IT all started with a tweet from Irish Boxing News towards the end of last year. “Which boxer beat Luke Campbell, Carl Frampton, Scott Quigg, Jamie Conlan and Marco McCullough as an amateur?”
Boxing punters scratched their heads and reached deep into the recesses of their memory banks. Conlan replied within minutes. Frampton wasn’t far behind. “Ryan Lindberg. And he beat me twice the wee sh*te...”
In just under three weeks, Carl Frampton will pick up a multi-million pound cheque for his pay-per-view showdown with Quigg. His face is on billboards and buses across England and Ireland.
Championed by the legendary Barry McGuigan, IBF world super-bantamweight champion Frampton is Belfast’s golden boy. When he fights at the SSE Arena, fans come in their thousands to scream and shout their support.
Not since McGuigan himself has an Irish fighter captured the public imagination to the same extent, particularly in the north.
When Ryan Lindberg answers the phone, he is getting ready for another nightshift at Multi Packaging Solutions in Mallusk.
He hasn’t laced up a pair of boxing gloves competitively in years – he’s not even sure when his last fight was. “Four or five years I think, I can’t really remember to be honest.” At 27, he is a year younger than Frampton.
Ten years ago, the Immaculata southpaw – under the tutelage of respected trainer Gerry ‘Nugget’ Nugent – announced his arrival at senior level by beating the Tigers Bay fighter at his first-ever Ulster senior championships towards the end of 2005.
In 2007, the pair met again, this time at the semi-final stage of the Irish senior championships in Dublin. Lindberg came through a standing count to win 23-17, before beating Clonmel’s Kevin Fennessy in the final to land his first Irish title at senior level.
How then, a decade on, have the careers, the lives, of Carl Frampton and Ryan Lindberg gone in such different directions?
How does he feel watching one of his peers conquering a world they once shared?
Why is it Frampton and not Lindberg whose face will stare back from television screens in homes, pubs and clubs on February 27?
Lindberg laughs nervously. There is no hint of the green-eyed monster when he talks about Frampton. No bitterness – he has nothing but total respect for all his former foe has achieved.
“Everybody has their own way of going in life,” he says.
“Carl was a friend of mine down in the High Performance, I’m glad to see him win all these world titles. I suppose I can say I beat a world champion – that’s not something too many other people can say.
“The reality is no-one was at my door offering me anything to go pro. I probably would’ve gone pro if somebody had made an offer. But I wasn’t about to go begging people – I’m not that kind of person.
“Now, don’t get me wrong, I was at his fight against the Frenchman [Jeremy Parodi], and the atmosphere at the Odyssey, the buzz – it gets you going. You do think ‘f*ck, I wish I got to this bit’. You do get like that, I’m sure anybody who ever boxed thinks that.
“My mates were giving me a bit of slegging about it, and I’m saying back to them ‘I could beat him again, I could beat him again’, talking a load of sh*te!
“But fair play to him, he’s done brilliant.”
The wheels started to come off Lindberg’s amateur career when he lost out to Tyrone McCullagh at the Irish seniors in 2010. Despite having beaten the Derry native in the Ulster senior final, McCullagh – now a 3-0 pro – got the nod for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
Just as he had pipped Frampton to a spot at the 2006 Commonwealths in Melbourne, Lindberg was left to lick his wounds.
Around the same time, he found himself caught in the slipstream of John Joe Nevin’s success at 56kg. The Mullingar orthodox was just 18 when he lost to the eventual gold medallist at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and, after adding two world bronze medals in 2009 and 2011, his spot on the team bound for London 2012 was secure.
It was a difficult time, recalls Lindberg.
“I was on funding from the Irish Sports Council and I was coming to my last payment and then that was me, unless I went away with the Irish team and did well. But I wasn’t getting the chance to go away anywhere.
“Nevin already had the 56 spot sewn up so I would’ve had to move up a weight to try and get to London. There was a lot of good boxers up at lightweight, so it would’ve been a bit of a lottery.
“At the same time I was offered a job so it was either take that or go down to Dublin and box in the Irish. If I’d picked the job, I couldn’t have gone to the Irish seniors. If I’d chosen to go to the seniors and say, for talk’s sake, I didn’t win, I would’ve been on the broo.
“I wouldn’t have had the job and I wouldn’t have had any money, and I wouldn’t have had the Olympics. That was the predicament I was in. “It was at this stage that the head got threw up as well…”
Barry McGuigan had since taken Frampton under his wing and was nurturing the early years of his career in the paid ranks. Lindberg is right, though – promoters weren’t beating his door with pro contracts. They weren’t beating down Frampton’s either. The professional fight scene in Ireland, and particularly the North, was almost non-existent then.
McGuigan’s son Shane was crowned Ulster welterweight king at the Andersonstown Leisure Centre in April 2008, the same night Lindberg completed a hat-trick of bantamweight titles.
But it was Frampton, with an easy win over Eamonn Finnegan, who caught the eye of the ‘Clones Cyclone’ once again.
The rest, as they say, is history. Lindberg admits Frampton’s style was more suited to the professional game but, like everything in his short boxing career, he would have been prepared to put in the hard yards to make it work for him.
“My style was probably an amateur style, but at the end of the day I would’ve worked hard enough to adapt to turn that into an advantage.
The likes of Nugget would’ve been a great asset to me in that respect. “I would never have been a talented boxer, in terms of natural talent – Nugget would tell you that himself – but I worked my balls off. “If I’d gone pro, I would’ve done the same. I’d have done the hard work to make sure I could win and do well.”
During his five year hiatus from the ring, Lindberg has returned sporadically to the Mac, and to Nugget.
Time and again he would leave, only to come back again a few months later, ready for another – often short-lived – crack at a return to former glories.
A change to his work hours has allowed him to dedicate more time to the sport in recent months and, although he knows a long road lies ahead, Lindberg has set his sights on winning another Ulster senior title – five years after the last.
“I’m undefeated at the Ulster seniors,” he says. “Over the last four or five years I’ve come and gone a few times, and things didn’t work out. You question yourself, wonder should you even be doing it again, that type of thing. “But I’m getting the rust off. My fitness isn’t 100 per cent but once I get that back I’ll know where I go from there.
“I would love to go pro to be honest, just to try it out, because I’ve done the amateur scene. But if it doesn’t happen and I’m still training, I’ll go into the Ulsters.
“If I do it and then I get beat, at least I can say I tried.”
He’s not putting any pressure on himself. If it happens, it happens. If not, life goes on. He’ll still follow boxing, follow the guys he went to war with between the ropes.
For now though, the nightshift calls. “We make paracetemol boxes and that kind of thing, so I suppose I made it as a professional boxer in one way,” he chuckles. Still young enough to make an impression on the fight game, the dream isn’t over.
And Ryan Lindberg, the man who beat Frampton, Quigg, Conlan, Campbell and the rest, could yet have the last laugh.
Frampton has too much class for Quigg
THE man who has shared the ring with both Carl Frampton and Scott Quigg has backed ‘The Jackal’ to come up trumps at the Manchester Arena on February 27.
Five-time Ulster senior champion Ryan Lindberg famously beat Frampton in the 2006 Ulster final (held at the end of 2005) and then again at the last four stage of the Irish seniors in 2007.
In between those two fights, the Immaculata southpaw faced Quigg at a multi-nations tournament in Liverpool in July 2006 – although it’s only recently Lindberg has realised who his opponent was.
“Swear to God, one day I was sitting watching TV and he was on and I thought ‘I know his face from somewhere’. I looked his name up and realised I’d fought him before...”
Unlike the tight, technical nature of his two fights with Frampton, Lindberg remembers Bury orthodox Quigg being an easier night’s work – and he expects ‘The Jackal’ to have too much class when the pair meet in less than three weeks time.
Lindberg said: “He wasn’t as good as Frampton. With Quigg, I was keeping him at bay easily, I thought I won the fight easily. His style was to come forward and block punches with his face.
“I think Frampton’s going to win easy. Here’s the difference between the two fighters – Frampton went over and fought in America. He got knocked down twice in the first round [by Alejandro Gonzalez jnr], he changed his thinking and his style to win the fight.
“I don’t think Quigg could do that. Quigg just goes out and does the same thing over and over again.”
Lindberg believes Quigg’s 2013 majority draw with Cuban Yoandras Salinas, when he struggled badly in the first half of the fight, showed the Bury fighter’s limitations.
He feels his former foe will triumph on points. “I don’t think he’ll stop him. Quigg got the head punched off him by the Cuban and he didn’t go down, so I think he’s got a good chin. “Even whenever I fought him I hit him as hard as I could, I was hitting him easy, but he just kept coming forward and coming forward.
“People talk about Quigg stopping [Kiko] Martinez – but that’s after Frampton beat him twice. Martinez is older now, he’s been around a long time, and he’s probably done out. “I don’t think the fact it’s in Manchester will make any difference,” added Lindberg. “Half of Belfast is going to be there anyway – everyone’s looking tickets. “It’s going to be some night.”
How I beat the Jackal
AS Scott Quigg and trainer Joe Gallagher devise a masterplan ahead of their world title showdown with Carl Frampton on February 27, Ryan Lindberg recalls how he beat ‘The Jackal’ in both their meetings as amateurs. Frampton was the reigning Irish champion coming into his flyweight final against unknown 17-year-old Lindberg.
And the Mac man admits he had to be convinced by veteran coach Gerry ‘Nugget’ Nugent that he could get the better of his decorated opponent.
“It wasn’t me that really thought about going into the Ulster seniors, it was actually Nugget who said to me. Frampton was Irish senior champion at the time and I said to Nugget ‘do you think I could beat him?’
“He said ‘yeah’, and so did [former pro boxer] Martin Lindsay. They were fully confident in me, so I took their word, and we just got down to work.” While Frampton received a walkover in his semi-final, southpaw Lindberg had a tough bout against Jamie Conlan, the current WBO Inter-continental super-flyweight champion.
Lindberg remembers that, just minutes after having his hand raised against Conlan at the Dockers Club, it was announced that Frampton had won a multi-nations tournament down in Ballybunion, Co Kerry that day. A round of applause rang out for the Midland boxer.
Lindberg was determined the plaudits would be coming his way at the Ulster Hall a week later.
Master tactician Nugent was on the case, as Lindberg recalls. “We knew he was small, I had the longer arms. Nugget saw this shot threw in sparring one day, a sort of a pivot hook, and he said to me ‘why don’t you use that?’
“And we did, we used it to our advantage. We hit him to the body, pivot hook and then out. So when he tried to get inside we were away, onto the back foot and boxing again instead of standing with him.
“He was a heavy hitter. He’s muscular now, he wasn’t like that as an amateur, but he was still very strong. “He was a box-fighter as you would call it, but he wouldn’t overdo it. He wouldn’t rush into things, the same way he is now. He was very patient and measured.
“Because he was smaller, he was faster inside, so we boxed and moved and kept him at midrange distance. We had to get the distance right – everything had to be perfect, and thankfully it was. “The second time [in the 2007 Irish senior semi-final] I was more confident because I beat him the first time. But they’re two nights I’ll never forget.”
Boxers and trainers at Holy Trinity Boxing Club give their verdict on Frampton v Quigg:
