It was a brilliant idea for former featherweight champion of the world Barry McGuigan to teach Daniel Day-Lewis how to fight for The Boxer, reports Paul Hayward
In Jim Sheridan’s new film, The Boxer, a Belfast boxing ring is torched and becomes a blazing symbol of Northern Ireland’s endless war. This latest movie to address the Irish conflict – and the idea of fighting as a means of salvation – suggests the Marquess of Queensberry as the peacemaker with the Daniel Day-Lewis character, Danny Flynn, as his special envoy.
As a southern Irish Catholic who married a Protestant and fought in the north under a non-sectarian banner, Barry McGuigan knows all about brutality, legal and otherwise. It was inevitable and entirely proper that Sheridan should have summoned McGuigan to teach Day-Lewis how to fight.
McGuigan doesn’t appear in the film, but through him all the themes of the story converge. Flynn is a lapsed IRA man who leaves prison after 14 years to revive a long tradition of non-sectarian boxing at the Holy Father gym in a republican stronghold. His return stokes an inferno of bigotry among Provo hardliners and Protestants.
McGuigan was never a player on either side in the conflict, but he married his childhood love and was roared on at the King’s Hall in Belfast and beyond by Protestants and Catholics alike.
“I was accepted on the Falls Road and I was accepted along the Shankill,” he says. “They all rolled out the carpet for me.” His was a transcendent violence, a violence with rules and limits, and for both sides it created another, third enemy – a Panamanian here, a Puerto Rican there – against whom two disparate traditions could unite if only in three-minute segments marked out by the clang of a bell.
McGuigan and Day-Lewis have become “very close”, to the extent that McGuigan and his wife Sandra and their four children stay with Day-Lewis when they are in New York. “Daniel showed complete commitment. He gives himself to whatever he does. Oh, Jesus, we trained from the end of 1994 to 1997,” McGuigan says. “Initially he’d come and spend a week with me at a time, then a fortnight, then he’d go off and train all over the world.
“He had a guy in the Blue Velvet gym in New York who gave him a structure. He was working out every day – running in the morning and training in the afternoon. And as the movie got closer, his training intensified. He was as fit as a flea and his knowledge of boxing is amazing.”
For Flynn, boxing is another way of fighting back, but this time within a different set of British laws, those of the Marquess of Queensberry. After 14 years of sullen non-communication with his fellow inmates, his nerve-ends and powers of speech are almost dead. The pain from his opponent’s blows are his way back into the world, a way of feeling again. He drags his old trainer, Ike Weir – brilliantly played by Ken Stott – out of the drunk tank and back into the sweaty and Stygian world of the gym.
This subtext is present in boxing rings the world over, and is the hardest element for opponents of boxing to understand: violence as a route to redemption for both assailant and victim, as a way out, not always into something better, and not always necessarily economically richer, but at least from the world where circumstance has forced most boxers to be.
Danny is a one-man peace process in warrior dress, out of prison to resume legalised hostilities just as the IRA is preparing to (temporarily) lay down its guns.
“The funny thing is, boxing has always drawn people together. It always had that possibility,” McGuigan says. “When I fought, and they realised I was good, it didn’t matter where I came from. I was a southerner who fought in the north. It was never an issue. When I fought abroad people who would never, ever, associate with each other ended up travelling in the same party to see me fight.”
Some boxers end up living under bridges; many enter the vortex of alcohol and drugs, or have to give bad after-dinner speeches for o100 a time. Others are shot dead in domestic or gangland disputes. If it looks hard for them up there in the ring, you should see some of them 10 years after they’ve thrown their last punch. All this, of course, was the terrain of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, in which Robert de Niro, playing Jake la Motta, established the template for actors trying to transmogrify themselves into fighters.
Day-Lewis worked at it, says McGuigan, with equal determination. “I taught Daniel style and technique. Left jab and then the right hand. Conformation and shape. I taught him to roll with his shoulders, get up and down, move around the ring.” No boxer can talk like this without showing you the moves, and McGuigan does, in his tight chair. “It takes years to get to know that. To know when the guy is going to come at you, when your angle is going to be narrowed.
“Some fighters never get it. He got it so well, and his left hook was fabulous. I could have put him in with any of the British middleweights below the top 10 or 12 and he could have beaten them easily.” This can’t pass unchallenged, but McGuigan sticks by his claim.
“Every day, Daniel sparred in the gym, five or six rounds. I said to him one day down at the Fitzroy after he’d sparred eight rounds: ‘You don’t need to do this, Daniel, Jesus Christ, come on, I can make it easier.’ He said: ‘No, if I want to do it properly I have to go through it, and I want to go through it because I admire these guys.'”
The film hints at a connection between paramilitary violence and the violence of the ring. That link, in the end, may be fear. Again, it will be hard for people who despise boxing as futile and brain-curdling machismo to comprehend this argument of McGuigan’s: “A boxing ring is a place where you face your fears, and think: how big a man am I really? There are different degrees of ability, but when you get to the highest level you know the guy opposite you is serious and that you’ve got to face him. “People say: ‘I was never afraid.’ It’s a load of bullshit. This no-fear thing is rubbish. Without fear I couldn’t have fought. I couldn’t have done anything.”
That fear, says Day-Lewis, is about being “face to face with someone trying to hurt you”, and Sheridan shifts the angle nicely when he says: “At least with boxing the enemy is outside yourself. Most people are trying to be normal and prove they’re calm and cool when, in fact, we’re all in terror all the time anyway.”
All in terror, all the time. That image takes us full circle back to Northern Ireland, with Flynn standing in a ring, throwing punches and spilling blood to erase what Louis MacNeice called “a faggot of useless memories”.
McGuigan is such a relentlessly positive, affable and articulate survivor of the dark trade that you’d never guess how many times calamity has had him on the canvas. The “tragic fight” he refers to was the death of a Nigerian boxer called Young Ali, whose skull was too thin to withstand the beating McGuigan gave him over six rounds. Young Ali slipped into a coma and died six months later. In a two-year period in the late Eighties, McGuigan’s young daughter nearly died through convulsions, and he lost his father, aged 52, to a rare cancer. Four years ago, his beloved brother, Dermot, committed suicide, and in the early Nineties he was almost wiped out financially in a High Court battle with his former manager, Barney Eastwood.