The king of the ring

The king of the ring


Gary Keegan, former IABA Performance Director, talks about Ray Moylette’s World Youth title win

Feature
Daniel Carey

DURING their second night in the Olympic Village in Beijing, members of the Irish boxing team were shown a short video. It featured footage of the boxers in their qualification bouts, interspersed with clips from Al Pacino’s famous ‘game of inches’ speech in ‘Any Given Sunday’. With Enya providing the soundtrack, messages such as ‘What will your destiny be?’ and ‘The future is yours to write’ appeared on screen.
One man with his eye on the future is Ray Moylette, who returned from Mexico in early November having become the first Irishman to win a gold medal at the World Youth Championships. Ireland also picked up one silver medal and two bronze in Guadalajara, so those involved in boxing here have reason to reflect with great pride on 2008.
As Performance Director of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, Gary Keegan oversaw the development of high performance squads at senior, junior, youth and women’s level. He puts Moylette’s – and Ireland’s – achievement into context.
“A world medal at that level is very difficult to take, and we pulled home four of them, including a gold,” Keegan told an audience in Athlone IT in early December as part of a lecture entitled ‘Reaching and Maintaining Elite Levels in Sport’. “And for that gold medal [to go] back to the west, to Mayo ... is really historic and really significant.”
A picture of the four medallists – Ray Moylette, Jamie Kavanagh, David Joe Joyce and Thomas McCarthy – coming back to Dublin Airport, medals proudly displayed, flashes up on the screen behind Keegan. He describes them as ‘generation next: success’, and the omens are good.
“We have 20 boxers on our junior programme, and we’ve 20 boxers on our youth programme – of which we selected eight for the World Youth Championships. So we put our 20 most talented boxers into a high performance environment, and Ray was one of those guys,” Keegan said in conversation with The Mayo News afterwards.
Preparation for the World Youth Championships was led by head coach Jim Moore, assisted by Jimmy Payne and Tony Davitt. Keegan, who received regular updates on their progress, describes Moore as ‘a phenomenal coach’ who has ‘a fantastic relationship’ with the group in his charge. But he also stresses the role played by St Anne’s Boxing Club coaches Peter Mullen, Paul Mullen and Gary Kennedy in the young Islandeady man’s development.
“These guys have been through a comprehensive preparation programme,” he adds. “We brought Romania, England, Italy and Germany over here, as sparring and training partners. And then the Olympic team came back in after the Games and trained alongside those guys, which was very, very important. They got to spar with Kenny Egan, Darren Sutherland and John Joe Joyce, and through that process, they got to see themselves as potential[ly] world class. They had been sitting at their televisions watching their senior counterparts [taking part in the Olympics] – who they trained alongside, showered alongside and sweated alongside – in the ring, achieving glory.”
The younger group achieved their own bit of glory in Mexico, and none shone brighter than the man from Mayo, who came through five bouts in seven nights. Keegan, who is now Director of Technical Services at the Irish Institute of Sport, stresses the importance of becoming ‘process-focused rather than outcome-focused’. In layman’s terms, he explains, that means taking things ‘round by round, punch by punch’.
“What Ireland achieved in Mexico, we never achieved before in the history of the sport,” says Keegan. “We were hugely successful. It was a tough environment climate-wise [and] there was a lot of travel. And without the sports science and medicine back-up, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve the results.”
The eight-strong team was accompanied on the 22-day trip to Central America by two coaches, a strength and conditioning coach and a physio. Keegan stresses that getting boxers to ‘perform at the level they needed to perform at’ in the world championships was a ‘real challenge physically’. Psychologist Gerry Hussey, a Galwayman who worked with the Olympic team, also played his part before they departed for Mexico. Every angle was covered.

THE preparation that the 18-year-old Moylette and his peers undertook ‘wasn’t as full-time as the seniors, but we brought them for extended periods of time into the gym’, Keegan clarifies. “It wasn’t just weekend training; we brought them in for five- and six-day camps, and we get a lot done during those periods … Ray has really floated to the surface in the last year.”
Having won the national Boy 1 (33kg) title in 1992 and Boy 4 (44kg) in 2004, the past 12 months have certainly represented a bonanza for the talented St Anne’s boxer. He won the Cadet (57kg) title in April 2007, and within a month had added the Junior (57kg) title. It was a huge achievement for a 17-year-old taking part in an under-19 competition, and he was also named Best Boxer of the Championships. Earlier this year, he added the Junior (60kg) title. London 2012 is Moylette’s next major goal. Gay Mitchell’s dream of a Dublin Olympics notwithstanding, this is probably as close as the Games will get to Ireland.
“It’s almost like a home game, and that adds its own pressure, but I also think it adds its own advantages as well,” says Keegan. “There’ll be huge Irish support there for our boxers. But they will be carrying the hopes of the nation into that Games, and that puts a lot of weight on the team. So I hope we manage that well, because we want them to perform.”
But 2012 is still some time away. What’s next for Moylette and the rest of his high performance group?
“Senior boxing, and that transition is going to be quite a challenge for them,” replies Keegan. “There’s a strong senior group there holding down their positions, so they’re going to have a real fight on their hands to make it. But I think we have to now look at these guys seriously over the next two years. We can’t afford for their development to be part-time, so we’re going to have to consider their education and their boxing aligned to each other.”