match-up against Reyes was the ‘floater’, meaning it could be inserted anywhere on the running order to fill airtime in the event that several fights finished more quickly than expected. There were few early stoppages on the bill, however, and Monaghan’s ‘Silencer’ wound up boxing after the main event, well beyond midnight.
Lamar waited for four hours to catch McKenna’s second-round stoppage of Mexican journeyman Reyes. He then drove through the night back to his primary residence in LA.
An eight-time underage champion, Aaron McKenna had first journeyed to California with his father three years earlier, aged 16, for three months of intensive training. His heart was initially set on becoming Ireland’s youngest-ever prizefighter, but this would have required him to compete in Mexico until he turned 18, the minimum age for a professional boxer in the States.
McKenna and his father opted instead to wait, but the teenager had left quite the impression in gyms around Greater Los Angeles during that first sojourn.
In 2017, Aaron and Fergal returned to California on an indefinite basis, the Irish prodigy putting pen to paper on a promotional deal with Oscar de la Hoya’s Golden Boy once he turned 18.
Aaron’s mother, Fergal’s wife, Loretta, stayed home in Smithborough with the family’s two other sons, Gary and Stevie, each a former Irish amateur champion in his own right. While Gary pursued primary-school teaching, middle child Stevie would join Fergal and Aaron in the States a year later, ‘The Hitman’ (now 17-1, 16KOs) beginning his own professional-boxing journey.
As such, until the Covid-19 pandemic coaxed them back to Ireland, Loretta saw her husband and two of her sons in person only two or three times a year.
The parents’ huge sacrifice paid off on Saturday night, their youngest boy becoming a world champion at the 3Arena, Dublin. Aaron McKenna [21-0, 10KOs] joined Andy Lee, Steve Collins, and the division’s first-ever recognised champion, ‘Nonpareil’ Jack Dempsey, as one of only four Irish boxers to have won a middleweight world title.
Or, as the immensely satisfied ‘Silencer’ described it during his post-fight press conference, “Tonight, we got a world title.”
***
In early 2019, a WhatsApp message landed this way from the McKenna brothers’ then-PR representative, Rachel Charles of Sheer Sports, requesting assistance to land her boxers a first interview on Irish television. They would soon be home for a couple of weeks to visit their mother, she said.
An introduction was made between Rachel and the producer of a daily chat show on which this writer had a weekly slot.
Cards on the table, the Kendrick Lamar yarn made up much of the pitch to get the two lads on the show. The producer was equally tickled, however, by tales of how Aaron and Stevie had once met Adam Sandler twice on the same day; or how a victorious Aaron had obliviously posed for a ringside selfie with Cindy Crawford, believing her just a random fan until he was informed otherwise by his highly amused father.
Sure enough, Aaron and Stevie were greenlit as guests for the following Wednesday.
To flick onto the channel halfway through their interview might have led one to believe that these two youngfellas were there to discuss the sacrament of Confirmation. Kitted out in formal shirts and trousers, Aaron and Stevie were understandably bashful on their Irish TV debut, their breath short and their answers not much longer. They were disarmingly polite, certainly, but the show’s co-hosts were left to scramble for material as they reached the end of their cue cards ahead of schedule.
In studio a week later, the aforementioned producer informed this middle man that the showrunner had been left unimpressed by the guest recommendation, and that the conversation with the boxers had been like “drawing blood from a stone”.
A fortnight further on, however, and the same producer and his boss stood corrected: based on TV viewership and social media metrics, the McKenna brothers’ guest slot had been their highest-rated segment of the month.
As the producer put it, “They seem to be the kind of boxers that your grandmother could get behind.”
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Shockingly, Golden Boy Promotions didn’t pursue that line of advertising. Yet, striking from the footage on Sunday was the sheer number of elderly fans who came out to greet their new world champion in Monaghan Town and Castleblayney, McKenna receiving a Garda escort as he toured the IBF belt through his home county.
Even the age profile of the crowd at the 3Arena on Saturday night was older than would be typical for a boxing event, but there were equally many parents who brought their children. The hundreds of Monaghan jerseys and flags leant the occasion a GAA feel, certainly, as did the deafening chant of ‘Farney Army’ seconds before McKenna and Italian opponent Etinosa Oliha traded leather for the first time.
It’s a vibe not exactly replicable on America’s West Coast, or demographically ‘the wrong coast’ as far as promoting an Irish boxer is concerned. During the pandemic, with shows scarce, McKenna became less of a priority for Cali-centric promoters Golden Boy, who at least had the good grace to effectively lease him out to Hennessy Sports in the UK, where he continued his career alongside his Mick Hennessy-promoted brother, Stevie.
Stevie, Aaron and Fergal McKenna celebrate the world-title success of the family's youngest child. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
The brothers and dad Fergal all moved home to Smithborough. During the early stages of lockdown, with gyms broadly inaccessible in Ireland, the McKennas had a ready-made solution: Fergal had years earlier constructed a large garden shed in the family backyard, in which he had installed a high-end boxing gym with ample S&C equipment and a full-size boxing ring. (The ring, indeed, had once been graced by Monaghan’s last boxing world champion, Barry McGuigan, as well as Belfast’s former undisputed flyweight champion Rinty Monaghan. It was essentially salvaged from scrappage by McKenna Sr, who restored it for his three children).
In November 2021, upon the conclusion of his contract, the 10-0 Aaron parted ways with Golden Boy. Basing himself at home full-time, he made his loan to Hennessy Sports a permanent one, fighting on British shows which were mostly broadcast live on Channel 5.
His time in California, though, during which he sparred hundreds of rounds against some of the most impressive boxing talents in the world, would later prove invaluable.
Heading into the final third of his maiden world-title fight against the physically challenging Oliha in Dublin on Saturday, McKenna was told in the corner by his father and trainer: “Just think back to when you were in America, when you were sparring in all the high-quality gyms and you were being pushed to the limit.”
Fergal would later tell Sky Sports, “This fight sort of mimicked that, and we had to dig deep. Aaron had to show his boxing skills in different phases, different parts of the fight. And he did it, and he came through with flying colours.”
Invaluable, too, was McKenna’s world-class conditioning, which is partly inspired by a chance encounter with Carl Lewis’ former coach, Joe Douglas, at the base of the Santa Monica Stairs about six years ago.
One of athletics’ greatest ever minds, Douglas is the founder of the Santa Monica Track Club, which, since its inception in 1972, has been the base camp for dozens of Olympic gold medals and world records. One Saturday morning, he noticed Fergal timing his sons’ runs on his phone and approached for a chat. Producing one from his own jacket pocket, Douglas advised Fergal to invest in an analogue stopwatch to remove the potential for any distraction on the coach’s side. He impressed the importance of recovery on the two young boxers, who were demons for high-intensity training.
Douglas’ advice greatly influenced the McKennas’ approach to training camps thereafter. Along with elite boxing trainers such as Robert Garcia and Freddie Roach, he is woven into the tapestry of Aaron’s success in becoming only Ireland’s fourth-ever middleweight beltholder. Incidentally, each of McKenna’s world-champion predecessors, ‘Nonpareil’ Jack Dempsey, Steve Collins, and Andy Lee, all equally began their professional careers in America.
And yet Aaron McKenna’s world-title win was ultimately achieved from a gym in the back garden of his family home in the Monaghan countryside, about 10 paces, or five seconds, from where he rests his head at night. In his corner were neither Garcia nor Roach, but his dad and his older brother.
***
Back in January 2019, while the California-based McKenna boys were home for Christmas, The 42 paid a visit to the family home in Smithborough to shoot a short video documentary on their journeys to that point.
Fergal greenlit unrestricted access to a full training day, even permitting the filming of sparring between Aaron, then 19, and Stevie, 21, which was sufficiently ferocious that Dad had to warn them to cool the jets on a couple of occasions.
He also provided the brothers’ training logs, handwritten by himself into a chunky notebook; each run, each weight session, each spar meticulously detailed, the metrics informing the intensity of the following day’s training.
While they were as gentlemanly and accommodating with their time as ever, Aaron and Stevie were characteristically gun-shy as they sat for an interview on their living-room sofa, their personalities only properly unveiled once they hit the gym, and each other.
After a full day of shooting, two intrepid young reporters were set to hit the rocky road back to Dublin when mother Loretta intervened.
“Ah, lads, ye’ll stay for dinner, surely?”
All efforts to the contrary were waved away, and another 90 minutes were spent enjoying a tremendous chicken curry at the McKennas’ kitchen table, oldest brother Gary also calling over to bring the family to full complement. This was, after all, a precious moment in 2019 in which the parents and sons could all be together. That they chose to share it with a videographer and a sportswriter spoke volumes.
At the table, too, one could see evidence of the personalities that Aaron and Stevie would later become: the Liverpool chat, the slagging over fantasy football, the stories from California — like how Stevie had recently pretended to be a southpaw to blag his way into a sparring session with two-time Olympic gold medallist and then-pound-for-pound great Vasyl Lomachenko.
As darkness descended on Smithborough and home-time finally arrived, it was Fergal who this time intervened:
“Wait, lads, did we give ye a couple of gloves? We didn’t… Stephen, go out, there, to the gym, and bring in a couple of gloves for the two lads!”
Knowing the drill, Aaron and Stevie signed the gloves before handing a parting gift to their visitors at the front door.
“You never know,” laughed their father. “They could be worth a few bob one day.”
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From befriending Kendrick Lamar in LA to winning a world title from his back garden in Monaghan
ON 9 NOVEMBER, 2018, Fergal McKenna’s brow furrowed as an unidentified man strolled into his son’s changing room at Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio, California.
Aaron McKenna, then just 19, was moments removed from walking to the ring for his sixth professional boxing match. His unannounced visitor, about five-foot-five in height and partly obscured by the hood of his Nike sweater, approached to embrace the Monaghan welterweight.
Father and co-trainer Fergal was on his way to intervene when he felt a hand on his shoulder and a whisper in his ear from Aaron’s older brother, Stevie.
“Dad, it’s grand. That’s Kendrick Lamar.”
“Oh aye?!” came the sarcastic response from Fergal, whose interest in West Coast music stretches about as far as The Saw Doctors.
Lamar, however, was given the leeway to greet Aaron, fist-bumping the rest of his team and posing for a picture before promptly returning to his ringside seat.
A keen boxer, The King of Hip-Hop had a week earlier encountered the McKenna brothers at a gym in Los Angeles. After his own boxing lesson, he observed intently from the bottom rope as Aaron and Stevie sparred in preparation for the younger brother’s upcoming bout with Abel Reyes.
He was sufficiently impressed that he stuck around to consult with them after their session. The brothers, who would routinely listen to Lamar’s music as they ran the Santa Monica Steps during camp, were starstruck. The usually introverted Aaron chanced his arm and invited the 12-time Grammy winner to his fight on a Golden Boy Promotions card the following Thursday night. Naturally, he presumed that the VIP pass left under Lamar’s name at the Fantasy Springs ticket office would go unused. Lamar, however, drove three hours across the state of California to show face.
McKenna’s match-up against Reyes was the ‘floater’, meaning it could be inserted anywhere on the running order to fill airtime in the event that several fights finished more quickly than expected. There were few early stoppages on the bill, however, and Monaghan’s ‘Silencer’ wound up boxing after the main event, well beyond midnight.
Lamar waited for four hours to catch McKenna’s second-round stoppage of Mexican journeyman Reyes. He then drove through the night back to his primary residence in LA.
An eight-time underage champion, Aaron McKenna had first journeyed to California with his father three years earlier, aged 16, for three months of intensive training. His heart was initially set on becoming Ireland’s youngest-ever prizefighter, but this would have required him to compete in Mexico until he turned 18, the minimum age for a professional boxer in the States.
McKenna and his father opted instead to wait, but the teenager had left quite the impression in gyms around Greater Los Angeles during that first sojourn.
In 2017, Aaron and Fergal returned to California on an indefinite basis, the Irish prodigy putting pen to paper on a promotional deal with Oscar de la Hoya’s Golden Boy once he turned 18.
Aaron’s mother, Fergal’s wife, Loretta, stayed home in Smithborough with the family’s two other sons, Gary and Stevie, each a former Irish amateur champion in his own right. While Gary pursued primary-school teaching, middle child Stevie would join Fergal and Aaron in the States a year later, ‘The Hitman’ (now 17-1, 16KOs) beginning his own professional-boxing journey.
As such, until the Covid-19 pandemic coaxed them back to Ireland, Loretta saw her husband and two of her sons in person only two or three times a year.
The parents’ huge sacrifice paid off on Saturday night, their youngest boy becoming a world champion at the 3Arena, Dublin. Aaron McKenna [21-0, 10KOs] joined Andy Lee, Steve Collins, and the division’s first-ever recognised champion, ‘Nonpareil’ Jack Dempsey, as one of only four Irish boxers to have won a middleweight world title.
Or, as the immensely satisfied ‘Silencer’ described it during his post-fight press conference, “Tonight, we got a world title.”
***
In early 2019, a WhatsApp message landed this way from the McKenna brothers’ then-PR representative, Rachel Charles of Sheer Sports, requesting assistance to land her boxers a first interview on Irish television. They would soon be home for a couple of weeks to visit their mother, she said.
An introduction was made between Rachel and the producer of a daily chat show on which this writer had a weekly slot.
Cards on the table, the Kendrick Lamar yarn made up much of the pitch to get the two lads on the show. The producer was equally tickled, however, by tales of how Aaron and Stevie had once met Adam Sandler twice on the same day; or how a victorious Aaron had obliviously posed for a ringside selfie with Cindy Crawford, believing her just a random fan until he was informed otherwise by his highly amused father.
Sure enough, Aaron and Stevie were greenlit as guests for the following Wednesday.
To flick onto the channel halfway through their interview might have led one to believe that these two youngfellas were there to discuss the sacrament of Confirmation. Kitted out in formal shirts and trousers, Aaron and Stevie were understandably bashful on their Irish TV debut, their breath short and their answers not much longer. They were disarmingly polite, certainly, but the show’s co-hosts were left to scramble for material as they reached the end of their cue cards ahead of schedule.
In studio a week later, the aforementioned producer informed this middle man that the showrunner had been left unimpressed by the guest recommendation, and that the conversation with the boxers had been like “drawing blood from a stone”.
A fortnight further on, however, and the same producer and his boss stood corrected: based on TV viewership and social media metrics, the McKenna brothers’ guest slot had been their highest-rated segment of the month.
As the producer put it, “They seem to be the kind of boxers that your grandmother could get behind.”
Shockingly, Golden Boy Promotions didn’t pursue that line of advertising. Yet, striking from the footage on Sunday was the sheer number of elderly fans who came out to greet their new world champion in Monaghan Town and Castleblayney, McKenna receiving a Garda escort as he toured the IBF belt through his home county.
Even the age profile of the crowd at the 3Arena on Saturday night was older than would be typical for a boxing event, but there were equally many parents who brought their children. The hundreds of Monaghan jerseys and flags leant the occasion a GAA feel, certainly, as did the deafening chant of ‘Farney Army’ seconds before McKenna and Italian opponent Etinosa Oliha traded leather for the first time.
It’s a vibe not exactly replicable on America’s West Coast, or demographically ‘the wrong coast’ as far as promoting an Irish boxer is concerned. During the pandemic, with shows scarce, McKenna became less of a priority for Cali-centric promoters Golden Boy, who at least had the good grace to effectively lease him out to Hennessy Sports in the UK, where he continued his career alongside his Mick Hennessy-promoted brother, Stevie.
The brothers and dad Fergal all moved home to Smithborough. During the early stages of lockdown, with gyms broadly inaccessible in Ireland, the McKennas had a ready-made solution: Fergal had years earlier constructed a large garden shed in the family backyard, in which he had installed a high-end boxing gym with ample S&C equipment and a full-size boxing ring. (The ring, indeed, had once been graced by Monaghan’s last boxing world champion, Barry McGuigan, as well as Belfast’s former undisputed flyweight champion Rinty Monaghan. It was essentially salvaged from scrappage by McKenna Sr, who restored it for his three children).
In November 2021, upon the conclusion of his contract, the 10-0 Aaron parted ways with Golden Boy. Basing himself at home full-time, he made his loan to Hennessy Sports a permanent one, fighting on British shows which were mostly broadcast live on Channel 5.
His time in California, though, during which he sparred hundreds of rounds against some of the most impressive boxing talents in the world, would later prove invaluable.
Heading into the final third of his maiden world-title fight against the physically challenging Oliha in Dublin on Saturday, McKenna was told in the corner by his father and trainer: “Just think back to when you were in America, when you were sparring in all the high-quality gyms and you were being pushed to the limit.”
Fergal would later tell Sky Sports, “This fight sort of mimicked that, and we had to dig deep. Aaron had to show his boxing skills in different phases, different parts of the fight. And he did it, and he came through with flying colours.”
Invaluable, too, was McKenna’s world-class conditioning, which is partly inspired by a chance encounter with Carl Lewis’ former coach, Joe Douglas, at the base of the Santa Monica Stairs about six years ago.
One of athletics’ greatest ever minds, Douglas is the founder of the Santa Monica Track Club, which, since its inception in 1972, has been the base camp for dozens of Olympic gold medals and world records. One Saturday morning, he noticed Fergal timing his sons’ runs on his phone and approached for a chat. Producing one from his own jacket pocket, Douglas advised Fergal to invest in an analogue stopwatch to remove the potential for any distraction on the coach’s side. He impressed the importance of recovery on the two young boxers, who were demons for high-intensity training.
Douglas’ advice greatly influenced the McKennas’ approach to training camps thereafter. Along with elite boxing trainers such as Robert Garcia and Freddie Roach, he is woven into the tapestry of Aaron’s success in becoming only Ireland’s fourth-ever middleweight beltholder. Incidentally, each of McKenna’s world-champion predecessors, ‘Nonpareil’ Jack Dempsey, Steve Collins, and Andy Lee, all equally began their professional careers in America.
And yet Aaron McKenna’s world-title win was ultimately achieved from a gym in the back garden of his family home in the Monaghan countryside, about 10 paces, or five seconds, from where he rests his head at night. In his corner were neither Garcia nor Roach, but his dad and his older brother.
***
Back in January 2019, while the California-based McKenna boys were home for Christmas, The 42 paid a visit to the family home in Smithborough to shoot a short video documentary on their journeys to that point.
Fergal greenlit unrestricted access to a full training day, even permitting the filming of sparring between Aaron, then 19, and Stevie, 21, which was sufficiently ferocious that Dad had to warn them to cool the jets on a couple of occasions.
He also provided the brothers’ training logs, handwritten by himself into a chunky notebook; each run, each weight session, each spar meticulously detailed, the metrics informing the intensity of the following day’s training.
While they were as gentlemanly and accommodating with their time as ever, Aaron and Stevie were characteristically gun-shy as they sat for an interview on their living-room sofa, their personalities only properly unveiled once they hit the gym, and each other.
After a full day of shooting, two intrepid young reporters were set to hit the rocky road back to Dublin when mother Loretta intervened.
“Ah, lads, ye’ll stay for dinner, surely?”
All efforts to the contrary were waved away, and another 90 minutes were spent enjoying a tremendous chicken curry at the McKennas’ kitchen table, oldest brother Gary also calling over to bring the family to full complement. This was, after all, a precious moment in 2019 in which the parents and sons could all be together. That they chose to share it with a videographer and a sportswriter spoke volumes.
At the table, too, one could see evidence of the personalities that Aaron and Stevie would later become: the Liverpool chat, the slagging over fantasy football, the stories from California — like how Stevie had recently pretended to be a southpaw to blag his way into a sparring session with two-time Olympic gold medallist and then-pound-for-pound great Vasyl Lomachenko.
As darkness descended on Smithborough and home-time finally arrived, it was Fergal who this time intervened:
“Wait, lads, did we give ye a couple of gloves? We didn’t… Stephen, go out, there, to the gym, and bring in a couple of gloves for the two lads!”
Knowing the drill, Aaron and Stevie signed the gloves before handing a parting gift to their visitors at the front door.
“You never know,” laughed their father. “They could be worth a few bob one day.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Aaron McKenna Boxing Irish Boxing World Champion