Ringside With the Celtic Warriors: Tales of Ireland's Boxing Legends by Thomas Myler

Author:Thomas Myler [Myler, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Sports
ISBN: 9781856077873
Google: _YOeMQEACAAJ
Publisher: Currach Press
Published: 2012-11-15T23:24:44.024949+00:00

8. STEVE COLLINS

The electrician with sparks and true grit

It was a long road but Steve Collins finally made it to the top. A tough, gritty battler from Dublin’s Northside with a burning desire to win, he holds several ‘firsts’ to make him a standout. He remains the only Irish boxer to win world titles at two different weights, middleweight and supermiddleweight, and the first from the city on the Liffey to win one. Collins is also the winner of more world championship contests than any other professional boxer from this island, nine in succession.

Known as The Celtic Warrior, with a shamrock cut into his hair above his ears, Collins began his professional career in the United States, always a stern breeding ground for aspiring champions. Collins lost two world championship fights early on and it was not until he reached his thirties that he fulfilled his true potential.

Having competed against the best on this side of the Atlantic, Collins tends to be linked more to the eighties and nineties and he met most of the big names of the period. There was an intense rivalry, for instance, between British world champions such as Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn. He took them on and beat them twice, no mean feats. After being pushed to the limit by Collins in a world middleweight title fight in 1990, Mike McCallum, the brilliant Jamaican, felt his chin and remarked: ‘Collins is the toughest opponent I’ve ever fought. Period.’

Steve’s true grit could certainly never be called into question, and it was once reported that a concrete company wanted to sponsor his chin. He was knocked off his feet just three times, once in his last fight, during an elevenyear career involving thirty-nine contests. Collins rarely stopped going forward. Interestingly, all three reverses on his record came against world champions. Because of his aggressive, hard-punching ring style, he was very much a throwback to the great middleweights of the 1940s and 1950s such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, Tony Zale, Marcel Cerdan, Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio.

It is problematic to discern whether or not Collins would have won had he clashed with any of those illustrious ringmen, but he would certainly have held his own and at the finish they would have known they were in a fight, win, lose or draw.

In what has now become a classic DVD from 2004, Steve Collins’ Boxing’s Hard Men, he introduces footage from fights involving legends such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson, Marvin Hagler, George Foreman and others. Included is footage from his own classic wars with Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, as Collins indeed was one of boxing’s hard men. They are well worth watching, even to get a flavour of his immense talent and toughness.

Collins was born into a working class family in Cabra on 21 July 1964. ‘There was boxing on both sides of the family so it has always been there,’ he recalled. ‘My father

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