The Heavyweight Champion of Irishness: Ethnic Fighting Identities Today

Abstract

On the night of June 11, 2005, Kevin McBride, the heavyweight boxing champion of Ireland, was in the MCI Center in Washington, DC, to fight Mike Tyson, the one-time world champion. The audience, 15,000-strong, predominantly black, and overwhelmingly favoring Tyson, derided McBride’s “ring walk,” the procession the boxer and his faction make through the arena to the ring before the start of a fight. Earlier, Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali, had knocked out an American woman named “Irish” Erin Toughill, and the elder Ali had been shown on the big screen with Tyson in his locker room, to loud cheering. McBride was clad in a blue tartan full-length robe; the hood, like a condemned man’s, almost completely covered his downward-cast face. When he emerged from the walkway into the arena, he was greeted by roaring cascades of boos, jeers, and catcalls. Portions of the crowd thundered “USA! USA!” with an air of mockery. His prefatory bagpipers already had been drowned out by the noise and had hurried out of the ring. The usually ebullient standard-bearers of his entourage—the owner of a Boston pub and the manager of another—spent only a few moments waving the tricolor in the ring, before climbing down quickly to their ringside seats. McBride had said at several press conferences before the fight, “When I hit Tyson, he’s going to think the whole of Ireland hit him on the chin.” At an event held at The Kells, a popular Irish pub in Boston, he added,“And as one man says to me when I give that line, ‘there’s 800 years of suppression behind that right hand.’” Tyson had been bemused by McBride’s patriotic fervor, predicting that McBride would break that hand and calling him “cute.” Entering the ring, with his trainers huddling defensively around him, to the crowd, McBride may have appeared, like many of Tyson’s earlier opponents, to have lost the fight before it had began. The hostile scene was a far cry from most of McBride’s fights in America. In nightclubs, ballrooms, and fairgrounds in and around Boston, vocal audiences dominated by working-class immigrants have watched him methodically pound smaller and mostly ineffectual opponents into submission, sometimes pushing them right out of the ring. McBride’s ring walks often last longer than