LEAVING CERT IRISH oral examiners hear so much about trips to the pictiúrlann and spending spare time with the cairde that James Power’s 15 minutes must have made for a near-miraculous change of pace for the woman sat opposite him in Coachford College, Cork, on Monday morning.
Indeed, if anyone was forced to stifle a yawn or two, it was likely Power himself.
The 17-year-old Dripsey native, Ireland’s youngest professional boxer, had only landed into Cork Airport mere hours beforehand, at 3am, having added another stoppage victory — his fourth in as many pro fights — to his CV in Hungary on Saturday.
The lightweight banger had made light work of a local opponent, dropping him twice and halting him early in the second round — this despite being offered the six-round contest only a day before he flew out to weigh in on the Friday.
And he made light work of his first taste of official Leaving Cert action, too, even if his interrogator was initially sceptical of the fact that the fresh-faced Rebel was, as he explained, ‘an dornálaí gairmiúil is óige in Éirinn’. In fairness to her, there wasn’t a scratch on him.
“Yeah, it wasn’t too bad — wasn’t too bad, now,” a content Power tells The42. “Can’t complain.
“I went into school for eight o’clock. The teachers were a big help on the morning — they let me use their classes to look over the Irish, so that was very good of them.
“The examiner at the start — I don’t think she really believed me that I was a fighter. I think there was nearly a look of, ‘Aw, yeah, here we go — yeah, okay,’” he laughs.
But she started asking me a couple of questions and I was answering them away. She asked me who my trainer was, I said ‘Pete Taylor up in Dublin’, so she started asking me questions about Katie. And when I was able to answer, then, I think she understood that I was telling the truth… But if I couldn’t answer the questions I’d say she would have thought I was lying!
“It was grand,” he adds. “I’d be relatively well enough prepared to do an exam in any subject now, really, and get high enough in it.”
They tend not to be shy of confidence, boxers.
Power doesn’t conceal his competitive streak, either. On the morning of the exam, while wishing his sixth-year peers well on his Instagram Story, he joked: “Going to walk into the oral with the flag wrapped around me and hope for the best” — the flag in question being the tricolour which has accompanied him on his four fight trips abroad.
But when his boxing advisor, the veteran cutman Andy O’Neill, replied, “Bet ya you don’t”, it was no longer a joke.
“I had to win the bet,” Power chuckles. “I had to bring the flag in with me.”
And so he did.
Power nearly had to cram more for Saturday’s fight in Hungary than he did Monday’s exam: his fourth pro contest was bestowed upon him at just 48 hours’ notice.
With the fighter knuckling down at a crucial juncture in his school career, the aforementioned O’Neill and the fighter’s mother handle all of his boxing business.
Power simply stays fight-ready and waits for the nod from Mum.
“I told my mother and Andy that if something pops up, I’m not gonna say ‘no’ — I’ll always say ‘yeah’, like,” he says.
So then Andy contacted my mother the other day and said Burkey (Power’s stablemate, Robbie Burke) is going out to Hungary — it’d be a shame if James missed the trip. There’s a fight there for him around his weight. Six rounds. Do you reckon he’d be interested?’ I got home from school and my mother said: ‘I’ve booked flights for ya. You’re going out there.’ She kind of just said: ‘Yeah, you’re getting on the plane tomorrow.’
“Nah, they’re a big help, both of them, now,” he adds. “They kind of organise everything for me — I don’t have to really do anything on the organisation side of things.
My mother drives me to and from training. Not just me — she drives my sister to and from training every day as well. And then she drives me up to Dublin on the weekends to train with Pete Taylor. Her entire life revolves around me and my sister, and we couldn’t do it without her.
Boxing is a mother’s nightmare but Mrs Power can at least rest easy in the knowledge that there’ll be no Leaving Cert holiday for her son, who muses that he has “probably done enough trips, now, over the last year”.
Reason being: since turning professional Power has been too young to obtain a fighter’s licence for the Boxing Union of Ireland (BUI), and so he has instead fought twice each in Mexico and Hungary in order to light the touch paper on his fledgeling career.
And there was no need for nerves on his mother’s behalf during his second fight in Hungary on Saturday, either, as things panned out.
“Normally, I go out looking for the kill,” says Power. “I try to finish them as quickly as possible. The gameplan going into this one — it was my first six-rounder, so I wanted to get at least four rounds in. I wanted to get a few rounds of experience under my belt.
“I did the first round nice and calmly, I was picking my shots. I went out in the second round and kind of picked it up a little bit.
“I dropped him. He got up. I dropped him again. He got up. And then I kind of just put the pressure on him and finished him off, then. I would have rathered that he was a little tougher and he could have taken a couple of shots, but… I landed that body shot that put him down as well, and that felt good,” he laughs.
They’re not the best opponents, so I wouldn’t have to be training like a pro all the time. Ability-wise I should be good enough to beat any of them, and if I wasn’t good enough to beat them, I shouldn’t be in the game, really.
As well as being advised by Andy O’Neill, Power can also count on the support of Assassin Boxing in his corner — although, again, he remains too young to formalise any kind of management deal with a third party.
All of that will change soon, however. And the big 1-8 will also bring with it a big fight date on home soil for the first time.
But cognisant of the opportunity to properly announce himself to the Irish sports fan — Assassin’s TV arrangement with TG4 pushing that door open further — Power wants to prepare for his impending Irish bow in a properly professional manner.
“I was talking to Kaz [Evans] and Conor Slater (promoters with Assassin) and Andy about it.
I turn 18 next week, so I could try to squeeze and Irish debut in before the Leaving Cert if I wanted. But I want to try and get a good training camp done — like training properly, full-time, like a pro — just to give everyone in Ireland the best version of me, d’you know? I think that’d be a good idea.
“Like, I finish the Leaving Cert in June, and then I could have July and August — two hard months of proper training. And then late August or start of September, I could maybe make my Irish debut.”
As things stand, he “trains away at home” during the week, rarely straying far north of his fight weight. He heads up the M50 each weekend to train under a new coach in Pete Taylor, whose “incredible, scary knowledge of boxing” has already manifested itself in Power’s arsenal by way of “small tweaks” that made little sense to the Cork youngster until he tried them in sparring.
Schedule-wise, it’s “not ideal”, he says, and one suspects he might be putting it mildly.
But while friends sun themselves in Ayia Napa or Santa Ponsa this summer, Power will sweat it out in a boxing gym in Ballyfermot. Only then will the sacrifices truly begin.
“With school and stuff, you can’t really train like a pro, and to be fair, that’s not really good enough, like,” he admits. “But it’s getting the job done, and I’m going to focus now on the Leaving Cert, and when I get the Leaving Cert done, sure who knows? I could take a couple of years out and try boxing full-time, see what that’s like. Or I could go to college.
“But I’m definitely going to head up to Dublin for the summer and train all summer with the likes of Gary Cully, Luke Keeler, Davey Oliver [Joyce]. I’ll try it full-time and see how that goes.
“That’s the plan. I could go up there for the summer and, after a week, hate it and want to come home, d’you know? Or I could go up there and love it and stay there, then.
“It’s just a matter of trying it.”
Before all of that, though? The bloody French oral next week.
“We’ve a good bit prepared for that,” he says. “A lot of boxing again. Erra, it should be all right.”
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