Michael Conlan: “You need to leave the past in the past and move forward.”

Michael Conlan: “You need to leave the past in the past and move forward.”

By Garry White

“It’s a very hard game. When I lose, I lose in front of millions of people around the world. Fuck me, it’s not nice. People throw rubbish at you, and they do and say things that leave you feeling vulnerable, in a sense,” admits Michael Conlan, wisened by eight years in the pro game and more than two decades in all in the toughest of sports. The picture that beams out to you on BoxRec is still a fresh-faced one, elusively younger than the simultaneously world-weary yet upbeat 33-year-old on the other end of our ZOOM call. Boxing leaves its marks not just in the obvious places, but deep in the psyche and sometimes in the soul. 

There are those sixteen straight victories reeled off in five years of uninterrupted momentum, where like the fictional Jay Gatsby “his dream [of a world title] must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it”, before waking into a nightmare of three inside-the-distance reverses in his last five outings. Worst of all those ‘red-blocked’ losses on his record have all come in the ones that really mattered. 

To be a mere ninety seconds from the moment he had always dreamed of, only to find himself punched through the ropes and prostrate staring blankly into oblivion against ‘Lethal’ Leigh Wood is an experience that is hard to countenance for anyone who hasn’t lived it. “You need to leave the past in the past and move forward. But it was hard. Yeah, that one keeps me up sometimes. Jeez, I was a minute-and-a-half away. What the hell?” the Belfast boy questions both to the cosmos and no one in particular. Anyway, he knows no one is listening. In this loneliest of sports, the fighter wins in the company of millions and loses alone.

“But I did get a lot of credit from it, which also helped me a lot,” admits a sanguine Conlan. “That slip in the eleventh round [Referee Steve Gray ruled it as a knockdown] changed the momentum of the fight. We were both done in terms of energy, but it just gave Leigh the belief he could get the job done – fair play to him. I suppose it’s a bit bittersweet as the fight was such a good one. But it’s still shit being in the ‘Fight of the Year’ when you lose. But at least people spoke well about me after, so it wasn’t as bad as the last one.”

The ‘last one’that Conlan is referring to is his most recent ring appearance against Jordan Gill. Appearing in front of a packed home crowd at Belfast’s SSE Arena the dice appeared to be loaded in his favour in one of those perceived ‘last chance saloon’ fights that boxing coldly throws up much sooner than it should. Was there ever a sport as intolerant to defeat as modern boxing? Its combatants are routinely framed by promoters and the media as impregnable superstars, and then after one or two bad nights, unwantedly recast as one left hook away from the knackers yard. 

Gill just one fight prior if you listened to the hype, had the world at his feet before being brutally undone by the aged, creaking Kiko Martinez. Conlan, for his part, had seven months earlier been saved by his corner in an unsuccessful IBF title shot against Mexican Luis Alberto Lopez. In a fight firmly at the ‘axis’ trajectory of “the loser has nowhere to go”, Conlan was stopped in seven rounds.

It is easy to write these words casually. To pull them from memory and then verify them via BoxRec, Wikipedia, or old fight reports. To let them fall easily onto the page, and to sometimes take pride in the self-conceit of a job well done. But all the while forget that they tell the story of an athlete’s life. Beyond the printed results and the brutal ten-second social media clip of a beaten fighter being pummelled, and then held by an intervening referee, beneath it, there is a real person. One that at the end of the night must leave the venue, go home, and the next day live his life, despite the scattering of his long-cherished dreams into tiny particles on the air. To be condemned to see his very public defeat replayed to millions across the internet and everyone from expert to idiot having an opinion on it. 

For Conlan, who carries his Belfast identity deep in his soul. Who punches with his people and for his people, to publicly lose in front of them for a second time in seven months, the pain and false perception of unwarranted shame must have been impossible to bear. 

“Yeah, I didn’t really know if I wanted to do this anymore,” he confides. “I took a complete step back from boxing and didn’t do any for over six months. I ran a marathon just to keep my head in a good place. That helped me through what was a dark period, I suppose. From April to December, I ran more than 900 miles. You’re alone a lot during that time. Running up hills in the dark at 5 am, you know, maybe 15 or 20 miles at a time.” – it’s an insight into the boxer’s uncompromising psyche that even while he was estranged from it, he still drove himself by its hard rules. But deep down, he knew that he couldn’t outrun it. 

“One day, I thought: what the hell? I need to get back to the gym,” he says, his eyes widening. “Those hours by myself on the road had made me realise that I’ve still got things to achieve. I’ve got goals to reach; that’s why I knew I had to come back.”

After twelve months estranged from the sport, it wasn’t easy. The old muscle memory that he had taken for granted initially proved elusive. “For about my first ten spars, I had forgotten how to box. I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. But eventually, it all clicked,” remembers Conlan of those tentative first sessions back in the gym, as recently as late November of last year. 

A team-up with the Sauerland Brothers and their Wasserman Boxing Promotion has provided him with fresh impetus and sees him back in action on Friday night at the Brighton Centre on a show headlined by Harlem Eubank against Conlan’s fellow Belfast-native, Tyrone McKenna. Uncharacteristically for Conlan, it will be Eubank who will need to soak up the pressure and harness the adrenalin of an expectant home crowd whilst he eases himself back in with a supporting eight-rounder. It’s all a surrealist far cry from those recent super-charged fight nights at The SSE in front of the faithful or those early nights on Top Rank shows at MSG entertaining busloads of cheering Irish Americans. 

Waiting for him on the unfamiliar south coast will be his opponent, Asad Asif Khan. So far, the Indian’s most noteworthy entry on his resume is a five-round knockout loss to Can Xu. “He’s 19 and 5 with one draw. He’s game, loves to showboat, and takes two punches to land one,” says Conlan of his upcoming dance partner. “He’s the right style of opponent for the comeback. Being out for fifteen months is a long time, the longest I have ever been away, so I need to be sharp and switched on. But he’s the right person for the job.”

In Conlan’s corner on fight night will be new trainer Grant Smith of Sheffield’s famed ‘Steel City Gym’. It’s a move that he confirms is “going great” but obviously, one that has necessitated his upheaval and relocation to South Yorkshire. “I’m here away from my kids and wife, which is always very hard,” says a focused Conlan. “But I have a goal to reach, and I will do everything I can to make sure I get there. You have to make sacrifices in boxing to reach the potential that I believe I have.”

There will be those who would readily forgive the Irishman’s cruel loss to Wood in a barnstormer and his fifth-round reversal to tough Mexican, Luis Alberto Lopez. But they would take his loss to Gill, who had looked painfully fragile against Spanish veteran Martinez and has subsequently been stopped by Zelfra Barrett, as the conclusive proof that Conlan’s world title dreams will remain just that. It is tempting to ask, outside of the new team that he has behind him, what he can do differently this time. “For the last two losses I had an awful lot of shit going on in my life,” he responds frankly. 

“But I’ve kind of got to the end of that stuff now. I am getting back on track and my head has cleared. You know, I’ve said many times in the past that outside stuff doesn’t affect you – but really it does! I had so much going on in my life. I shouldn’t really have been dealing with these things when competing at the highest level. It’s very dangerous doing that. But I’ve put all that to bed. My mind is right and I’m happy now. I’m fighting with no stress and ready to get the job done.”

And if there is any fighter that has dealt with more than his fair share of what he euphemistically calls ‘shit’ then it is Conlan. As an amateur, he won everything there was to win at European, Commonwealth and World-level, except the Olympics. A bronze medal in London 2012 as a 20-year-old was marked as a dead-cert to be upgraded to gold in Rio. However, the ringside judges blocked his progress in the quarter-final stage via a scurrilous decision and waved through his ‘beaten’ and bloodied Russian opponent instead. It was an act of such brazen larceny that it was later revealed in an AIBA-sponsored report into institutional corruption, conducted by Prof Richard McLaren, to be a result that was so suspicious it caused the crooked system of bribes and backhanders to “publicly collapse”. It took upwards of five years for Conlan to be publicly vindicated by the report. 

But back then in 2016, all he could do was to raise his middle finger defiantly to the judges and then enter into a tirade about the integrity of amateur boxing and how his “dream had been shattered” to the world’s media. In its own way, despite his misery, it made him as big a star as if he had actually won the gold medal.

“If I’m honest, it made me a superstar overnight,” he says of his defiance in the moments after receiving the crooked verdict. “But equally I always wanted to be an Olympic champion, that’s all I ever wanted. But if I could go back, I still wouldn’t change any of it. It’s made me who I am and helped me earn a lot of money in the pro game. 

“When I turned pro, I had Olympic champions on my undercards. I was the bigger draw! In a funny way, it helped springboard me.”

Earlier in our conversation, Conlan had talked fondly of his first year in the pro ranks. Promoted by Bob Arum’s Top Rank he bypassed the usual small hall locations and appeared on some monster nights of boxing at Madison Square Garden, performing in the shadows of the likes of Vasyl Lomachenko. But deep down he reveals that he wished he’d taken the time to take a step back to enjoy it all more. That he hadn’t been side-tracked by the now-familiar voices eager to take aim at a youngster with a huge promotional deal and the front-and-centre positioning of those early appearances. “I’d get shit from American journalists because there was so much hype around me. They were always happy to throw dirt on me. At that stage I was young. I’d read everything and find myself getting annoyed with people about it.

“I remember waking up at 6 am after my third fight [W TKO3] and thinking that wasn’t good enough. I need to get better. I just knew the criticism would be coming my way.”

It doesn’t seem fair, but perhaps it’s just the nature of the boxing beast. Those periods of unbridled, almost unstoppable success, abruptly interrupted by very public and deeply personal derailment. As much as people will share in the glory of the good times there will still be others that revel in the bad. And worst of all those, who in an unperceived homage to G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Secret People’, scan half-awake through social media videos of the latest loss in the same way that “a tired man looks at flies”.

Yes, Michael Conlan has seen it all. Along the way, he has achieved more than enough for one man. But beneath it all there are only ever two things he’s ever wanted. Now only one of them is still on the table. The journey towards it begins again quietly this Friday night in an eight-rounder at the Brighton Centre.