IT TOOK MUHAMMAD Ali 11 rounds to polish off Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in the last big boxing match held in Croke Park, back in 19 July, 1972.
It was such a novel event that nobody had even brought boxing gloves. They had to be hastily retrieved from London on the day of the fight. The attendance was also disastrous.
To draw a line from Ali to Taylor, shows the transformation of the world, of the sport and of women’s role in sport.
It might come as a surprise to many to learn the last time an Irish fighter headlined a bout in Croke Park, it was just over a century ago.
Bartley Madden was appearing for the second time there in August 1926. A former Roscommon footballer, he made a career for himself as a durable opponent in American fight circles.
While never quite a contender, he fought New Zealander Tom Heeney who was a prospect. Madden hung in for 20 hard rounds as Heeney won and later challenged Gene Tunney for the Heavyweight title of the world at Yankee Stadium.
That was long forgotten by the time Ali met Lewis.
How it came about was through a singular individual: Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue of Killorglin, a Circus Strongman touring with Duffy’s Circus, turned pub landlord and, somehow, implausibly, boxing promoter who leveraged his friendship and connections with Henry Cooper to get Ali to fight in Ireland.
Dave Hannigan, author of ‘The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland’ tracked his journey from army cadet who spent long hours in the gym hoping to become a professional weight lifter, to the man who would pull a cart laden with men around the circus ring, a tethered rope between his teeth.
After his arrival in London, where he owned different pubs including The Wellington in Shepherd’s Bush, he kept pushing on.
He had a wrestling ring installed in the pub. In another superhuman feat of strength, he pulled a London bus up Kilburn High Street with one hand.
Advertisement
Butty Sugrue 'relaxing' in his pub, the Admiral Nelson in Kilburn. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Sugrue became well-connected and achieved a level of fame that saw him appear on a Saturday night show on terrestrial television by the mid-70s, millions of the British public watching a snapshot of that strange time as Jimmy Savile hosted Sugrue and the other guest, Gary Glitter.
After bringing Henry Cooper on a tour of rural Ireland in 1971, the notion of a big fight in Ireland tantalised Sugrue. He wasn’t long finding out that if he wanted Ali, he had to get the suave New York boxing writer and promoter Harold Conrad onside.
Conrad, a man who would be immortalised in the novel ‘The Harder They Fall’ and played by Humphrey Bogart in the film adaptation, made an odd couple with Sugrue, the man who once hosted an ‘Indoor Puck Fair’ in his pub with an imported Kerry goat, and tried to convince his pub patrons that the recently blown up Nelson’s Column would be making an appearance.
Perhaps wary, Conrad told Sugrue the bottom line: a guarantee of $300,000 by April 1972. Somehow, Sugrue went to the Williams and & Glyn’s Bank and secured the fee, promptly wired to New York.
All of a sudden, Ali was coming to Ireland. Or not, as the contemporaneous Irish sports writers would sniff.
“Of course when Butty came up to Dublin to promote Ali coming to fight in Dublin that summer, he was laughed out the gate. The sportswriters basically were making fun of him and feeling it was the most ludicrous thing anyone would ever hear,” says Hannigan down the line from his desk as a history professor at Suffolk County Community College, Long Island.
Even when Conrad came to town, to give it back-up, he had to say it was legit. He was shocked at how cynical the Irish sports writers were!
“Peader O’Brien kept trying to tell Conrad that Butty was a bit of a chancer and that this could never happen,” Hannigan adds.
Ali was in decent nick. This was not a fading light picking up the cheque. Many triumphant days lay ahead of him.
He had endured his licence being stripped over his stance on Vietnam and had the year prior lost ‘The Fight of the Century’ to Joe Frazier, who was in no mood to grant him a rematch after some merciless pre-fight taunting.
Ali enters a press conference in Dublin. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
To keep his wheels rolling, he ended up fighting around every six weeks or so. But when he came to Ireland, a handy hook of his ancestor, paternal great-grandfather Abe O’Grady from Ennis, wasn’t something Ali wanted to encourage.
“Ali in 1972 was still talking radical language, that the white man is the devil,” says Hannigan.
“So when somebody brings up the O’Grady connection, he plays it down and says, ‘There was a lot of sneaking around in them days.’
When researching the book, Hannigan spoke to the famous Irish-American journalist Pete Hamill who had been dispatched by The New York Post to Dublin for the week.
Hamill sensed the start of some soul-searching for Ali, the man who was proclaiming the white man as devil, and yet everywhere he went he was shown the love he thought only existed for him in Harlem and Atlanta.
When it came to deciding the venue, there was no early day megaphone diplomacy between a Peter McKenna or Eddie Hearn. Leopardstown Racecourse, Dalymount Park and Lansdowne Road were all in play. But it was Croke Park in the end and there were no agonised editorials or Central Council votes required.
The money on the table for the GAA this weekend is the sort you get when 83,000 paying through the gates. But in 1972 just 18,725 attended.
It would seem they got their dynamic pricing wrong. The best seat in Croke Park that night was £15. For context, the best seat for that year’s All-Ireland final was £2.
And when the National Anthem began playing, it was as if a cue for several thousand more to enter the ground through the Hill 16 end.
Either way, they fell well short of the break-even figure of 30,000 and made no profit once all expenses had been paid out.
Sugrue had claimed he would donate some profits to a charity ‘for the mentally handicapped children of Ireland,’ but nothing was forthcoming.
Two Garda have the craic with Ali. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The most interesting element to it all was how Ali moved around the place, enchanting one and all who was pulled into his orbit.
Pete Hamill detailed how he would walk around the city, followed by a sea of adoring public.
Much to his distaste, he was billeted at the Oppermann’s Country Club on the foothills of the Dublin mountains, but would have preferred to stay in the Gresham, where all the fun and games were and that housed the likes of Conrad, and the visiting Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and family.
Ali gives a tap to the 14-year-old Ronnie Regan, son of Ronald, in The Gresham Hotel. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
At one stage, he attended Leinster House and Taoiseach Jack Lynch became the first Head of State to have a formal audience with Ali.
On a trip to the Dáil, he had a look around and headed for the canteen. One staff member made a call home to his wife to say he would be late home, and when she asked why, he put Ali on the phone to state his case.
He attended a charity Fête in Palmerstown on a Sunday afternoon, where he played crazy golf. He found time to record an advertisement for Quinnsworth Supermarkets. John Huston turned up at a sparring session and mugged for the camera.
Related Reads
How Katie Taylor cracked America and changed the paradigm of female fighter pay
Taylor slips into business mode with one last Irish goodbye, but not before making another dream come true
'This ring-walk, I truly believe it will be one of the greatest moments the sport has ever seen'
John Huston attends a workout. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
When RTÉ came looking for an interview, he charged them £100 but wanted cash. A runner was hastily dispatched to grab the money from the canteen till. The year before, he had billed the Parkinson Show £12,000 for an interview.
Throughout his stay, Paddy Monaghan was always close by. Monaghan was from Ederney in Fermanagh and as a child moved to Oxfordshire and became a feared bare-knuckle boxer.
When Ali was stripped of his boxing licence, Monaghan had sympathy and started a petition that secured 22,000 signatures, later writing to President Richard Nixon to plead Ali’s case. News of his efforts reached Ali, and Monaghan was invited into the inner sanctum.
One morning just as dawn was breaking, the two got a driver to take them around Dublin. Monaghan brought Ali to the GPO, showed him the bullet holes and explained the Easter Rising, before heading to Croke Park to show him the venue at first light.
Ali was also keen to meet the firebrand politician, Bernadette Devlin. Her fame was high in America at the time, having gone on a tour of American colleges the year before, preaching a radical brand of socialism that caused havoc on college campuses.
By the time Ali got a rematch against Frazier and beat him in Madison Square Gardens in 1974, Monaghan was in his corner, and Devlin had a ringside seat.
The fight itself was forgettable. The occasion also warned off boxing promoters of any potential Dublin bouts.
But still.
“When I first started to research the book, about 25 years ago now, I thought Butty was a joke figure because that was his public image. And the more you get into it, it is incredible because Ali has the most incredible resume in all sports and boxing and when you scroll down through his record you just see Croke Park, Dublin,” says Hannigan.
“The Thriller in Manila, The Rumble In The Jungle. And Croke Park! And that was because of this crazy Kerry man, in 1972 when communications were primitive and this guy managed to get Ali and his entourage to Dublin for a week of mayhem.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
Crazy golf in Palmerstown, a Quinnsworth ad, fighting at Croke Park: When Ali came to Ireland
IT TOOK MUHAMMAD Ali 11 rounds to polish off Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in the last big boxing match held in Croke Park, back in 19 July, 1972.
It was such a novel event that nobody had even brought boxing gloves. They had to be hastily retrieved from London on the day of the fight. The attendance was also disastrous.
To draw a line from Ali to Taylor, shows the transformation of the world, of the sport and of women’s role in sport.
It might come as a surprise to many to learn the last time an Irish fighter headlined a bout in Croke Park, it was just over a century ago.
Bartley Madden was appearing for the second time there in August 1926. A former Roscommon footballer, he made a career for himself as a durable opponent in American fight circles.
While never quite a contender, he fought New Zealander Tom Heeney who was a prospect. Madden hung in for 20 hard rounds as Heeney won and later challenged Gene Tunney for the Heavyweight title of the world at Yankee Stadium.
That was long forgotten by the time Ali met Lewis.
How it came about was through a singular individual: Michael ‘Butty’ Sugrue of Killorglin, a Circus Strongman touring with Duffy’s Circus, turned pub landlord and, somehow, implausibly, boxing promoter who leveraged his friendship and connections with Henry Cooper to get Ali to fight in Ireland.
Dave Hannigan, author of ‘The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland’ tracked his journey from army cadet who spent long hours in the gym hoping to become a professional weight lifter, to the man who would pull a cart laden with men around the circus ring, a tethered rope between his teeth.
After his arrival in London, where he owned different pubs including The Wellington in Shepherd’s Bush, he kept pushing on.
He had a wrestling ring installed in the pub. In another superhuman feat of strength, he pulled a London bus up Kilburn High Street with one hand.
Sugrue became well-connected and achieved a level of fame that saw him appear on a Saturday night show on terrestrial television by the mid-70s, millions of the British public watching a snapshot of that strange time as Jimmy Savile hosted Sugrue and the other guest, Gary Glitter.
After bringing Henry Cooper on a tour of rural Ireland in 1971, the notion of a big fight in Ireland tantalised Sugrue. He wasn’t long finding out that if he wanted Ali, he had to get the suave New York boxing writer and promoter Harold Conrad onside.
Conrad, a man who would be immortalised in the novel ‘The Harder They Fall’ and played by Humphrey Bogart in the film adaptation, made an odd couple with Sugrue, the man who once hosted an ‘Indoor Puck Fair’ in his pub with an imported Kerry goat, and tried to convince his pub patrons that the recently blown up Nelson’s Column would be making an appearance.
Perhaps wary, Conrad told Sugrue the bottom line: a guarantee of $300,000 by April 1972. Somehow, Sugrue went to the Williams and & Glyn’s Bank and secured the fee, promptly wired to New York.
All of a sudden, Ali was coming to Ireland. Or not, as the contemporaneous Irish sports writers would sniff.
“Of course when Butty came up to Dublin to promote Ali coming to fight in Dublin that summer, he was laughed out the gate. The sportswriters basically were making fun of him and feeling it was the most ludicrous thing anyone would ever hear,” says Hannigan down the line from his desk as a history professor at Suffolk County Community College, Long Island.
“Peader O’Brien kept trying to tell Conrad that Butty was a bit of a chancer and that this could never happen,” Hannigan adds.
Ali was in decent nick. This was not a fading light picking up the cheque. Many triumphant days lay ahead of him.
He had endured his licence being stripped over his stance on Vietnam and had the year prior lost ‘The Fight of the Century’ to Joe Frazier, who was in no mood to grant him a rematch after some merciless pre-fight taunting.
To keep his wheels rolling, he ended up fighting around every six weeks or so. But when he came to Ireland, a handy hook of his ancestor, paternal great-grandfather Abe O’Grady from Ennis, wasn’t something Ali wanted to encourage.
“Ali in 1972 was still talking radical language, that the white man is the devil,” says Hannigan.
“So when somebody brings up the O’Grady connection, he plays it down and says, ‘There was a lot of sneaking around in them days.’
When researching the book, Hannigan spoke to the famous Irish-American journalist Pete Hamill who had been dispatched by The New York Post to Dublin for the week.
Hamill sensed the start of some soul-searching for Ali, the man who was proclaiming the white man as devil, and yet everywhere he went he was shown the love he thought only existed for him in Harlem and Atlanta.
When it came to deciding the venue, there was no early day megaphone diplomacy between a Peter McKenna or Eddie Hearn. Leopardstown Racecourse, Dalymount Park and Lansdowne Road were all in play. But it was Croke Park in the end and there were no agonised editorials or Central Council votes required.
The money on the table for the GAA this weekend is the sort you get when 83,000 paying through the gates. But in 1972 just 18,725 attended.
It would seem they got their dynamic pricing wrong. The best seat in Croke Park that night was £15. For context, the best seat for that year’s All-Ireland final was £2.
And when the National Anthem began playing, it was as if a cue for several thousand more to enter the ground through the Hill 16 end.
Either way, they fell well short of the break-even figure of 30,000 and made no profit once all expenses had been paid out.
Sugrue had claimed he would donate some profits to a charity ‘for the mentally handicapped children of Ireland,’ but nothing was forthcoming.
The most interesting element to it all was how Ali moved around the place, enchanting one and all who was pulled into his orbit.
Pete Hamill detailed how he would walk around the city, followed by a sea of adoring public.
Much to his distaste, he was billeted at the Oppermann’s Country Club on the foothills of the Dublin mountains, but would have preferred to stay in the Gresham, where all the fun and games were and that housed the likes of Conrad, and the visiting Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and family.
At one stage, he attended Leinster House and Taoiseach Jack Lynch became the first Head of State to have a formal audience with Ali.
On a trip to the Dáil, he had a look around and headed for the canteen. One staff member made a call home to his wife to say he would be late home, and when she asked why, he put Ali on the phone to state his case.
He attended a charity Fête in Palmerstown on a Sunday afternoon, where he played crazy golf. He found time to record an advertisement for Quinnsworth Supermarkets. John Huston turned up at a sparring session and mugged for the camera.
When RTÉ came looking for an interview, he charged them £100 but wanted cash. A runner was hastily dispatched to grab the money from the canteen till. The year before, he had billed the Parkinson Show £12,000 for an interview.
Throughout his stay, Paddy Monaghan was always close by. Monaghan was from Ederney in Fermanagh and as a child moved to Oxfordshire and became a feared bare-knuckle boxer.
When Ali was stripped of his boxing licence, Monaghan had sympathy and started a petition that secured 22,000 signatures, later writing to President Richard Nixon to plead Ali’s case. News of his efforts reached Ali, and Monaghan was invited into the inner sanctum.
One morning just as dawn was breaking, the two got a driver to take them around Dublin. Monaghan brought Ali to the GPO, showed him the bullet holes and explained the Easter Rising, before heading to Croke Park to show him the venue at first light.
Ali was also keen to meet the firebrand politician, Bernadette Devlin. Her fame was high in America at the time, having gone on a tour of American colleges the year before, preaching a radical brand of socialism that caused havoc on college campuses.
By the time Ali got a rematch against Frazier and beat him in Madison Square Gardens in 1974, Monaghan was in his corner, and Devlin had a ringside seat.
The fight itself was forgettable. The occasion also warned off boxing promoters of any potential Dublin bouts.
But still.
“When I first started to research the book, about 25 years ago now, I thought Butty was a joke figure because that was his public image. And the more you get into it, it is incredible because Ali has the most incredible resume in all sports and boxing and when you scroll down through his record you just see Croke Park, Dublin,” says Hannigan.
“The Thriller in Manila, The Rumble In The Jungle. And Croke Park! And that was because of this crazy Kerry man, in 1972 when communications were primitive and this guy managed to get Ali and his entourage to Dublin for a week of mayhem.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Ali ALI IN CROKER Boxing Katie Taylor