PROLOGUE
‘A book?’ the passive-aggressive voice on the other end of the phone answers me incredulously. ‘Listen, I’ve been beaten with baseball bats, I’ve had my throat slashed, I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been exiled out of the country. My family’s been held captive in our home as well. I’ve been shot twice, I’ve been in prison and my son’s just been stabbed to death. Amongst all that, I was the welterweight champion of the world while drinking the bar dry and doing enough coke to kill a small horse every night. My life’s not a book. It’s a fucking movie script.’
These were the first words Eamonn Sean Terrence Magee ever spoke to me. I was sitting in a Madrid car park while he stood in John Breen’s gym on the outskirts of Belfast. I still recall the pressure I felt, the fear that I’d lose him before I ever had him, the creeping sense of panic that I’d caught him on one of his supposedly many off days.
Magee is an alcoholic. More than that, I’d been warned he can be a truculent, temperamental, dangerous, depressive, paranoid alcoholic. I believed I had to time my call wisely. Weekends were likely to be a write-off, for example. Too early or too late on any day of the week may lead to an unfavourable response from the ex-boxer. I reasoned that after a mid-week gym session was probably my best bet. There was every chance he would have turned up for it reeking of the previous night’s excesses, but hopefully he’d sweat and beat enough of it out of his system to be open to my suggestions. Having earlier spoken to Breen, his closest confidant in boxing, I knew that on this day Eamonn was scheduled to work with Marco McCullough ahead of the local featherweight’s November outing in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. A text message from Breen was my cue that it was now or never.
‘I don’t want to talk about all this on the phone,’ Magee decides after a couple of minutes listening to my rambling pitch. ‘Come over here and we’ll sit down face to face and see what happens.’
This is as good as I could have expected. He hasn’t swung the door wide open, but neither has he slammed it shut in my face. The crafty southpaw has left it cautiously ajar so he can get a peek at me before making any definitive decision. I am heading home in a couple of weeks to watch the boxing bill McCullough is on anyway, so we choose the pre-fight weigh-in in the Waterfront Hall for our first physical encounter.
***
I see McCullough first, his soft features pale and drawn from the effects of days of rigorous abstinence to coerce his body down to the nine stone limit. Magee then comes into focus, lurking in the background, partially disguised by a flat cap pulled low and a scarf around his neck behind which he can tuck his chin. Magee’s posture is striking to observe. All the damage, the attacks by blade and bullet and tooth and bat, has been inflicted onto his left side and, perhaps as a result, he now tends to subconsciously tilt his head and lean to the right. But, as always, his visible facial features are the dead giveaways: the flattened and fattened misshapen nose that dominates his countenance, underlined by thin, terse lips that remain pursed through habit to hide his once-missing front teeth. I can instantly pick his weathered and scarred, old-before-its-time face out of a cast of millions. He is an unmistakeable figure in Northern Irish life.
We shake hands, nod a greeting to one another and agree to find a quiet spot after the weigh-in formalities to sit down and discuss my vision for his story.
It would be disingenuous to say Eamonn Magee was ever a hero of mine, but certainly he is someone who has always fascinated me. There is nothing a boxing fan loves more than a hometown hero to support, and I am no different. I am a handful of years too young to remember Barry McGuigan in his prime, but I was there riding the mid-90s Celtic wave across the Irish Sea with the rest of them as Steve Collins gate-crashed the golden era of British super middleweight boxing to dethrone Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank. Collins is from Dublin, of course, but Ireland is a small island and we get behind our own regardless of exact place of birth.
By the time the Celtic Warrior had hung up his gloves, Belfast’s Wayne McCullough was a world champion, but his decision to relocate to the US left him out of sight and somewhat out of mind. As the new millennium arrived, the likes of Damaen Kelly and Brian Magee were quality professionals performing admirably, but they fell short in truly capturing my imagination. I needed something deeper than decent ring performances to grab onto.
As an extremely individual pursuit, boxing cannot rely upon the rabid tribal allegiances of team sports for its lifeblood. For that reason, solo sports tend to be more dramatic by nature and, like all good theatre, the success of the storyline is dependent upon the audience connecting with the portrayal of a character and his foe. It is largely irrelevant what emotion forges this connection – love, empathy, loathing, awe, whatever. All that matters is that enough people feel enough of something to want to watch an athlete in the boxing ring, or on the tennis court, or on the golf course and so on, over and over again. Magee achieved that, although to this day it is difficult to put my finger on exactly how he managed it. He has that aura particular to geniuses and cult figures that demands you pay attention to even the most insignificant moments of their existence. The sense of unpredictability that surrounds those who live their lives on a knife edge, coupled with Magee’s constant underlying dark and volatile character, combines to convert the routine or mundane into a potential spectacle. He holds a magnetism that appears to attract trouble and tragedy in equal measure, with fleeting flashes of glory occasionally interspersing the two. Gifted and flawed: two characteristics guaranteed to produce a compelling subject.
***
I had expected the meeting place of which we earlier spoke to be somewhere either within the confines of the Waterfront Hall itself or alongside it in one of the neighbouring cafés or, much more likely, bars. As it turns out, Magee slipped out of range as soon as it was confirmed his fighter and their opponent had made weight, and decanted to a bar on the other side of the city centre.
‘I’m in Madden’s,’ he says when I call looking for him. ‘C’mon over here, it’s a quiet spot.’
Madden’s Bar is tucked away on the corner of Marquis Street and Berry Street where the black taxis lie waiting to ferry cargo out of the centre heading north or west. These black immigrants from the boroughs of London were introduced in the late 1960s for their ability to rumble over the remains of smouldering barricades and turn on a sixpence to dart down a side street and avoid the epicentre of a riot or disturbance. With the bus service regularly beaten into submission by the violence of those desolate decades, a black cab was often the only means of escaping the city centre as night fell. As with everything in the province at that time, the service was segregated, with separate associations for Catholic and Protestant drivers and passengers. It was felt to be safer that way but, of course, it also made it easier to identify what community a particular taxi was from or where it was headed, so it wasn’t long before the dark vehicles became prey to terrorist assassination gangs.
Today the old hackney carriages enjoy a much safer existence on the streets of Belfast. One of the many fruits borne by the peace process has been the emergence of curious tourists to the Northern Irish capital and who better to lead them on a tour of the city, focusing on sectarian flashpoints and the gable-wall murals that tell a version of the story, than a wizened old taxi driver and his trusty black cab?
Madden’s Bar has enjoyed a similar renaissance. It has always been a nationalist establishment but only since the turn of the century has it felt totally comfortable nailing its colours to the mast. A large mural depicting an old Irish fiddler playing at a table covered with pints of Guinness and prints of Irish language publications now proudly adorns the outside wall. Fáilte Isteach, or welcome inside, underscores the artwork and on either side of the front door An ceol traidisiúnta (and an pionta) is fearr sa chathair lets Gaelic speakers know the best traditional music and pint in the city can be located within. The Irish proverb Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste (broken Irish is better than clever English) is another prominent and unambiguous sign that there is more green, white and orange than red, white and blue in this old watering hole’s DNA.
Outsiders who visit today for a pint of Harp, a bowl of Irish stew and a traditional Irish music session may wonder why there would ever have been any fuss about such a public preponderance of Celtic lettering, but those who lived through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s know differently. Scores have been murdered in sectarian attacks on the streets in and around Madden’s over the years. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) killed Roman Catholics on Marquis Street itself, as well as on neighbouring Millfield, North Queen Street and in Smithfield Market. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), meanwhile, shot and killed British soldiers on Berry Street and Chapel Lane, and murdered a Protestant civilian on Millfield. But the attack which resonates deepest with Madden’s and its customers took place on 5 June 1976.
That evening, five members of the UVF’s Shankill Battalion pulled up outside the Chlorane Bar on Gresham Street, four minutes’ walk from Madden’s, in a hijacked black taxi. One of them was Robert ‘Basher’ Bates, a leading member of Lenny Murphy’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang, whose policy of abducting, torturing and murdering randomly chosen Catholics terrorised the nationalist community for almost a decade. The driver waited outside with the engine running as the four masked and armed passengers alighted and entered the bar. Once inside they told the stunned drinkers to divide into groups according to religion. Unusually for a bar in central Belfast in the 1970s, both Catholics and Protestants frequented the Chlorane and so the terrified customers were at this stage unsure as to the particular ecclesiastical persuasion of these killers. In the confusion a couple tried to make a run for it and all hell broke loose. When the gunfire died down and the murderers made their escape along North Street and back into the loyalist Shankill, five bodies lay lifeless on the bloodied barroom floor. Three were Catholic and two were Protestant. Ten days later any trace of the bar was forever destroyed in a bomb attack. The Chlorane was probably chosen for the ease with which the attackers were able to escape but it could just as easily have been Madden’s.
Now, seventeen years on from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that, theoretically at least, decommissioned the paramilitaries and brought an uneasy peace to the province, such a threat to innocent patrons in a bar like Madden’s is basically zero. The Northern Irish are famed for their long memories but just in case the punters have one too many and lose sight of how far the city has come, a telling remnant from the past greets all who approach Madden’s threshold. A buzzer on the door still alerts bar staff to someone waiting outside and allows them to check their identities and intentions via a CCTV camera and inside screen. It is one of the few city-centre bars that continues with this security measure.
As I wait for my Guinness to settle and then be topped off, an American couple standing at the bar, visibly emboldened by the effects of an afternoon supping a selection of Irish nectar, finally musters up the courage to enquire as to why such caution is still deemed necessary. The barman gives a masterful response that finds the perfect balance between granting the tipsy visitors sufficient reassurance that they have nothing to worry about and insinuating enough about the area’s dangerous past to send them home with a famous story to tell about their day in a real, hard Belfast drinking den.
Magee is at the other end of the bar when I enter, still wrapped up in his coat, scarf and flat-cap ensemble, finishing off a pint of Harp. He pays for my pint, orders himself another, and we move to the corner for a bit of privacy.
Madden’s is a dimly lit, claustrophobic, wooden box of a place, a comfortable coffin serving beer and whiskey. Photographs of revellers both young and old, local and international, now plaster the walls alongside posters promoting Irish folk festivals and vintage advertisements for products as varied as St Bruno tobacco, Diamond dyes and Bass ale. The cluttered bar is compact but stuffed with all the spirits and stout required for a decent night out. The foreign banknotes pinned to the wall above the platoons of liquor bottles are testament to the range of nationalities that have sampled the liquid delights within.
Wooden benches line the wooden panelled walls, with wooden chairs around wooden tables peppering the floor space. The only thing that isn’t wooden is the craic guaranteed when the pints are flowing and the live music sparks up and grows outwardly and organically from a designated corner. Please make these seats available to musicians after 9 p.m. is written on the backrest of a bench. There’s a hierarchy in these traditional pubs and a talented vocalist, fiddler or bodhrán player will always hold more sway than most. There’ll be regular performers, but anyone with the ability to keep up is welcome to sit down with their instrument and play along. Some nights a session will begin with just a voice and a tin whistle and end with five or six times that number united as one within the controlled chaos that is live traditional Irish music in a heaving, bouncing, beer-soaked bar.
We are too early for a shindig on this afternoon, however. When we sit down at a table upon which You don’t miss the water until the well runs dry is inscribed in Gaelic, there are no more than a handful of souls in the pub as a CD of Irish rebel songs plays softly in the background.
I quickly begin my pre-prepared spiel. I’m from the other side of town but essentially the same community. I’m nine years younger but also lived through the Troubles. I’m a boxing fan, I understand the sport. I’m a good writer, a good storyteller. I’ve the connections to get us a deal and do this properly. I’m passionate about this, willing to drop everything to focus on the project until it is complete. Basically, I’m the man for the job of telling your life story, Eamonn.
He listens intently and then begins with a warning. His is not what anyone would describe as a normal life, he says. He’s going to tell me everything, the truth and nothing but the truth: that is how he puts it with more than a gentle nod towards his long and chequered relationship with the judicial system. I’m going to hear things that will shock and offend me. I’m going to hear things that could put me, him and the subjects of the anecdotes at risk from the police and, more worryingly, other forces that still patrol and control the streets of Belfast. He asks me if I take anything and from the look in his eye I know he’s not referring to half a sugar in my morning coffee. A few lines of cocaine with his mates will be the only way to get all the best stories out of them, he continues. It’s clear he wants to get a few things out in the open immediately so there are no surprises further down the line.
In truth, I am treating this as nothing more than a brief meet and greet, so I’m reluctant to start talking about any of the peaks and troughs of Magee’s life and career. I want to go in prepared for those, armed and ready to delve as deep as I can and learn as much as possible from Eamonn in the process. But he’s not really a man for small talk and his life rarely dabbles in the mundane that the rest of us recognise as daily existence, so we inevitably end up skimming over some of the more gruesome or glorious moments from the past forty-four years.
His narrow eyes dampen noticeably when I ask how he got through the recent memorial for his murdered son, Eamonn Junior.
‘It’s not easy,’ is his understated response, ‘and it’s never going to be.’
It’s a feeling he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, he says, and he has a few of those. He tells me about a poem someone composed for Eamonn Jr that would break my heart. His son was an angel, he says; nothing like his old man.
We talk a little about his boxing, how his slick style contrasted so starkly with the thuggish image he has always carried as a violent street fighter. He describes himself as a natural, clever fighter and his eyes sparkle briefly as he talks about spying a flaw in Jon Thaxton’s footwork early in their 2002 bout. Magee noticed how, when he circled and manoeuvred the Englishman around the ring, Thaxton was prone to crossing his legs for a split second when forced into a particular position.
‘I only had to wait,’ Magee tells me with a sly grin, ‘and then bang in the sixth round. Boxing is a game of chess, you see.’
The Thaxton victory led to the biggest moment of his career, fighting against Ricky Hatton. I still can’t watch the fight without feeling frustrated that he couldn’t finish the Mancunian in the second stanza when, having already been knocked down in the first, Hatton was buzzed again and in serious trouble. Magee famously left the arena to smoke a cigarette barely an hour before his ring-walk that night and I feel compelled to ask whether he has any regrets about how he lived his life between fights – a lifestyle that, it’s fair to say, may have adversely affected his career.
‘I don’t regret anything and I wouldn’t change a thing,’ comes the immediate smiling reply.
I don’t believe him, but I say nothing.
‘My life has been great craic,’ he concludes with another grin, but this one is unmistakably tinged with sadness.
My remark was an obvious reference to the booze and women and drugs and fags. He laughs when admitting that his old manager, the late Mike Callahan, would traverse the city depositing notes behind bars warning publicans not to serve Eamonn in the lead-up to a fight. But his reluctance to travel within the postcode of the straight and narrow had much more serious consequences than an inability to finish off a struggling foe in the ring.
He brings up the punishment shooting by the IRA himself. The Night of the Long Knives is how it was known in north Belfast: a famous occasion in 1992 when the republican paramilitary group handed down their own unique brand of justice to known drug dealers in the area. Thirteen were targeted that night and twenty-year-old Magee was one of them. Only the intervention of his father, who pleaded with the local IRA commander that his son was fighting for the Irish title in a couple of months, saved Eamonn from a bullet through his kneecap. That injury would almost certainly have ended any hopes of a boxing career. Instead he received a flesh wound to his calf for his troubles. He won that Irish title, by the way, fighting with a bandaged leg and wearing white socks that gradually reddened with his own seeping blood as the night went on.
The IRA attack is just one of the many contradictions that swirl around the ill-informed myth of Eamonn Magee. In general, sport in Northern Ireland is just another means by which segregation is maintained by those with a vested interest in keeping society divided and conquered. Yet, despite its roots in the working-class districts most embittered and affected by the Troubles, boxing has only ever united the two communities in the province. From Barry McGuigan and his dove-of-peace shorts, to Wayne McCullough carrying the Irish tricolour at the 1992 Olympic Games, any sectarian leanings have always been left at the gym door.
It has often been said that Eamonn Magee never got that memo. There is a belief that he carried his political baggage with him everywhere he went and, in exacerbating any underlying nationalistic tensions that existed, proved more divisive than unifying throughout his career. Those who hold this belief point to his father’s republican past and Magee’s own youthful dalliance with political violence. They point to run-ins with the law, allegedly laced with distinct sectarian undertones. They point to his in-your-face Irish nationalism at a time when a more restrained approach was urged.
I knew all this, but I had always sensed that the truth, as is its wont, was a more complex affair. If Magee was indeed a dyed-in-the-wool militant republican, why had the IRA shot and later exiled him? If he really was a dangerous bigot, how did his lifelong friendships with Protestants like McCullough or proud Englishmen like Hatton develop? If green, white and orange boxing attire truly defined him, what did it mean when he fought with the red hand of Ulster on his chest as an amateur representing his province?
The other topic Magee raises is the financial upside of spilling his heart onto the pages of my book. It soon becomes clear that the ex-fighter is still in possession of a rapier-sharp business mind. He has his own ideas for a title, release date, newspaper serialisation, a sequel and even a movie.
‘Did you see that Fighter film?’ he asks me. ‘They made a movie about Micky Ward and the fella isn’t fit to lace my boots.’
His eyes sparkle in such moments. As they do when he talks about beating ‘the ex-British soldier and Plastic Paddy, Shea Neary’, taking the piss out of a visiting Guardian newspaper journalist, or telling the promoter Barney Eastwood to shove his offer of 500 quid for ten victories up his hole. But the moments are fleeting and Magee’s default mood appears to be a mixture of pensive sadness with an undercurrent of bitterness. He is always said to have a chip on his shoulder, too, but no one has ever identified who axed it into place. I haven’t even begun to figure him out, have barely scratched the surface, but I’m hooked.
As night falls we rise to leave. The alcohol has taken its effect and dulled my senses somewhat, but it looks like we have a deal, sealed with a handshake and a silent acknowledgement that our word will be our bond going forward.
‘So where do we start then?’ he asks me as I put on my coat – he never took his off.
I had anticipated this question and have my response ready. While reading between the lines of an old Irish Independent piece on Magee, I thought I discovered the key to exploring this flawed and complicated man when the article touched very briefly on Eamonn’s formative years and ‘the scourge of internment’. This, I believed, was where his story must begin.
‘Internment,’ I say. ‘I’d like to begin with Operation Demetrius and internment.’
‘You’ll need to speak to my mother then.’
