BERNARD McComiskey was mopping the floor in Banbridge Leisure Centre (part of his job as a life guard) as a fight fan enthused about Connor McGregor’s rumble that weekend.
He was saying it how he couldn’t wait for it and how it made him recall the time his dad had taken him to Cork to watch Steve Collins versus Chris Eubank.
‘Do you remember that fight?’ he asked.
‘Yeah I do,” replied Bernard, “I boxed on that bill.”
The guy nearly fell into the pool.
Turn the clock back 25 years, swap the splashing and shouting and the chlorine smell of the swimming pool and try to picture a swaying, singing, sweating mass of humanity packed into in the Green Glens Arena (a show jumping stadium) in Millstreet, Cork on the 18th of March, 1995.
Two men, polar opposites in personality, shared the ring in the main event. Chris Eubank, the cane-carrying, monocle-wearing English champion in his 20th world title fight and Steve Collins, the street smart challenger from Dublin, went head-to-head for the WBO super-middleweight title in what became an iconic event in Irish sporting history.
Bernard’s path to Millstreet began when Barry Hearn, father of Eddie and founder of Matchroom, signed the talented lightweight from Gilford in county Down as his first Irish fighter in the late 1980s. The country boy had to keep pinching himself to believe it was all real early on.
“For my first fight I weighed in with Lennox Lewis,” he recalls.
“It was the Mike McCallum-Michael Watson bill (April 14, 1990). That was my debut, although my fight was cancelled and I didn’t get to go on.
“Me? From Gilford, 18 years-of-age, standing there, a wee skinny skitter, standing next to Lennox Lewis? It was unreal!”
He made his debut a couple of weeks later with the legendary John ‘Darkie’ Smith in his corner. Chris Eubank had been one of his training partners, albeit a silent one.
“We were both in the same camp with Matchroom but he kept himself to himself and he hardly spoke,” says Bernard.
“Ronnie Davis was his coach and he came over to me and said: ‘Chris just told me there that you look like Barry McGuigan and you box like him’. I thought: ‘God that’s brilliant’. He noticed that and, looking back, I take pride in him saying that.”
After three fights he parted company with Hearn and returned home to box out of Barney Eastwood’s gym in Belfast. It was there that he first crossed paths with Collins, who had fought in the USA for most of his career. When the Dubliner’s sparring partner let him down one day, Bernard jumped in instead.
“Obviously he wasn’t going hard on me because I was a lightweight and he was super-middleweight but we both got a workout out of it,” he says.
“To this day I love telling people: ‘I sparred him’.”
But it was Belfast promoter Owen McMahon who secured Bernard’s spot on the Millstreet card. By that time he was 7-1 and hoping to kick on in his career.
“Me, Damien Denny, Owen McMahon and Owen’s son drove to Dublin Airport and we got a private plane and flew from there to Kerry,” he recalled.
“It was a wee six-man aircraft and I’ve hated flying ever since because it was going all over the place.
“When we were sitting in Dublin airport, Damien says: ‘There’s yer man out of U2!’ The Edge! He was sitting beside us in the café and Damien got him to sign his napkin.”
By the time they arrived in Cork, Collins had gotten the edge on Eubank by tricking him into an elaborate psychological mind game that his work with hypnotist Tony Quinn rendered him impervious to pain and that punches coming at him seemed “three times slower” while the target he was aiming at seemed three times bigger.
Like Bernard, Collins had started out overseas. His career began in Massachusetts with the Pettronelli brothers (Pat and Goody) and he worked his way up the ladder from small hall shows after making his debut in Lowell on the same card as then relatively unknown Mickey Ward and Freddie Roach.
He’d won the WBO middleweight title but his big break came when Ray Close (who’d already fought Eubank twice) failed a brain scan before their trilogy fight and that opened the door for ‘Celtic Warrior’ Collins who was the number one contender.
Eubank was in his 20th world title fight but Collins boxed brilliantly in the first half of the fight and had the Englishman down in the ninth round. In a genuine classic, ‘Simply the best’ rallied and sent the Dub to the canvas in the 10th with a booming right hand but Collins got back to his feet and held on to win a thriller on points.
“It was brilliant, brilliant. It was one of them moments in time,” Collins told The Irish News.
“It had everything, it had the drama… It was like a Rocky film and where we were fighting as well… It was effectively a cow shed. Ah it was brilliant.
“Everything just fell into place in my training camp. I had a brilliant sparring partner and my brothers Mick and Roddy were there as well. They were helping me spar as well and my brother Mick is a hardy ****** and he was hitting me with bigger shots than I was giving him.”
Collins described his mindgames with hypnotist Quinn as “the biggest con ever”.
“That was all down to Roddy,” he said.
“Tony’s a great fella, he was giving me the talks in between the rounds. It was a con basically, it was great craic.
“But it was a hard, hard fight. One of the hardest I had but I dug down, I was resilient and I had the crowd cheering me on and I was doing it for my family, doing it for my son and I thought: ‘I have to win, I have to’. He was never, ever going to stop me, ever. I had all my family at ringside and Roddy and Mick and Pascal in the corner. We were all fighting in the ring that night."
Bernard watched the fight unfold from a viewing gallery in the changingrooms. He was “the floater” on the bill and warmed up serval times without getting on before the main event.
“Bernard Paul (a future Commonwealth champion at light-welterweight) was scheduled to be on but he forgot his boots so I lent him mine,” he explains.
“So he boxed in my boots and then the main fight came on and once it was over I was told: ‘Right you’re on next Bernard’.
“So I was going into the ring and the whole place was emptying and then the lights all came on. My fight lasted 82 seconds. I stopped the boy (Simon Hamlett), I can’t remember how I did it. I was frustrated with not being on before the main fight and I just mauled him. I just got stuck into him and overwhelmed him.
“After my fight we met Brendan O’Carroll (now the star of Mrs Brown’s Boys) he says: ‘You were brilliant, you boxed like Barry McGuigan (him again!)”
Six months later, Collins and Eubank did it again, this time at Pairc Ui Chaiomh. Bernard was due to be on the undercard for that one too but he broke his hand in one of the more bizarre sporting injuries you’ll read about.
“I was down in the pub watching a Celtic match and Celtic scored,” he explains.
“I jumped up and went ‘Yaaaaassssss’ and punched the air but I hit this beam above my head and wrecked my hand! I had to pull out of it.”
That is how it went for Bernard and despite four more wins he bowed out of boxing in 1999 with an 11-1 record which included an avenging knock-out win against the only man to beat him. We never saw the best of him.
“Looking back, you think: ‘Was that really me?’ he says.
It was. We watched but he was part of it.
