Sport

Immaculata struck gold when they captured Gerry Nugent

One of the most recognisable and respected coaches on the local boxing beat, Gerry ‘Nugget’ Nugent has seen it all during a career outside the ropes. Neil Loughran talks to the man who makes the Mac tick...

Gerry Nugent where he can always be found - Immaculata's gym  
Gerry Nugent where he can always be found - Immaculata's gym   Gerry Nugent where he can always be found - Immaculata's gym  

“Hello, Nugget?”

“Yes...”

“Nugget, I was told my chances of getting you on this number were hit and miss, probably more miss...”

Laughs loudly.

“You were told right. I don’t even take this phone with me if I’m going out of the house. It’s one of those iPhones. Me and technology, we don’t really mix - I’m a bit of a dinosaur.”

Laughs again.

“You’re just lucky you caught me at the right time...”

BOXING was never really part of the plan. A few sessions here and there at the old Achilles gym didn’t light the fuse straight away.

A nippy inside right on the soccer pitch, hastily-arranged kickabouts were the daily diet for Gerry Nugent as a boy growing up on the streets of west Belfast. Gaelic football, hurling, handball, ‘Nugget’ would turn his hand to them all. Boxing was always on the radar, it just took a while to draw him in.

But as the political landscape in the North underwent a seismic shift in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, so too did the lives of its people. Sport still provided a temporary release from the madness that surrounded him, but the St Peter’s area at the bottom of the Falls Road - the place Nugget calls home - at times found itself in the eye of a bitter, bloody storm.

Like so many young men at the time, Nugent was arrested by the British army and interned in Long Kesh. That was March 1973 - he was 30 years old. Nugget was released just in time for Christmas but, during that nine-month stretch, the foundations were laid for his later calling at Immaculata Boxing Club.

“They put me in with all the kids. I was about 30, they were all 18 and 19. I was there and just started training them,” he recalls.

“There was a wee weights room, a wee five-a-side football pitch in the cage and I just started organising football competitions and wee games, took the younger ones under my wing. The ones I was in with all came from my district, so I’d have known all their families.”

Monthly editions of a newsletter published inside Long Kesh, the Hut 60 Bulletin, are a testament to his sporting prowess, the name ‘Nugget Nugent’ featuring regularly in its pages, topping the pile in the monthly write-ups. At the time, he was just glad of anything to relieve the tedium of prison life.

“They used to make up games, play football or whatever and I won them all - well most of them," he added.

“You just wanted to be doing something, anything.”

But aside from earning the bragging rights inside, a seed had been sown. Taking training, passing on ideas - it had given him a bit of a kick. Having formed and played for Rapid Football Club upon his release, he eventually felt a nagging desire to get involved with the Mac.

“I knew a good bit about boxing, I went to boxing all my life - Jim McCourt, an Immaculata man, John Caldwell, Paddy Fitzsimons, I went to see all them. Boxing was a big part of the district," he said.

“I never really boxed as such, but when the Rapid club shut, I got involved with the Mac from there. I went round to see Paul McCullagh one day, he was the head coach there at the time. Big Fra McCullagh would’ve been there, Vinty McGurk, Gerry Fitzpatrick, who’s still with me today.

“I just asked if they needed a hand. I knew Paul, so he said ‘no problem Nugget’. And that was it, I was hooked...”

“He's an innovator, years ahead of his time, always coming up with new ideas.”

MARTIN LINDSAY is a name that continually crops up in conversation. The pair share a unique bond.

Nugget was there the first time Lindsay walked through the doors of the Mac at eight years-of-age. He helped him win Ulster and Irish titles, guided him to the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002.

The night a vicious left hook they had been working on for weeks left Derry Mathews in a crumpled heap, that electric top-of-the-bill battle at the Ulster Hall when Lindsay ripped the British featherweight title away from Paul Appleby - Nugget was there every step of the road.

“He’s more of a father figure - he’s there for your best interests, that’s why I always stayed with him,” says Lindsay, who now helps out with the six-to-10 age group at Immaculata three nights a week.

“He’s constantly watching boxing and picking things up. If you ask any of the boxers who’ve come through the club, not one would ever have a bad word to say about him.”

“Martin just came in the door and the wee hands were up and he was punching right from the start,” recalls Nugget.

“You hardly had to change anything. The Appleby night, I was never in an atmosphere like it. Normally when you’re at a fight, there’s wee pockets of people who know you - see that fight, almost everyone in that place knew me and Martin well. They were all Martin’s friends, the whole district was there. It was something special.”

Lindsay admits he owes much of his success to Nugget’s unorthodox training methods. He may jokingly refer to himself as a dinosaur where mastering modern technology is concerned but, when it comes to boxing and the preparation of fighters, Nugget was - and still is - a visionary.

While others were intent on putting miles in the legs, doing laps upon laps of football pitches, hours on the overhead speed bag, the Mac men were doing a form of interval training long before it became a buzz term among fitness fanatics. Building explosive power, short sharp bursts rather than long, lung-busting runs was the order of the day as Nugget drew on his experiences in other sporting fields.

“Boxing then was all skipping, plenty of bags and overhead ball and I would’ve changed that about a bit," Nugget says.

“I’d have mixed up the training with a lot of football, handball... I’d have brought a lot of handball into it because everything’s short and explosive.

“In terms of how your body moves, it’s very similar to boxing. You need quick feet and good reactions, there’s wee shuffles, making adjustments on your feet. That’s the key. You’re always having to react, just like in boxing.”

"First time the Mac hasn’t had a senior champion in 27 years."

NOVEMBER 7 2015. It was a rare Facebook post, but a telling one nonetheless. The message was written just two days before the Ulster seniors got underway at the Dockers' club.

Not only did Immaculata have no champions, they had no entrants. Emerald’s JP Delaney, who lost to Seán McGlinchey in the light-heavy final in Newry, is a former Mac man. That’s as close as they got.

Other coaches would be worried. Fretting about where their club was going, what they were doing wrong. Have I lost my touch? Nugget is too long in the game to get bogged down in the here and now.

“It’s the end of an era I suppose, but you get those wee blips. Luckily we haven’t had them too often,” he says calmly.

With the loss of the likes of Commonwealth Games silver medalist Joe Fitzpatrick, James Fryers and Alfredo Meli to the pro game, the Mac is in transition. Lindsay is working with the kids and then there’s Gerry Fitzpatrick, Alfredo Meli snr, Kate Meli and Frankie Slane all doing their bit. He has plenty of support, but Nugget still finds himself in the gym twice a day, five days a week.

Times have changed, he accepts that. In the old days, if somebody hadn’t weighed in for training, he’d have been at their door within minutes - “if they weren’t there, I’d have gone to their granny’s or their ma and da’s door”.

That drive may have diminished with age, but anybody who saw him working Meli’s corner at last month’s Waterfront Hall brawl with Conrad Cummings will have been left in no doubt that Nugget’s love for the game remains intact.

“Of course you still love it, it’s your life," he admits.

“Maybe what’s changed is that, in the past, I would’ve made them come. Now, I just can’t be bothered - if they don’t want to come, they don’t want to come and that’s that. I get sickened quicker as I get older. I’m 72 now and it’s hard to chase them.

“I’d always have been interested in their well-being, first and foremost. If I could offer advice which I thought would help them, I would and that’s still the case today. But kids now are different now. There’s no sergeant majoring kids nowadays - they don’t take it. They’re bigger, taller lads. Maybe it’s me getting older, maybe I’m not as pushy.”

The loss of his wife of 50 years, Marie, in 2013 was a body blow. The club continues to give him a focus and, for that, he considers himself a lucky man.

“The Mac just became my life. I can’t stop it. You try to take time away, but you just can’t do it. You might plan to take two days off, but then just think ‘I’ll just head round to the club’," he reflects.

“For Jesus' sake, when I look back at when I was 50, I was bouncing. I was beat in the final of the world over-50s final at handball down in county Clare, I was playing football. You know? Being on your own here, it gets harder. Going from 70 to 80 is like going from 10 to 20, only the other way about. From 10 to 20, you get stronger and stronger, the other way you go down the hill quicker and quicker,” he laughs.

“But we’ve plenty of good ones coming through now, probably only a few years away, and then they’ll get their chance. I’d have always taken a chance with kids - I always believed that, if you were good enough, you were old enough.

"That’s why we would’ve had 17-year-olds likes Joseph Fitzpatrick going in and beating good lads and winning Ulster titles. Ryan Lindberg was 17, Martin Lindsay 17, Kevin O’Hara 17, Frankie Slane 17. Stephen Gibson was 19. I could go on…”

He could go on, and he will go on. The hundreds of fighters who have passed through his hands since he first pulled on the pads all those years ago, the coaches who have learned and grown under his stewardship - looking back, it has been a hugely fulfilling journey.

If it hadn’t been boxing, it would have been something else. For the fighting folk of Nugget Nugent’s district, he has been a constant source of ideas and inspiration.

They can count themselves lucky they caught him at the right time.