Article from the Guardian yesterday on this guy (former Irish heavyweight boxer). Worth a read - interesting life.
It’s hard being the toughest white man on the planet
Ireland’s Joe Egan - boxer, landlord, convict and Mike Tyson’s best mate - is more than happy to get the next round in
Andy Bull
February 13, 2008 2:01 PM
This is a long story about a man named Joe Egan. I don’t know how much time you’ll give it - there is no urgent news here, no 36-point headlines to be wrung out of it and no great lessons to be gleaned. It’s just a story. If you like stories, read it. It’s good. And it’s true.
Joe Egan is a boxer, an ex-convict and a cuckold. He is also the toughest white man on the planet. I didn’t give him that title, and neither did he. Mike Tyson did. There is something comical about a man who markets himself this way, until you begin to get to know him and can ignore the Lock Stock bullshit gloss. When I got Joe’s autobiography, I skimmed through the photos: Joe shaking hands with Floyd Patterson, posing with Muhammad Ali, dangling his arm around Sugar Ray Leonard, playing chess with Lennox Lewis, sharing dinner with Smokin’ Joe Frazier, grinning at Jake La Motta, petting Tyson’s dog. Is there anyone in boxing who doesn’t know Big Joe Egan? Who the hell is this guy?
When he was boxing, Joe had two nicknames: the Abominable Showman and Big Joe. It’s tough to say which was more deserved, but it’s easy to see why Big Joe stuck. He’s huge. You could probably compact three of me into his frame and have room for more. His chest isn’t a barrel, it’s a tanker. And he looks very different to the handsome square-jawed kid on the cover of his book. But that was 20 years ago, and Joe has since been living a life that leaves scars, etching itself out in creases, wrinkles and lumps.
The last time I saw Joe, standing outside the Victoria Pub in Clapham, I was struck by the thought that my words wouldn’t do him justice. He, and his life, are too large to fit on the page. There are too many tales, adventures and anecdotes. Joe is one of the great characters - where do you begin?
‘He pounded me to a pulp, absolutely hammered me. I lost on points, but I went the distance’
Joe was an amateur heavyweight, a good one. By the age of 24, he’d won seven Irish titles and fought for his country 11 times. He took up the sport in London, where his family lived for a spell when he was young. But his first fight in Ireland is where the story starts. A 12-year-old Joe was fighting at Dublin’s Phoenix Club “round the back of Ryan’s barbers”. His opponent was a year older, but “just some novice, and a lot smaller than me”. His name was Steve Collins - a future world middleweight champion. “He pounded me to a pulp, absolutely hammered me. I lost on points, but I went the distance.” Many of Joe’s boxing stories end that way. Among his many talents, and he’s a damn charming man, Joe has an astonishing capacity to take a beating. It is this extraordinary resilience that defined his boxing and, you could say, his life.
Because of his size, Joe struggled to get match-ups as a teenager and raced through to the senior level too fast. When he turned 17, he started boxing men 10 years older than himself. On a trip with the Irish team to America, Joe was spotted by Floyd Patterson, who offered Joe the chance to train in the US the following year. He called his family and told them he wouldn’t be back in Ireland any time soon.
Patterson told Joe there was work going as a sparring partner for a pro boxer the same age as him. Tired of getting hammered by older fighters, he leapt at the chance and travelled to the Catskill mountains. There, in a large wooden house belonging to his sister-in-law, Cus D’Amato - the man who had trained Patterson to his world title 30 years previously - was breaking in a heavyweight contender. When Joe first met Tyson he sized him up as an opponent, just like a fighter would. “I’m thinking: this kid’s smaller than me, he’s got a shorter reach and he’s speaking in this funny voice, high and lisping. I’ll have a piece of this.” Then they got in the ring, and Tyson hit him. “Oh shit. Shit. I’ll never forget that first shot. It was a straight right to the body that hit me round the back. I know myself that my feet came off the canvas; I know he lifted me with that punch … God I could feel the power in that punch.”
‘Tyson was savage, savage. Sheer ferocity, raw green power coming at you’
Joe did two three-minute rounds that day, and he took a beating. “It wasn’t just the power, it was the speed he delivered the punches at. And it was a completely different man in that ring, even in three minutes. He was savage, savage. Sheer ferocity, raw green power coming at you.” Joe rode the beating and stayed on in the house. While Tyson ran through sparring partners like ten-pins, Joe stayed on. Over the next three years, Joe spent as much time in the ring with Tyson as any man. Tyson was growing into one of the most destructive fighters in history. “I’d sit there at the side of the ring, watching these guys - bigger, more experienced than me - getting a pasting, getting knocked out, and you think to yourself ‘Oh Jesus’. We used to line up on the skirt of the ring, all of us sparring partners sat there in a row. Cus would walk up and down and then point his finger at somebody. You never knew who it would be. And I’d sit there, swear to God, with my fingers crossed inside my gloves, going ‘not me, not me’.”
Tyson never knocked Joe down in all those fights, and one day turned to him and said: “Joe, you’re the toughest white man on the planet.” He still introduces him that way today. Joe is pretty modest about it now. “I was just the toughest white man in the gym, that’s all. All the other fighters used to let their egos get involved. When I fought Mike, I kept my guard up, I wasn’t looking to try and land a knock-out shot like some of the other fellas.” It’s impossible to overstate the ferocity of Tyson at the time. He tore fighters and their egos to pieces. Not Joe. He knocked him out on his feet, several times, but he never put him on the canvas.
“I remember once, Sugar Ray was at the gym watching me and Mike spar. And hiding behind my gloves I could see Sugar Ray wincing at these blows I was taking. Two years later he was back at the gym again, and there I was, getting another pasting. He says to me afterwards: ‘You’re a real brave fella to come back here after that beating you got last time.’ ‘Come back?’ I said, ‘I’ve been here the whole time!’” Joe continued to live and train with Tyson, and the friendship they forged as they grew into their prime together has lasted ever since. First impressions - “I remember our first breakfast, Mike eating a plate of sausages with red sauce. I couldn’t believe it. He’d have a plate of sausages, honest to God, just a massive plate of sausages” - grew into something more significant. They built a coop for racing pigeons and daubed Tyson’s Flyers on the side in white paint. They stayed up late talking about Barry McGuigan and other Irish fighters, Joe falling asleep on the sofa as Tyson slid yet another tape of some old champion into the VHS player.
Joe has strong views on Tyson, who reads Tolstoy and wore a pair of Joe’s Irish team shorts for his second and third pro fights, on the Desiree Washington rape case, on Don King and the hangers-on. They’re the views that an old friend would have. For Joe, a key reason for Tyson’s troubles was the death of D’Amato in 1985, and the way King replaced him as a mentor. All of Joe’s pals have spoken to Tyson, either at the two-day bender they threw on his behalf when he visited Ireland, or over the phone, which Egan would pass around the room at Tyson’s insistence. Tyson visited Joe’s home in Ireland and spent 45 minutes talking to Joe’s mum, reminiscing about the occasion 20 years earlier when she’d sent Tyson a birthday present - a shoebox containing a packet of Tayto crisps and a pair of jumpers.
‘What’s he coming out for? I’ve just smashed him to bits and he’s coming out for round two!’
But this is Joe’s story, not Tyson’s. Tyson’s future opponents hired Joe to gain bragging rights by doing what Tyson couldn’t and knocking Joe down. Don’t think that Joe wasn’t a fine boxer. He was. He could, as he says, “go three rounds with anybody in the world”. He lost on points against Lennox Lewis in '85, and beat future world champion Bruce Seldon in '88. That last fight was probably the peak of his career. He fought Seldon in his hometown, Atlanta, and in the first round he took, once again, an absolute beating. His corner men tried to retire him, but Joe refused. Seldon was as shocked as anyone when Big Joe got back up for the second round. “I could see in his eyes, he’s saying: ‘What’s he coming out for? I’ve just smashed him to bits and he’s coming out for round two!’ And, for that split second he was looking at me as the bell went, he didn’t attack. For that split second he was a standing-still target, and I hadn’t seen one of them all fight long. So I hit him with the hardest shot I could. It was an unmerciful shot, a great body shot in the ribs, the solar plexus. And he groaned. I could hear the pain. I could hear that I’d hurt him, and it gave me a new lease of life.”
The two rounds that followed earned both men a standing ovation from a ringside crowd that included 10 world champions, men like Rocky Graziano, Joe Frazier and Jersey Joe Walcott. Joe won on points. When he was taken to hospital for an MRI scan afterwards, he was kept waiting in the ambulance for the arrival of a Very Important Patient. It was Jake La Motta, the Raging Bull. "He had been standing on the stage fighting the fight with me - it was like a throwback to when he fought, a proper war - and he’d tripped and fallen. And I look at him, and he looks at me and says: “The heavyweight. Great fight kid.” Joe is full of stories. Hours of them. He leans across conspiratorially to share secrets that he’s told a thousand times, then rocks back in gales of laughter, removing his grip from around your forearm and slapping his thigh. Your glass is only half-empty when he insists on buying another round, even though he’s teetotal himself.
Joe turned pro in 1990 and won his first two fights. After the second, he needed 54 stitches. That same night a coach he was travelling in was hit by a Mercedes, and Joe broke his collar bone, leg and jaw. Widening in the gyre, things fell apart. He lost his job, was shafted out of his insurance claim by a corrupt solicitor and, left penniless, he fell into a deep depression. After two desultory fights he quit boxing because his body couldn’t take it anymore. After some bleak years a move to Birmingham brought a kind of salvation. He found work as a bar manager, and moved on to become a licensee and then a landlord of his own premises. This, though, is when Joe’s story enters darker areas. The tales don’t have clear heroes anymore; they become increasingly disturbing. Joe’s book puts this part of his story in the gangster-fetish genre that will guarantee a certain market. It does him a disservice, and makes uncomfortable reading. And while I’m in thrall to Joe’s persona, this stuff clouds the affection.
In 1998, when Tyson was coming out of prison, Joe’s pub was targeted by gang members of the neo-fascist Combat 18 movement wanting protection money. They were, as Joe says, “pure evil, like you cannot imagine”. What ensues is too brutal, and too confusing, to include here at length; 37 armed men descend on the pub, Joe is shot in the face, one man has his hip shot off, another has his throat cut and another is hacked apart with a machete. It’s in the book. It’s nauseatingly violent. I’m never going to know how culpable he was for what happened and I can’t quite believe it when he insists he was just the innocent landlord of a family pub. He was tried for attempted murder and found not guilty, but he made an enemy of the police force. Perhaps it was the other way round.
It is clear from Joe’s many anecdotes that he was far from law-abiding. But there is a point when the nature of his criminality switched from petty to hardcore. I can’t square it with the charming man sat in front of me but then I’ve no idea what it is to command the power and savagery that all fighters must have. “I swear to God you never think it will happen to you till it does,” he tells me, “and that man is standing in front of you with that gun.”
Joe’s fiance stayed on in Ireland when he moved to Birmingham. For three years he sent money back to her, which he suggests she spent mainly on breast enhancements. He paid for a house in her name. Back in Ireland trying to escape his problems, Joe picked up a newspaper and saw her picture on the front page underneath the headline ‘Flatley’s new friend’. Joe’s wife-to-be, he discovered, had left him for the Lord of the Dance. The wound was deepened by the fact that Michael Flatley was once a boxer himself. Joe became PR fodder for Flatley’s world tour and at one point was asked to sign a contract that will return the house to his ownership if he admits Flatley knocked him down in a fight. Whatever was left in Joe Egan’s centre fell apart. Joe arrived back from Ireland and walked into his pub to find an Irish dancing night taking place in the lounge. “I took it personally, thought they were all laughing at me. Stormed into the lounge, screaming and crying, shouting and fuming ‘You lousy bastards’. I thought they were laughing at me, but they were only dancing for the presentation of a raffle.”
‘I’d been Joe the convict, Joe the publican - I needed to find Joe the boxer again’
The police eventually convicted him for dealing in stolen cars. Joe went to jail but his good conduct shone through: he spoke at youth clubs and job centres, working to rehabilitate himself and others less fortunate, or less resilient, than himself. He has been straight ever since. He’s married, and happy in his job as a client entertainer. At the age of 38, 12 years after he last stepped into a ring, Joe made his boxing comeback. He fought once, and won by technical knock-out. “I’d been Joe the convict, and Joe the publican, and I needed to find Joe the boxer again.” Tyson offered him a place on his undercard, but Joe turned him down. “I’d nothing else to prove to anybody, nothing left to prove to myself.”
You couldn’t call Joe a gangster - he explodes into fury when we talk about gang culture. Ross Kemp’s gang documentaries provoke particular wrath. His face creases. “Why isn’t he off making documentaries about the St John’s Ambulance? Or the Sea Scouts? That was my gang.” He can’t abide bullies and has fought them throughout his life: from corporations in industrial tribunals, to cocaine-snorting city boys in bars where Joe was bouncing, to the boxer Mitch Green who made a habit of hitting his sparring partners after the bell, to the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, which denied him a spot at the Olympics, to the inmates hogging the weights in the prison gym. He can say with pride he has always stood up for himself and his many friends; he has picked a lot of fights and earned a lot of enemies.
Joe’s tangled world view, governed by pride, violence, friendship and a goddamn refusal to quit, only laces itself into sense when you meet him. The stories, the glamour, the violence, the pigeon coop - they all roll up into one huge frame, three times larger than me and thousand times larger than life as I know it. It makes my head swirl. So many stories the man has, and I haven’t even touched on a fraction of them. I couldn’t do them justice.