Dublin's Emmet Brennan (L) and Kerry's Kevin Cronin exchange during their controversial original bout at the 3Arena last September, which was won by Brennan.
Madison Square Garden
A Dublin Olympian, a Kerry firefighter, and a bone to pick in the Big Apple
‘How can you hate on a person who has the same dreams as you? We’re just two people in each other’s way.’
FIREFIGHTER KEVIN CRONIN is in New York City for St Patrick’s weekend not to parade down 5th Avenue alongside the FDNY but to tend to personal business on Pennsylvania Plaza a few streets over.
Cronin, a first responder with Tralee Fire Brigade in Balloonagh, Co. Kerry, loves his job, but he’s still open to changing his life.
Understanding the significance of his Celtic super-middleweight title rematch with Paris Olympian Emmet Brennan at Madison Square Garden tonight, Cronin’s superiors in the station rostered him exclusively on weekends for a couple of months. That allowed ‘The Kingdom Warrior’ (9-2-1, 5KOs) to rent a house in Dublin with his coach Johnny Lewins and, for the first time in his 12-fight professional career, train as a full-time boxer from Monday to Friday.
The fire, now, has been lit under Cronin. The danger is that there might be no putting it out.
“To be honest with you, I had no idea that having the opportunity to train full-time could change me this much in such a short period of time,” Cronin tells The 42 from the boarding queue for his flight to New York on Wednesday.
“It’s like I’m after just jumping through years’ worth of levels — just, y’know, immediately getting to where I expected to be in two or three years’ time.
“And yeah, unfortunately for Emmet, it’s me who he’s after choosing to fight in New York — or maybe I chose to fight him,” laughs the 28-year-old Cronin. “But either way, I wouldn’t be wanting to fight me, y’know?
“The last few weeks have been the life I’ve always wanted to live but it just hasn’t been feasible. Like, financially, I’ve had to work, I’ve had to fund my own [boxing] career. I’ve had to drive up and down to Dublin for sparring, drive back down for work. When you beat some journeyman, you can’t afford to put everything into boxing.
“Whereas this opens so many bigger doors for me that the risk — just of taking so long off work and pouring every penny I have into camp — it’s worth taking.”
Emmet Brennan (L) and Kevin Cronin weigh in for their Celtic super-middleweight rematch at MSG. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Emmet Brennan, meanwhile, knows intimately the benefits of relocating for a full training camp: the North Inner City Dubliner was an elite amateur, captivating the nation as he fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming an Olympian in Tokyo four years ago.
Brennan knows the struggle, too: boxers in Ireland’s High Performance Unit are effectively professional athletes who don’t get paid unless they earn private sponsorship or, in the case of major medal winners, state grants.
Brennan had none of this when he pursued his Olympic dream full-time in 2019. He quit his job, took out a Credit Union loan, and never looked back.
The 33-year-old Brennan, a qualified fitness instructor who ditched the vest for boxing’s paid ranks in 2023, knows what good looks like when it comes to fight preparation.
When he jumps on a Zoom call with The 42 a couple of hours after Cronin’s plane departs Dublin Airport on Wednesday, the undefeated Celtic super-middleweight champion [5-0, 1KO] has already been set up in New York for more than a week.
And transformative training camp or not, Brennan thinks Cronin and his team have made a balls of their itinerary.
“I’ve seen earlier that he’s just coming over today”, says Brennan, “and I was like, ‘You know what, like? Big, big mistake coming over this late.’
“It gives him, what, like, four days?
“Look, I want the best fight possible but I’m just thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ He should have been over here last Wednesday with one of his team; pay the extra few quid and get a cheap house out in Queens or up in The Bronx or something and acclimatising.
If you’re on holiday, your jetlag will be gone after four or five days — but when you’re standing up from your stool going into the sixth, seventh, eighth round and your legs are a little bit heavier than they usually are, you’re gonna realise, ‘Fuck, I should have come over a week earlier.’
The smiling Brennan speaks from personal experience. He relocated to New York after the Tokyo Olympics in an initial effort to turn professional only for shoulder surgery to scupper his plans.
His well-documented past struggles with alcohol came to a head in Big Apple bars thereafter. And while Brennan no longer drinks, he’s the first to admit that his wild sabbatical in 2022 had its perks: the friendly Dubliner gained helpful connections and, eventually, a social circle on the city’s pub scene.
That’s worth a few hundred tickets on a St Patrick’s Weekend show at Madison Square Garden’s 5,000-capacity Theater venue, where he will seek to set the record straight and beat Kevin Cronin for a second time on Callum Walsh’s undercard tonight.
Brennan has also twice since returned to the city to fight, earning victories on small-hall shows in Midtown and Queens on either side of his contentious original win over Cronin at the 3Arena last September.
He found himself a bit sluggish on his first business trip back 12 months ago, squeezing out a majority decision over Queens journeyman Devaun Lee at Sony Hall, which is why he flew in so far in advance of tonight’s rematch with Cronin.
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“So, look”, Brennan says, “I’m sure Kevin had a great camp — great — but I just think he did the last bit of it wrong.
“And Mick Conlan, being his manager, should have probably been on the ball there… but look, I’m glad he’s had a good camp,” Brennan adds.
Brennan celebrating with the Celtic super-middleweight title after his contentious victory over Cronin. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
Brennan’s shot across the bow of his fellow former Olympian, Michael Conlan, is quite deliberate.
Conlan, who preceded tonight’s headliner Callum Walsh as the Paddy’s Weekend poster boy at MSG, plainly pissed off Brennan with his cries of robbery on Cronin’s behalf when the Dubliner was adjudged the narrow winner of their original encounter six months ago.
Conlan, of course, was just doing what any manager would do for their boxer, but it rankled with Brennan on some level to get it in the ear from a supposed peer after what had been an undeniably close fight (this writer scored it a draw from ringside, for what it’s worth).
“I’ve looked at the fight now six or seven times”, Brennan says, “because we’re obviously analysing and doing tactics for the rematch — and, like, the fight is not a robbery.
If you’re judging that, you’re probably either gonna give it to me by one round, score it a draw, or give it to Kevin by one round.
“It’s not a robbery but when you have the likes of Mick Conlan coming out, and then you have the likes of Dana White saying the same…” Brennan shrugs. (UFC president White, for whom Cork boxer Callum Walsh is a passion project, effectively co-promoted that Walsh-headlined Dublin show and fumed afterwards at the judges’ scoring of the Brennan-Cronin bout).
“He’s the most powerful man in the sport now,” the smiling Brennan says of White, who recently expanded his boxing portfolio in a partnership with Saudi Arabia. “I’m not gonna go against him.
But, like, Dana White was there to look at Callum Walsh. He wasn’t there to look at myself or Kevin, so he would have only had half an eye on us. He was sitting beside Michael Conlan and Kevin’s team as well, so he’s hearing them shouting and celebrating… I don’t think he looked at it from a fair point of view.
“But to make the best of a bad situation, all of that outrage has taken us to Madison Square Garden,” says Brennan, who will tonight realise a second boxing dream.
Cronin loads up a shot on Brennan. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
The Kingdom Warrior is left dismayed by the verdict in Brennan's favour. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
The Kingdom Warrior, too, is keen to leave the controversy of his split-decision loss to Brennan in his rearview, albeit that’s easier said than done.
“I’m done thinking about the first one,” Cronin says.
“…But it’s kind of one where I don’t want to move on without righting that wrong, y’know?”
Cronin’s only regret in the days following his sore loss was, “Oh fuck, why didn’t I have a conversation with Dana White?”
But a week or two after the fight, the Milltown native was catching up on coverage of a UFC event when he stumbled upon White invoking his name in a conversation with somebody else.
“I’m watching it like, ‘Jeez, this is one of the biggest men in combat sports, like, and I’ve just heard my name come out of his mouth, which is it’s pretty cool.’
“But look”, Cronin continues, “I’ve made these things happen for myself, y’know? I’ve been willing to take these risks, jumping into these fights as the B-side.”
He’s right.
An all-round sportsman, Cronin played for Milltown-Castlemaine up to U21, also lining out for Mid Kerry. He was, and remains, obsessed with Gaelic football — he would have been in Austin Stack Park for Kerry’s league victory over Armagh yesterday if he wasn’t gearing up for his own battle across the Atlantic today.
Cronin is just more obsessed with boxing, a reality with which he made peace as he approached his 20s.
A solid amateur career out of the Cashen Vale club in Tralee saw him campaign up as far as super-heavyweight (Cronin once weighed 118kg for a bout, but in the paid ranks he competes at around 76kg).
He made his professional debut as a 22-year-old in the familiar confines of the National Stadium this month six years ago, going on to claim wins in England, The Netherlands and Spain before throwing his name in the hat for domestic dust-ups.
His two meetings with Limerick’s Jamie Morrissey in 2023 were classics of their genre. Cronin was cursed to finish their back-to-back bouts with a razor-thin defeat and a split draw, but his barnstorming performances caught the eye of the Conlan brothers who added him to their management stable.
This led to a US debut and, eventually, to his first clash with Brennan, another Irish fight-of-the-year contender at the 3Arena last September.
WHAT. A FIGHT. 🤯
Emmet Brennan and Kevin Cronin just showed us Irish boxing at its finest 🇮🇪
Cronin’s record of 9-2-1 (5KOs) doesn’t scream at you off his BoxRec page but it could just as easily be 12-0 (5KOs), which would give him a very different profile on paper.
To gain recognition commensurate with his talent, he must simply blow the door down the old-fashioned way, by having his hand raised in an eagerly anticipated repeat-or-revenge clash with a domestic adversary.
And the old-fashioned way suits the gentlemanly Cronin just fine. He is, after all, a 28-year-old pillar of his community. Even if he wanted to adopt a boxing ‘persona’ at this stage of the game, he’d be laughed over the Cork border. But it’s not his natural inclination in any case; Cronin is just a fairly normal GAA head who happens to be very good at boxing.
“Listen, there’s obviously the sales pitch behind it that I could jump on to sell the fight for myself but, ah, look, is it a rivalry? Nah.
“I’ve no rivalries with anyone,” Cronin laughs. “I don’t bring personal feelings into a fight or anything like that. I’ve no ‘beef’.
“My career isn’t gonna be defined by me beating Emmet Brennan. He’s just the next stepping stone on my journey. That’s all he is.
“Anyway, every fight from here on out is my world-title fight because I can’t afford another loss. And because of that, I’ll treat every opponent the same.”
Brennan checks the clock at the 3Arena. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
“I have no ill feelings towards Kevin either,” Brennan says.
Look, how can you hate on a person who has the same dreams as you, works as hard as you, and is trying to do exactly what you’re doing? We’re just two people in each other’s way.
“You see what happened to John Cooney a few weeks ago,” adds Brennan, referring to the popular Galway super-featherweight who passed away in February after suffering a brain injury in a Celtic title bout in Belfast. “That sheds a light on things where, like, you’ve gotta respect what we’re both doing here.
“I have a lot of respect for Kevin and I definitely don’t have any ill feelings towards him. For me, it’s just business and it’s about winning on Sunday night and then moving on with my career.”
The only shame about tonight’s 360 Promotions card at Madison Square Garden, which is headlined by Callum Walsh [12-0, 10KOs] versus Scotland’s Dean Sutherland [19-1, 7KOs] and features plenty of rising talent from this country, is that one of Irish boxing’s good guys is probably going to lose.
Cronin has been blown away by the support in Milltown, Tralee, Killarney and beyond, from where “gangs of people” have forked out to watch him avenge his defeat.
Brennan will have a couple hundred in the arena, too, some from New York, others over from his own home city, all of them demanding that he avenge his own win.
As a firefighter from County Kerry and an Olympian from Dublin’s inner city settle their professional differences at an iconic boxing venue, the neutrals among us at home can celebrate their similarities on a UFC Fight Pass stream.
But which of Kevin Cronin or Emmet Brennan will be celebrating when the dust settles on their violent non-rivalry?
Weigh in Results ⚖️
10 round Super Middleweight contest
Emmet Brennan: 167lbs 2ozs Kevin Cronin: 167lbs 8ozs
“People haven’t even seen a fraction of what I can do,” Cronin says. “I think in the first fight, I thought too much about what Brennan was going to bring to the table instead of focusing on bringing my own strengths to the table.
“Sunday night, we’re getting the job done by any means necessary. It could be a world champion in front of me — I’m winning Sunday and it’s as simple as that.
This is my this is my breakout night. I’ll make sure the world of boxing knows my name after this one.
“It’s going to be a treat,” says Brennan. “It’s going to be a cracker.
“Both of us are going to be in prime condition. With the first fight, we only really got confirmation about five or six weeks out. This time, we’ve had confirmation like 12, 13, 14 weeks out, so you’re going to see both of us in tip-top shape.
“Both of us are probably going to produce a career-best performance which is going to give the people in MSG and the people watching back home a great spectacle.
“It’s going to be fight of the night and I’m just focused on winning.”
Callum Walsh v Dean Sutherland, featuring Emmet Brennan v Kevin Cronin II, can be viewed live on UFC Fight Pass tonight from 10pm Irish time.
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A Dublin Olympian, a Kerry firefighter, and a bone to pick in the Big Apple
FIREFIGHTER KEVIN CRONIN is in New York City for St Patrick’s weekend not to parade down 5th Avenue alongside the FDNY but to tend to personal business on Pennsylvania Plaza a few streets over.
Cronin, a first responder with Tralee Fire Brigade in Balloonagh, Co. Kerry, loves his job, but he’s still open to changing his life.
Understanding the significance of his Celtic super-middleweight title rematch with Paris Olympian Emmet Brennan at Madison Square Garden tonight, Cronin’s superiors in the station rostered him exclusively on weekends for a couple of months. That allowed ‘The Kingdom Warrior’ (9-2-1, 5KOs) to rent a house in Dublin with his coach Johnny Lewins and, for the first time in his 12-fight professional career, train as a full-time boxer from Monday to Friday.
The fire, now, has been lit under Cronin. The danger is that there might be no putting it out.
“To be honest with you, I had no idea that having the opportunity to train full-time could change me this much in such a short period of time,” Cronin tells The 42 from the boarding queue for his flight to New York on Wednesday.
“It’s like I’m after just jumping through years’ worth of levels — just, y’know, immediately getting to where I expected to be in two or three years’ time.
“And yeah, unfortunately for Emmet, it’s me who he’s after choosing to fight in New York — or maybe I chose to fight him,” laughs the 28-year-old Cronin. “But either way, I wouldn’t be wanting to fight me, y’know?
“The last few weeks have been the life I’ve always wanted to live but it just hasn’t been feasible. Like, financially, I’ve had to work, I’ve had to fund my own [boxing] career. I’ve had to drive up and down to Dublin for sparring, drive back down for work. When you beat some journeyman, you can’t afford to put everything into boxing.
“Whereas this opens so many bigger doors for me that the risk — just of taking so long off work and pouring every penny I have into camp — it’s worth taking.”
Emmet Brennan, meanwhile, knows intimately the benefits of relocating for a full training camp: the North Inner City Dubliner was an elite amateur, captivating the nation as he fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming an Olympian in Tokyo four years ago.
Brennan knows the struggle, too: boxers in Ireland’s High Performance Unit are effectively professional athletes who don’t get paid unless they earn private sponsorship or, in the case of major medal winners, state grants.
Brennan had none of this when he pursued his Olympic dream full-time in 2019. He quit his job, took out a Credit Union loan, and never looked back.
The 33-year-old Brennan, a qualified fitness instructor who ditched the vest for boxing’s paid ranks in 2023, knows what good looks like when it comes to fight preparation.
When he jumps on a Zoom call with The 42 a couple of hours after Cronin’s plane departs Dublin Airport on Wednesday, the undefeated Celtic super-middleweight champion [5-0, 1KO] has already been set up in New York for more than a week.
And transformative training camp or not, Brennan thinks Cronin and his team have made a balls of their itinerary.
“I’ve seen earlier that he’s just coming over today”, says Brennan, “and I was like, ‘You know what, like? Big, big mistake coming over this late.’
“It gives him, what, like, four days?
“Look, I want the best fight possible but I’m just thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ He should have been over here last Wednesday with one of his team; pay the extra few quid and get a cheap house out in Queens or up in The Bronx or something and acclimatising.
The smiling Brennan speaks from personal experience. He relocated to New York after the Tokyo Olympics in an initial effort to turn professional only for shoulder surgery to scupper his plans.
His well-documented past struggles with alcohol came to a head in Big Apple bars thereafter. And while Brennan no longer drinks, he’s the first to admit that his wild sabbatical in 2022 had its perks: the friendly Dubliner gained helpful connections and, eventually, a social circle on the city’s pub scene.
That’s worth a few hundred tickets on a St Patrick’s Weekend show at Madison Square Garden’s 5,000-capacity Theater venue, where he will seek to set the record straight and beat Kevin Cronin for a second time on Callum Walsh’s undercard tonight.
Brennan has also twice since returned to the city to fight, earning victories on small-hall shows in Midtown and Queens on either side of his contentious original win over Cronin at the 3Arena last September.
He found himself a bit sluggish on his first business trip back 12 months ago, squeezing out a majority decision over Queens journeyman Devaun Lee at Sony Hall, which is why he flew in so far in advance of tonight’s rematch with Cronin.
“So, look”, Brennan says, “I’m sure Kevin had a great camp — great — but I just think he did the last bit of it wrong.
“And Mick Conlan, being his manager, should have probably been on the ball there… but look, I’m glad he’s had a good camp,” Brennan adds.
Brennan’s shot across the bow of his fellow former Olympian, Michael Conlan, is quite deliberate.
Conlan, who preceded tonight’s headliner Callum Walsh as the Paddy’s Weekend poster boy at MSG, plainly pissed off Brennan with his cries of robbery on Cronin’s behalf when the Dubliner was adjudged the narrow winner of their original encounter six months ago.
Conlan, of course, was just doing what any manager would do for their boxer, but it rankled with Brennan on some level to get it in the ear from a supposed peer after what had been an undeniably close fight (this writer scored it a draw from ringside, for what it’s worth).
“I’ve looked at the fight now six or seven times”, Brennan says, “because we’re obviously analysing and doing tactics for the rematch — and, like, the fight is not a robbery.
“It’s not a robbery but when you have the likes of Mick Conlan coming out, and then you have the likes of Dana White saying the same…” Brennan shrugs. (UFC president White, for whom Cork boxer Callum Walsh is a passion project, effectively co-promoted that Walsh-headlined Dublin show and fumed afterwards at the judges’ scoring of the Brennan-Cronin bout).
“He’s the most powerful man in the sport now,” the smiling Brennan says of White, who recently expanded his boxing portfolio in a partnership with Saudi Arabia. “I’m not gonna go against him.
“But to make the best of a bad situation, all of that outrage has taken us to Madison Square Garden,” says Brennan, who will tonight realise a second boxing dream.
The Kingdom Warrior, too, is keen to leave the controversy of his split-decision loss to Brennan in his rearview, albeit that’s easier said than done.
“I’m done thinking about the first one,” Cronin says.
“…But it’s kind of one where I don’t want to move on without righting that wrong, y’know?”
Cronin’s only regret in the days following his sore loss was, “Oh fuck, why didn’t I have a conversation with Dana White?”
But a week or two after the fight, the Milltown native was catching up on coverage of a UFC event when he stumbled upon White invoking his name in a conversation with somebody else.
“I’m watching it like, ‘Jeez, this is one of the biggest men in combat sports, like, and I’ve just heard my name come out of his mouth, which is it’s pretty cool.’
“But look”, Cronin continues, “I’ve made these things happen for myself, y’know? I’ve been willing to take these risks, jumping into these fights as the B-side.”
He’s right.
An all-round sportsman, Cronin played for Milltown-Castlemaine up to U21, also lining out for Mid Kerry. He was, and remains, obsessed with Gaelic football — he would have been in Austin Stack Park for Kerry’s league victory over Armagh yesterday if he wasn’t gearing up for his own battle across the Atlantic today.
Cronin is just more obsessed with boxing, a reality with which he made peace as he approached his 20s.
A solid amateur career out of the Cashen Vale club in Tralee saw him campaign up as far as super-heavyweight (Cronin once weighed 118kg for a bout, but in the paid ranks he competes at around 76kg).
He made his professional debut as a 22-year-old in the familiar confines of the National Stadium this month six years ago, going on to claim wins in England, The Netherlands and Spain before throwing his name in the hat for domestic dust-ups.
His two meetings with Limerick’s Jamie Morrissey in 2023 were classics of their genre. Cronin was cursed to finish their back-to-back bouts with a razor-thin defeat and a split draw, but his barnstorming performances caught the eye of the Conlan brothers who added him to their management stable.
This led to a US debut and, eventually, to his first clash with Brennan, another Irish fight-of-the-year contender at the 3Arena last September.
Cronin’s record of 9-2-1 (5KOs) doesn’t scream at you off his BoxRec page but it could just as easily be 12-0 (5KOs), which would give him a very different profile on paper.
To gain recognition commensurate with his talent, he must simply blow the door down the old-fashioned way, by having his hand raised in an eagerly anticipated repeat-or-revenge clash with a domestic adversary.
And the old-fashioned way suits the gentlemanly Cronin just fine. He is, after all, a 28-year-old pillar of his community. Even if he wanted to adopt a boxing ‘persona’ at this stage of the game, he’d be laughed over the Cork border. But it’s not his natural inclination in any case; Cronin is just a fairly normal GAA head who happens to be very good at boxing.
“Listen, there’s obviously the sales pitch behind it that I could jump on to sell the fight for myself but, ah, look, is it a rivalry? Nah.
“I’ve no rivalries with anyone,” Cronin laughs. “I don’t bring personal feelings into a fight or anything like that. I’ve no ‘beef’.
“My career isn’t gonna be defined by me beating Emmet Brennan. He’s just the next stepping stone on my journey. That’s all he is.
“Anyway, every fight from here on out is my world-title fight because I can’t afford another loss. And because of that, I’ll treat every opponent the same.”
“I have no ill feelings towards Kevin either,” Brennan says.
“You see what happened to John Cooney a few weeks ago,” adds Brennan, referring to the popular Galway super-featherweight who passed away in February after suffering a brain injury in a Celtic title bout in Belfast. “That sheds a light on things where, like, you’ve gotta respect what we’re both doing here.
“I have a lot of respect for Kevin and I definitely don’t have any ill feelings towards him. For me, it’s just business and it’s about winning on Sunday night and then moving on with my career.”
The only shame about tonight’s 360 Promotions card at Madison Square Garden, which is headlined by Callum Walsh [12-0, 10KOs] versus Scotland’s Dean Sutherland [19-1, 7KOs] and features plenty of rising talent from this country, is that one of Irish boxing’s good guys is probably going to lose.
Cronin has been blown away by the support in Milltown, Tralee, Killarney and beyond, from where “gangs of people” have forked out to watch him avenge his defeat.
Brennan will have a couple hundred in the arena, too, some from New York, others over from his own home city, all of them demanding that he avenge his own win.
As a firefighter from County Kerry and an Olympian from Dublin’s inner city settle their professional differences at an iconic boxing venue, the neutrals among us at home can celebrate their similarities on a UFC Fight Pass stream.
But which of Kevin Cronin or Emmet Brennan will be celebrating when the dust settles on their violent non-rivalry?
“People haven’t even seen a fraction of what I can do,” Cronin says. “I think in the first fight, I thought too much about what Brennan was going to bring to the table instead of focusing on bringing my own strengths to the table.
“Sunday night, we’re getting the job done by any means necessary. It could be a world champion in front of me — I’m winning Sunday and it’s as simple as that.
“It’s going to be a treat,” says Brennan. “It’s going to be a cracker.
“Both of us are going to be in prime condition. With the first fight, we only really got confirmation about five or six weeks out. This time, we’ve had confirmation like 12, 13, 14 weeks out, so you’re going to see both of us in tip-top shape.
“Both of us are probably going to produce a career-best performance which is going to give the people in MSG and the people watching back home a great spectacle.
“It’s going to be fight of the night and I’m just focused on winning.”
Callum Walsh v Dean Sutherland, featuring Emmet Brennan v Kevin Cronin II, can be viewed live on UFC Fight Pass tonight from 10pm Irish time.
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