In 1820, there were just 2,000 Irish scattered around Boston; not enough for the Brahmins class to notice. By 1880, however, the arriving Irish had exploded to 70,000, facilitating the 1906 election of Boston’s first Irish-American mayor, John F. ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather to the tan, smiling brothers who would transform the American political landscape in the 1960s.
By the time Seán Mannion traded Ros Muc for Beantown in the summer of ‘77, the city was emerald tinted and the southside suburb of Dorchester drenched in boozy and often violent waves of sentimentality for the old country; a fiercely independent world that was neither fully American nor truly Irish.
Martin Scorcese tried to capture something of that flavour in The Departed, based loosely on the recently deceased gangster and murderer James 'Whitey' Bulger. But in Mannion, Rónán Mac Con Iomaire has an eye-witness account of the last years of Irish-Dorchester from one of its most celebrated sons.
Mannion’s one encounter with Bulger is comical: the gangster accidentally clips Mannion’s car with his own late one night, enraging the Irish man to the point that he gives chase until the vexed Bulger pulls over. When Mannion rolls down his window to complain about the damage, Bulger sheepishly apologises and throws him a roll of cash – $500: “more that what the car was worth”, Mannion recalled. It was only when he watched the Chevrolet Malibu take off that he realised, to his mounting horror, who he had been dealing with.
Bulger’s thug acolytes were constantly hanging around the gym where Mannion was gaining a reputation as one of the most promising boxers in the city. Mannion watched other fighters, like his sparring partner and friend Frank McDonald who was shot dead in a bank heist gone wrong and made sure that he gave Bulger’s circle a wide berth. Still, as Mac Con Iomaire’s study illustrates, Dorchester had this habit of both revering its own and constantly destroying them.
Great potential
Mannion’s boxing life is essentially a story of the last great torrent of Irish-American emigration. His boxing talent separated him from the thousands of other working Irish who flooded Boston, hungry for work and a better life. He was a versatile stylist with an exceptional capacity to absorb heavy hits and he hadn’t been sparring in the Petronelli gym in Brockton for more than 20 minutes before his potential was spotted.
Internationally, Mannion’s career can be distilled to those high-profile nights when he fought Mike McCallum in Madison Square Garden in 1984 and Errol Christie in London in 1986. He lost both contests badly and they were, poignantly, the only two fights of his to be broadcast live on RTÉ television – the only channel that mattered to Mannion. But this book breathes vivid life into Mannion’s powerful and largely unheralded accomplishments in the Byzantine world of American boxing. He never got the big pay-day fight against the Tomas Hearns or Marvin Haglers that his talent deserved and one of the subplots of the book concerns Mannion’s tortured relationship with his trainer, Jimmy Connolly.
It becomes clear to the reader that Mannion’s interests will never be best served but he refuses to leave, for reasons that he never satisfactorily explains to Mac Con Iomaire. Mannion is in the twilight of his career when he finally moves to the stable of the great Angelo Dundee (who charged just 15 per cent of the purse rather than the 33 per cent Mannion had been paying). He had the technical grace and instinct still but a decade of winter labouring in Boston, late nights in Fields Corner and old fights had taken their toll. “If only I got him when he was 20 instead of 30,” Dundee would say.
Bad luck and bad decisions
“If only” is the feeling that pervades every chapter. Mannion is a genuine and mainly sympathetic figure: a decent if stubborn man who missed out on a parallel career of glory and belts through a litany of bad luck and bad decisions which Mac Con Iomaire revisits through deep research and interviews. Often, Mannion’s biggest fights were against drink and his short fuse: he was fortunate not to get thrown out of the States early in his career when he took on half the Boston police force following a brawl in the Centre Bar.
He retired on April 6th, 1993 and then discovered that Mike Flaherty, the Ros Muc trainer he revered, had died back home on the very same day. There’s no sport more solitary than boxing so, perhaps inevitably, there’s a terribly lonely streak running through this book.
Mannion moved home to Ros Muc eventually but, like many returnees, he couldn’t settle. Back in Boston, he found that most of his old Irish haunts in Dorchester had been erased and refashioned, and boxing is now a peripheral pursuit at best.
The author’s motivations for deep diving into an neglected Irish sports figure become apparent when you flick through the photographic collage (and the publishers have done a fine job: physically, this is a handsome book). Not everyone forgot: there is Mac Con Iomaire, aged nine, posing with the fighter on his homecoming to Ros Muc, shortly after the McCallum fight when, to west Galway kids, he must have seemed like a Marvel superhero. This book salutes that moment without shirking from the truth that Séan Mannion was also one of the countless emigrant sons of a Christy Moore ballad, destined to become suspended between two places that only fully exist in his imagination.
