Sport

Torn in the USA? How Billy Walsh found himself leading the States, instead of Ireland, to Rio

Billy Walsh became Team USA's head coach last November after a breakdown in communications with the Irish Athletic Boxing Association. Picture by USA Boxing
Billy Walsh became Team USA's head coach last November after a breakdown in communications with the Irish Athletic Boxing Association. Picture by USA Boxing Billy Walsh became Team USA's head coach last November after a breakdown in communications with the Irish Athletic Boxing Association. Picture by USA Boxing

It’s nine months since Billy Walsh left his post as Ireland’s head coach, having transformed the fortunes of Irish boxing over the course of a decade at the High Performance unit. Now preparing to lead Team USA into the Rio Olympics, Neil Loughran talks to the Wexford man about being told to go home by one of his new charges, the possibility of facing Irish fighters and how it has all started to click in Colorado Springs...

Neil Loughran: Billy, last November must seem like a lifetime ago now as you’ve built a new life for yourself across the Atlantic in a completely different environment. Did it take long to find your feet?

Billy Walsh: Funny enough, we’re supposed to speak the same language but a lot of the time they didn’t understand me. I speak low as well so they didn’t understand me at all - I noticed they were actually lip-reading me at times. Usually, everybody here is just shouting at each other, they’d be pretty loud. But we’re getting there - I’m reasonably well settled.

NL: I hope you’ve been practising your American accent...

BW: There’s a bit of that, but I’m trying to hold on to my Wexford one for as long as I can!

NL: And in terms of your own situation, you’re actually living at the Olympic training centre in Colorado - is it not important to retain a certain distance from the job?

BW: I wanted to be close to the team, I wanted to be in the middle of it. The same as in Dublin when we were all in the same hotel, we were in the National Stadium for a while together. I wanted to get to know everybody.

NL: From a personal and professional point of view, it must have been a huge readjustment?

BW: To change any culture is very difficult. For a foreign guy to come in and try to change things is even more difficult. I came here with a clean slate to see what they had in place and I quickly realised they didn’t have a world class system, surprisingly. You always think America is so much better than us in terms of technology and all that but they were light years behind the Irish system.

NL: In what respect?

BW: In every respect. The style of Olympic style boxing, they weren’t embracing it at all, they were coming together a couple of weeks or a week before heading off to a major tournament, like we would have been doing in 2003. There was no performance analysis, very little feedback to the guys, no follow up from their previous events, no sport science team really around them, and they weren’t getting funded. The Olympic Council decided these guys weren’t worth investing in because they weren’t producing.

NL: It’s your job to turn that around, but it’s not something that can be achieved overnight. In terms of your relationship with the boxers, have you been able to get them pulling in the same direction as you?

BW: In the last three Games they’ve only won one bronze medal in the men’s - it’s amazing how far they’ve fallen from grace. They haven’t been training like world class athletes, they’ve been training like amateurs. And amateur is gone, these countries have been professional for many, many years - in Ireland, we’ve been professional since 2003. I’ve turned their heads around and they’ve seen the change in culture, but the real work will be done after the Games. This is a Tokyo 2020 project really, but we’ve had good success in a short space of time.

NL: You’re used to dealing with Irish boxers, guys whose coaches and families you knew. Coming to Colorado, you didn’t know the boxers you would be working with and they didn’t know you. How difficult has that been to overcome?

BW: It’s like starting over again. At least with the guys in Ireland, we all knew each other. I knew all their coaches too, all their clubs. You’re right, I don’t know anybody here - I don’t know any of the coaches, so for me, it was just getting to know the guys, finding out what makes them tick, what their likes are, what their dislikes are, and giving them tools that will help their fight game because they’re all different styles.

NL: Surely though all boxers share similar traits deep down, no matter where they come from?

BW: I saw Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan at a training camp in Azerbaijan and I told them: ‘You boys are like altar boys compared to these fellas!’ That’s saying something. We think we come from tough environments and tough places, but it’s different for these kids...

NL: Claressa Shields, one of your boxers, is a case in point I suppose. She had an awful upbringing, her father was in jail for seven of the first nine years of her life, her mother was a drug addict, she was raped at the age of five by one man, sexually abused by another. It’s an awful story, and yet she goes and wins an Olympic gold medal at the age of 17 in London and is favourite to take middleweight gold again in Rio. What kind of personality is she and what was her reaction to your arrival?

BW: Well, she had been Olympic champion at 17 and she was looking at me thinking ‘who are you coming in telling me what to do?’ She wanted me to go home and get out of here. It got to the stage where she was going to go home, she was leaving - it was me or her – so I called her bluff and told her I was here until 2018, so go ahead. Go back home, train away, but you won’t be getting paid. Eventually we started to see eye to eye. She’s bought into what’s going on, she saw that I wasn’t trying to change her, I was trying to add to what she already had so she could fight in many different ways.

NL: That sounds like a difficult situation to manage. Having been there for a while now and faced those kind of issues as well as logistical problems, is it a bigger job than you first thought?

BW: This is only the tip of the iceberg. They don’t have a youth and junior programme here so we’re starting from scratch. It’s a massive project - it was only when I got here I realised how far behind we are, so it is probably a bigger project than I thought.If there’s anybody with talent here, the pros are just hanging around the corner, so we have to fund them to stay amateur. If you give them a decent salary like they get in Ireland, a lot of these guys wouldn’t go pro because they know the pro game is a mug’s game - Floyd Mayweather is the one per cent. There’s five or six pros in here for sparring and those guys are making nothing. They don’t know where their next fight is coming from.

NL: That’s a huge difference to Ireland where there isn’t such a big pro scene. In terms of the guys you used to be working with day in, day out, you have met them at training camps and at the world qualifier in recent months - how has it been when you have bumped into them?

BW: It’s a strange feeling alright. I’m in there at the draw and they’re calling out the names of all the teams to say whether you’re there or not there, and when they called out Ireland I put my hand up! I’ll always be Irish, you’re still thinking in that way. I’m great friends with all the coaching staff, they all worked underneath me, we had a good relationship and they didn’t change - they were sad to see me leave. It wasn’t their fault I left. When you’re in the same changing rooms warming up together, it’s hard, but you just have to block that out. You have a job to do. I’m with a different country now and you just get on with it.

NL: Obviously, there had been speculation about your position within the Irish set-up for a while, but when the end came it all seemed very sudden. Is that how it was for you? And how long did it take for you to get your head around the fact it was over?

BW: There had been negotiations for eight months, so I had a bit of time. I had gone out to Colorado Springs for four days around Christmas 2014 and at the end of those four days they said ‘what would it take to bring you here?’ I still wasn’t interested. But it was like the builder during the Celtic Tiger years who didn’t want to do a job so he gave a ridiculous price - I just asked for a ridiculous figure and they said ‘okay, I think we can do that’. By the time I got to the airport I had a contract on my laptop. I went to the IABA [Irish Athletic Boxing Association] and said ‘I know you can’t match these figures, I don’t want you to match these figures but I just want to be on a level that I had agreed with the former chairman after London’.

It was a lot less than four or five other guys working as High Performance directors in Ireland who have won very little. It went on and on for months, the Sports Council was brought in, and there was enough said about it at the time. There was a four hour debate about it in the Dail the day I left for Memphis.

NL: The day you left, there were camera crews and photographers waiting at the airport. That must have been bizarre...

BW: For an ordinary working class guy it beggars belief. That was terrible, a total invasion of privacy. It made me feel like a criminal leaving my own country. My wife is a very quiet woman and she was petrified. I just ran for the door to get out of there - you’re just thinking ‘what the f*ck is going on in the world?’

NL: That’s all in the past now, but your connection to the Irish team, the coaches and the boxers in Rio is obviously still very strong. Despite all that has happened, do you wish you were preparing the Irish team for the Olympics and not the US team?

BW: I went to Athens with Andy Lee, we were nowhere on the medal table. We went to Beijing, we were 12th in the medal table. Coming out of that we went to London and finished fifth in the medal table. So the question looking ahead to Rio was: ‘How are we going to go from five to one?’ Five to one became the mantra for this team. In Doha [last October] we finished fourth at the World Championships, so we’re moving towards that five to one and I wanted to lead that team to be the best team in Rio...

NL: Does it niggle at you that you’re not leading them any more?

BW: I have regrets about that. I wanted to finish off the job we had started, but it wasn’t to be, and I knew that when I was in Doha. I knew in the training camp that it was all up - I had to make the decision for my own health and my own wellbeing. Every part of the running of the programme was being taken away from me. I was only being left as a facility manager looking after the gym and just back down to being a coach again, whereas I had run the programme since 2008 without being rewarded as the director.

NL: Zaur Antia, your right hand man, has taken up the reins since you left. He’s not a guy the Irish public know a whole lot about, other than that he’s a top class technical coach. The boxers seem very fond of him, but there’s much more to it as team leader. Is he the kind of guy who can handle the pressure at a tournament of this magnitude?

BW: First of all, he’s a great character. He’s very good with people, great sense of fun, very easy to get along with - very personable - and a world class technical coach. The management of the programme... yeah it would be difficult for him because having that language barrier hasn’t made it easy for him. He’s been thrown in at the deep end. Reading and writing English wouldn’t be his forte. Man management, which he hasn’t really had to do, would be difficult. I managed the team, so it would be a bit alien to him, but he’s going to have to learn. We had lots of conversations since I left and we continue to speak regularly, but he has a very good team under him and I hope they will be the best team in Rio. I would be very satisfied and very happy if they were - that would be all my dreams coming true.

NL: Is there not a bit of a conflict of interest saying that?

BW: We’re in a different place. We’re looking to do well and get a few medals. If we do, we’ll be very happy. Claressa is a returning gold medallist so you would expect her to do well. Shakur Stevenson maybe, Charles Conwell who’s still in High School, he just had his graduation. That’s what you’re up against.

NL: The job you found yourself with, the situation you were in, working with the likes of Claressa, Shakur, Charles Conwell, was that the key to moving on from what happened back home?

BW: Listen, I got here one week and I was already having big battles with some of these athletes, trying to get them to warm up properly, to do the right things technically... they were all refusing. Later in the day I was looking out the window at this beautiful mountain top in the Rockies, Pikes Peak, snow on top, beautiful blue sky, and I thought: ‘you know what? This is the best decision I’ve ever made’.

I’m completely out of my comfort zone, I have to find the answers to this. If not, I’m going to fail. I have to change myself to adapt to certain things that I will accept. Other things I won’t accept, I have to win them over to make them see that.

In some ways, I should maybe thank the IABA.