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Will Tyson be roaring tomorrow?

From the archive, first published Friday 28th Jan 2000.

The voice on the end of the telephone was full of outrage and the language was as salty as ever, writes George Frew.

It was like hearing from an old friend - and the old friend in question sounded like a very large bear with a very sore head who'd had his honey nicked into the bargain.

Paddy Monaghan, formerly of Abingdon, was calling from the County Fermanagh to express his disgust and register his anger over the decision to allow a certain Mr Tyson entry to the UK to practise his brutal profession.

Paddy Monaghan swears a lot, but only the most prim of delicate flowers could object, because he swears for all the right reasons. The curses are steeped in honesty and sound like a sort of bruised poetry of the soul. Boxing has loomed large in Paddy's life, almost since he and his parents got off the boat from Ireland and pitched up in Abingdon in the days when the owners of guest houses could still get away with hanging signs in their windows which read, "No dogs, blacks or Irish."

If Paddy looks like a battered cherub now it's because of the times he fought, bare-knuckled, in the frozen fields and sun-dappled meadows of Oxfordshire against hard men for a purse that would put a meal on the table for his wife Sandra and their brood of children.

When regular work was scarce, Paddy would take a fight and Sandra, his childhood sweetheart, had to blink back the tears when the man she loved came home yet again with the cuts on his face glued together with a mixture of tea-leaves and axle grease. Bare-knuckle fighting was illegal, so the luxury of a doctor's stitches was never an option. When Paddy wasn't fighting himself, he was fighting on behalf of his great hero, Muhammad Ali. He swore a lot when they took Ali's passport and boxing licence away because The Greatest refused to contemplate travelling to the other side of the world to kill people with whom he had no quarrel.

He was the first to refer to Ali as The People's Champion, long before the phrase became devalued by hysterical over-use. Eventually, Muhammad got to hear about the Irishman from Abingdon who had sent a petition to the White House and confronted both Joe Frazier and George Foreman at Heathrow airport on The Greatest's behalf.

Monaghan got into a bit of a rumble with Smokin' Joe, who didn't take kindly to being reminded that he might have the title, but Ali was still the true champ. When Paddy was sitting watching television one night, Sandra answered a knock at the door to find Ali and half of Abingdon standing on the doorstep. Muhammad and Monaghan became great friends. Paddy was in Ali's corner when he fought Frazier at Madison Square Garden and this newspaper has pictures of Muhammad on file, sparring in the Monaghan's back garden with Paddy's eldest son, Tyrone.

And now here he was on the phone, fulminating mightily against Jack Straw, immigration officials, the gullible and Mike Tyson himself.

It is impossible in a family newspaper to accurately report Paddy's words. But by inserting, TV-style, a 'beep' when he employs his favourite Anglo-Saxon words, the flavour of his views may come across. "They took Ali's licence and passport away and he was convicted of nothing. Yet an animal like Tyson, convicted of rape, can still get into the beeping country. It's all beeping wrong."

When he talks about Ali, Paddy sometimes forgets to swear. Instead , his voice is full of warmth and affection as he recalls The Great Man.

"I remember one time Ali was in the country and another boxer who I had better not name was asked to go along to a home for handicapped kids and cheer them up. This boxer's manager just sent the people a telegram which said 'Not enough money'. So they asked Ali, and he just went. Never thought twice about it and never even mentioned money. "Mark my words - by the time Tyson is due to go back to America, all these idiots will be saying, 'What a nice man - what was all the fuss about?' If I'd been an immigration officer, I'd have told him to turn back and go beeping home."

In his own modest way - and he won't thank me for this, but it's true, anyway - Paddy Monaghan is almost as much of a legend as Muhammad Ali. He fought epilepsy and he fought on the cobbles until the blood streamed down his face like rain. He fought illiteracy and managed to produce a highly readable account of his life which has been optioned by the movie people and is currently in development hell.

One day, they might stir themselves enough to get round to filming it. If wunderkind Oxford director Sam Mendes is looking for a new project, he could do a lot worse than filming the life and times of Paddy Monaghan. It's a hell of a story. Too beeping right it is.

Story date: Friday 28 January

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.

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