LIFE IN IRELAND is tough, there’s nothing you can do/It’s the hand you’ve been given and up to you to see it through.
Eric Donovan published one of his poems last week. The boxer always loved a rhythm. His words land like well timed combinations: rapid and coherent.
People are not equal and life isn’t fair/You will quickly realise there’s inequality everywhere.
Formal education was not the dream on the Clonmullion council estate where he grew up. He left school early, like many from the area. They were students of a culture that treated the classroom with disdain.
“My own son Jack, who’s 14, I love talking to him about my past,” Donovan says. “Even my entrance exam and how I purposely chose to get the questions wrong because my peers told me that this is where you need to be. I said: ‘Jack, I made the biggest mistake by doing that.’ And what did he do? He knocked it out of the park and got himself into the highest class. That’s learning from your mistakes and passing it on to the next person. That’s all I try to do.”
These days, he shares his story in schools. The boy lost from education at 15 retraces those steps, so that succeeding generations may beat a clearer path.
“I find a lot of the kids now are in a crisis,” Donovan believes.
Kids are a lot more exposed to the world through social media. Everything they know, even in terms of their sexual development, they’re learning more from an earlier age. They need good honest men or women to stand up in front of them to talk to them about real life stories. Just be real. Kids love being real. They don’t like this cliché: ‘Don’t do drugs.’ They love hearing stories.
Last week, his views on recreational drug use generated a front-page lead in the Leinster Leader in his native Kildare. The Athy fighter moved to Drogheda late last year. Life in his adopted town, subject of so many recent lurid headlines, offers a snapshot of the Ireland he routinely encounters.
“There’s a drugs epidemic in this country,” he states. “People don’t realise. Every rural village in Ireland is flooded with drugs. The smell of marijuana on the street everywhere. Because I’m a counsellor as well, I’d be in touch with a lot of people who work in rehabilitation centres. It’s not getting any better. It’s a huge issue. It’s not going to be fixed by getting them at the top.”
Donovan offers compelling testimony for an alternative approach:
You need to go to the bottom and build up the kids with resolve. Bring in real-life people who have turned their lives around. There is no fairytale ending. Only pain, hardship, suicide, depression, guilt, remorse. It’s a horrific life.
He speaks from hard experience. Alcohol entered his world while he was still a young teenager. His talent for boxing, already yielding national titles, was no guard against youth’s eternal instinct.
“In the club [St Michael’s BC], I was giving 100%,” he recalls. “Outside the club, I was searching for oblivion. I couldn’t really make sense of anything.”
His first drink left him green but undeterred:
Me and a few lads robbed a bottle of wine from a supermarket. We all went down the back of a field, slugging three or four mouthfuls. I passed out, dizzy. Got sick. But then chased it again. It might have just numbed something for me. Then it becomes a craving. It feels like something that you actually need.
***
Donovan’s next bout represents a major hinge. Defeat to Mexico’s Joseafat Reyes, who has upset home favourites in the past, would likely spell the end of his career. But victory would take his record to 12-0 and push him towards a European title shot.
“I’m like a young budding entrepreneur trying to get a break,” he relates. “I’m putting everything, all that I can invest, into one thing.”
Professional fighting granted another spin on boxing’s carousel. First time around, during his amateur days, he went overboard.
Stylish and sure-footed in the ring, his head turned to greet adolescent temptations: “When I first started drinking and smoking, hanging around with girls, I was like: ‘This is cool.’ And boxing became uncool. Running the roads in the morning and training in the evening became less attractive.”
Dom O’Rourke, his coach at St Michael’s, tried to steer him back into the boxing lane. Coaxing Donovan required patience. O’Rourke was smart enough to listen.
“My coach used to keep following me when I’d be gone for two or three weeks from the club,” the boxer recalls. “He’d say: ‘What are you up to?’ I’d be like: ‘I’m sick of boxing. I gave enough of my life to boxing.’ I was only 15 years of age. He let me offload and then he’d say: ‘You’re good enough to go the Olympics.’ All this kind of stuff.”
But they never got the chance to find out. Donovan broke his hand at a house party, October 2011, effectively shutting the door on London 2012.
“I let a lot of people down that loved me and cared for me,” he confesses.
I used to get so low after the drinking episodes. It was all my own doing. Then I was beating myself up. I tried everything and anything: ‘I’ll go out later, I’ll only drink bottles, I won’t drink pints.’ I used to say prayers before I went out: ‘Please, God, let tonight be a good night.’ Every night, I crossed the invisible line where I blacked out. And I wake up in some dodgy place three days after. Now I’ve to go back with the Irish team and train, put some work in. A vicious circle. It’s hard for people to actually understand.
“My two environments were at loggerheads. I was always trying to escape. I was never content.”
The crash came not long after 2012’s Olympic Games. Future bleak, talent unfulfilled, he put the gloves away. No more juggling acts, no more yarns to tell.
“When I got older, I realised that the drink and drugs weren’t really the issue,” he reflects. “They were the masking tape. What was really going on? Why did I need to keep drinking and keep drugging? I had to get to the bottom of that. What is Eric made of? The character, flaws and all.”
He looks back with unease: “A lot of the time, I was oblivious to what I was even doing. I didn’t think.
A lot of my actions led to a lot of embarrassment, humiliation, resentment and guilt and depression. When that starts to catch up on you, you start to realise: ‘Holy fuck, I can’t keep reinventing myself. I can’t keep doing this.’ I was at the point of no return.
Cogent answers entailed harsh questions: “What was wrong with me that I had to keep trying to escape from me? The relationship that you have with yourself is the most important relationship you have in your life because if you don’t like the person that you are, then you’re spending your whole lifetime in a relationship with someone you don’t like. I had to come face to face with Eric.”
Previous attempts at cleaner living were compromised: “Loads of times I tried to stop but I kept hanging around with the same people. Someone said to me before: ‘If you sit in the barbers long enough, you’re going to get your hair cut.’ You know? I had to make root-and-branch change: how I was thinking about myself; how I was thinking about life; my perspective on life.”
But living sober can scare: “When I gave up drink and drugs for the first time, I thought that my life was ending. I didn’t know it was going to be a brand new beginning.”
For a start, he returned to education. The cost of studying counselling prompted a business venture, Eric Donovan Boxercise & Fitness, which funded his diploma. Back in St Michael’s, he felt sweet about his old science.
Four years ago, he donned a new moniker: Lilywhite Lightning entered the ropes for his first professional fight. His swerve, pushing 31, came late.
“The club is always a base to start and build again,” he says. “When you’re physically well, you start to get mentally well. No better feeling than putting your body through a fitness test, through exercise and activity. Blowing off steam, taking a few punches, giving a few punches. There’s something noble about it. As Chris Eubank would say: ‘It’s the warrior’s code.’ That’s it. You kind of prefer the physical pain as opposed to the emotional pain. I was always self destructive. It’s funny how I chose boxing because it’s a self destructive sport: taking blows, cutting weight, denying yourself.”
This time, though, one crucial difference: “Today, I’m boxing because I want to box, not because I have to box. I think I can achieve something. I’m so excited for life even after boxing.”
Whatever happens in the ring now seems least important. For so long defined by one sport, Donovan has moved beyond that narrow sphere.
“It surprises me that I’m even talking like this because I was always a bit of a liar,” he suggests. “I’d only ever tell you what you wanted to hear. I couldn’t imagine sitting down and having a conversation like this seven years ago. Every conversation used to be boxing. And boxing used to dominate my life, almost like an alter ego.”
His current coach, Ken Egan, faced similar demons and now works as a counsellor. Their interactions are instructive. Egan also sits as a Fine Gael councillor in Clondalkin. Conversations in the gym run a wide gamut: housing policy, waiting lists, social care.
“Because I’m self employed, I’m only one bad punch away from being on a trolley in the corridor of a hospital,” Donovan outlines.
When you think of all the other countries that seem to have a good grasp of these things, like Iceland and some of the Scandinavian countries: they look after their most vulnerable whereas in Ireland you feel if you’re vulnerable, you’re left to sink instead of being supported.
Writing provides a means to respond: “Sometimes I pick up a pen and when I do, the pen just flows and the words come out. It’s a vision in my head and I just write it out.”
He frames the current situation:
A lot of our most skilled people are leaving the country, not because they want to but because they have to. There are jobs for them in Ireland but it’s the cost of living. They can’t afford the rent. Before, emigration happened because there was no work. Now, there is work and they can’t afford to live.
Personal growth awoke his social conscience. Anger bubbled two weeks ago as he watched footage of Dublin City Council removing a homeless man’s tent: “Too many people are neglected by the State. Look at the queues for dinners up in Dublin.”
For all these concerns about the wider world, Donovan must maintain his own house. Regular support meetings keep him on track: “I go once or twice a week and I need that. It keeps my feet on the ground.
I know that I’m arm’s length away from going off the rails again. I can’t drink, simple as that. But I know I [technically] can. That’s the danger.
He moves through his days walking a beam: “I used a lot of coping mechanisms to get through life: the drink, the drugs. Now I deal with life as it is, straight up. And that can be tough. That’s why I need the support. There’s a part of me that’s so vulnerable and so immature. And then there’s another part of me that’s so mature and so powerful. It’s that balance all the time. Some days, I can deal with the biggest situation in my life. Then it could be something so small, like a pebble in your shoe that could just knock you completely off kilter, a comment that rattles you.”
He pauses, mind snagging on an image from the past.
“I was looking at an old photograph the other day,” he recounts. “A couple of them are locked up. A couple of them are on heroin. It makes me feel very lucky. A lot of them lads went to the club as well.”
Returning to those days unlocks another memory: “I remember my first family holiday was a St Vincent de Paul holiday. Young kids from the age of seven to 11 could go off to summer camp in Balbriggan, Sunshine House. Couldn’t wait for it. We’d go for a week. It was the highlight of my childhood. You’d go with all your friends from the estate. All the mothers down at the back square waving us off. All the boys and girls would be crying leaving the mothers. A week after, leaving Balbriggan, you’d be crying again because you’d such a special time.”
These contrasting shades colour his worldview. Every so often, the world moves him to verse. He cites his friend Mick O’Brien, a lecturer at Maynooth University, and an exchange that inspired If I Could Choose an Island.
“He’s a very proud Republican and a historian as well,” Donovan explains. “I remember having a passionate conversation with him about what Ireland means to him and what Ireland can do, the potential that Ireland has. I was so inspired by him. I jumped up, in the middle of the night, got a copy out of my locker and wrote it in, literally, two minutes. For me, poetry has to have a flow and a tone. It’s about rhyme, like a boxer.”
If I could choose an island, even only for a day/I would choose Ireland but in a complete and different way.
***
Fight week, final week of January, Donovan on the cusp.
Win or lose, everything could change next Saturday night. But even with all of that aside, his situation could not be more different.
“An outcome of a boxing match used to determine my wellbeing,” he admits. “Boxing was everything. I had no Plan B. Now I have a foundation of education. Now I have opportunities. Now I am more self-assured. Now I know I can go down many different avenues. Before, I didn’t see any of that. All I saw was Eric the boxer.”
Life through this wider lens lends keen perspective: “One day we’re all going to pass away. There’s nobody getting out of here alive! What are we trying to do? We all have something to offer.”
