THUMP, thump, thump… Eric Donovan knew that knock. He knew Dominic O’Rourke, his coach at St Michael’s ABC in Athy, was at the front door so he darted out the back instead and was up and over the wall and away in a flash.
He’d had enough of boxing. He just wanted to go and enjoy himself with his buddies. A bottle of cider, a joint or two…
He was wild then and drink and drugs stole away years that he could have spent chasing a gold medal at the Olympic Games. They led him down a rabbit hole from which he might never have returned.
Donovan first tried ecstasy when he was 14 – that was the age he left school - and he was well known around his native Athy in county Kildare first as a boxer and then, when he wobbled drunk or stoned on the street corner, as the fella who was throwing it all away.
But 10 years ago, when he was 27, something changed in Eric Donovan. He’d missed out on going to the Olympics and realised he had a serious problem and that he couldn’t beat his addiction on his own. And so, for the first time in his life, he needed to ask for help.
That was hard for someone who’d never let anyone see behind the mask but he did ask and he did beat the booze and the drugs. He won that fight and turned his life around and tonight he fights for the European super-featherweight title.
IT’S almost three decades since Donovan first walked through the doors at St Michael’s ABC in Athy, county Kildare.
He was swinging on a punch bag before he learned how to hit it but the coaches soon realised he was gifted with fast hands and dancing feet. A natural southpaw talent, he made opponents miss and made them pay: jab, left hand, right hook… He was out of range before they could lay a glove on him.
Title followed title from youth to senior level but, beneath the surface, there was a troubled soul that was camouflaged by a ready smile and a fighting heart.
A couple of weeks ago, we sat chatting about tonight’s fight. Looking at him now - clean-cut, articulate and a picture of health - it’s hard to believe he’s had to come through so many challenges in his life.
“It really all boils down to mental health and emotional health,” he says and that smiles fades away.
“I’ve had a lot of emotional and mental health problems that go way back to my childhood and I never really knew how to address them, how to discuss them or how to work with them and they kind of controlled me most of my life.”
Something in the way he talks strikes a chord and I ask if he lost a parent when he was very young. He didn’t but his parents did separate when he was about six months old and his father left.
“I have no recollection of that time in my life but I imagine it must have been a traumatic time,” he says.
“I’m a married man with a family today and I can imagine what it would be like. If a marriage breaks up it’s not an easy time for anyone, let alone if there’s children and all that involved.
“I just… I always felt different growing up, I always felt different and, where I come from as well, we didn’t have a lot… We didn’t have much growing up. I had a couple of difficult childhood experiences that probably affected my development and it wasn’t until later on, as a more mature adult, that I was able to get to the bottom of them and address them.”
The craic on the weekends on the run from Dominic O’Rourke developed into a serious habit and the booze, the weed and the solvents dulled that feeling of being different, of not quite fitting in. Weekends began to start on Thursdays and end on Mondays and soon became an everyday thing for him.
He turned his back on boxing more than once but his club never turned its back on him. He mightn’t have appeared for a weeks or months but, when he did, the coaches at St Michael’s welcomed him. The well of patience never ran dry.
“If it wasn’t for boxing God knows what could have happened to me,” he says.
“I could have gone down a much worse road. A lot of my friends growing up got into real hard drugs like heroin and some of them got locked up and really, really struggled.
“Boxing was always that outlet for me that gave me some sort of direction even in the madness. My good coach Dom O’Rourke… That man put a lot of time and effort into me and he kept bringing me back to the club and allowed me to restart and restart and restart again.
“It wasn’t that I turned up drunk or high, I would just disappear, I didn’t turn up but he always welcomed me back in and he let me start again. He always encouraged me, he never shut the door on me. He said: ‘This is where you’re at your best’ and he was right, when I’m boxing I’m at my best.”
DOMINIC O’Rourke will be in the Europa Hotel tonight cheering on the young fella from the Clonmullion estate he first met all those years ago.
O’Rourke, a former President of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, grew up and played football with Eric’s father and his uncles so he knew, as he puts it, what he was getting when young Donovan first came to his club.
“He was a talented young lad,” he said of the fighter who went on to become his first Irish senior champion.
“He was gifted, you could see the talent that he had and he was always a likeable fella; a likeable rogue, as the fella says.
“He had his ups and downs. He’d go missing for a while and I had to go looking for him and he used to be away climbing over the back wall when I was knocking the front door.
“He was a wild kid, he was easy-enough led then and he got into some bad company and we had to pull him back out of it but when you had him you had a top class boxer. It was his movement, he had a natural ability to move and being a southpaw made him that bit more awkward to box and he could use that.”
Donovan also possessed an innate self-confidence that made him unflappable in tight contests. O’Rourke recalls an Irish junior final at Dublin’s iconic National Stadium. The first round didn’t go well for Donovan and neither did the second…
“At that time you got the scores and I told him in the corner: ‘Eric you’re four down’,” says O’Rourke.
“He said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll beat this lad’ and I said: ‘Ok’ and I put the gumshield back in his mouth and I said no more.
“Out he went and he won the contest, he beat him on points. That’s the type he was, I never had a boxer like him with that confidence.”
The St Michael’s club was rocking at that time. The Joyce brothers, David Oliver and John Joe, were also rising stars in Irish boxing and there were some legendary battles between Eric and David Oliver that began in Athy, continued at the National Stadium and then in the World Series of Boxing.
“One time Eric hadn’t been training and we were sparring one night and the Joyces were there and they were in top form,” says O’Rourke.
“I put him in and I left him in. In the first round he was OK, two rounds in he was in trouble, by the third round he was getting tanked around the place…. He wasn’t too happy with me and I said to him: ‘Talk to me after the senior championships’.
“He started to train properly again after that and he won the senior championships and after it he said to me: ‘You were right, I wasn’t training and you taught me a big lesson that night against the Joyces’.
“He had won so much and the confidence was up and he didn’t think he had to train – he was acting the bollox in other words, coming an odd night and not putting the effort in. If he had put in the effort in he has since he left the amateur game he would have won Olympic medals. At that time he was only kind of floating around the place.”
DESPITE all his “acting the bollox”, Donovan was a five-time Irish Elite champion and a European and European Union Championship medallist who won the World Series of Boxing with the Astana Arlans team in Kazakhstan.
He was at his peak in 2010 and with Katie Taylor, Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlan was expected to be one of Ireland’s medal hopes at the London Olympics in 2012.
But his wild ways eventually caught up with him.
A few weeks before the Elite championships began, he lost control on a night out, ended up in a fight and broke his hand.
Unable to qualify, his Olympic dream went up in smoke and he spiralled into a dark depression that took him perilously close to suicide. Having reached rock-bottom, in early 2012 he found the courage to ask for help and began to turn his life around.
“It became a big mess,” he says.
“Deep down, addiction is an emotional wound or a mental issue that needs a lot of attention, love and compassion.
“I realised I couldn't reverse back out of it; I was too far gone. That was the time I had to reach out and ask for help. For the first time in my life, I allowed people fully into my world. I didn't trust many people prior to that but I needed to change, so I opened my mind, my heart and my soul to the possibility of change and I began the process of restarting a new life for myself.
“Because I kept falling down, messing up, screwing up and that’s when the penny dropped for me. I let people in, I worked with people and I started making the changes in my life. I started to instil values and principles and I started operating from a place of honesty and integrity and my life just changed. I never looked back.”
He retired from boxing and returned to education, graduating with a diploma in counselling in 2015.
FOR years he took boxing for granted but when it was gone he missed it and he returned as a professional in 2016, aged 31.
“Most people wrap it up at 31 but I decided to turn pro!” says Donovan with a chuckle.
“I had unfinished business I think or maybe amends to make and I wanted to finish my boxing career on my terms.
“I’ve won a Celtic title, I’ve won the Irish title and here I am fighting for the European EU title and if I can do that at 37 years of age it’ll be one hell of an achievement.”
It certainly will. Donovan won his first dozen fights but between three wins over the last two years, he’s been stopped twice by high-calibre opponents after stepping up from featherweight to super-feather. The first was against England’s Zelfa Barrett. Donovan boxed majestically for six and-a-half rounds but Barrett, swinging in desperation, nailed him with a left hook that swung the fight his way. The second loss, in February, was a brutal KO against two-time Olympic Games medallist Robeisy Ramirez.
Those defeats took their toll and Donovan came close to walking away after that Ramirez experience. But quitting is not his way and he bounced back with a win in May which set him up for tonight at the Europa Hotel.
Khalil El Hadri (13-1) of France stands in the way of him becoming European champion and claiming the victory that will allow Donovan to hang up his gloves, if he chooses to do so, content.
“I need it,” he says earnestly.
“There’s no point in saying anything different. Why am I boxing at 37 years of age? Mostly because I feel like I’m after something, I’m not done yet.
“Winning this title will mean I can be content if I hang up the gloves. But will I hang them up? Who knows? After this we can discuss things because I can’t look past this.
“I don’t want to get cocky or arrogant, I’m very confident of doing the job but I know the job is going to be hard, I know it’s no walk-in-the-park and I know I’m going to be tested mentally and physically, emotionally and spiritually… I’m going to be tested every way.
“But do you know what? I’m ready to be tested in all of those departments because I’ve been through a lot of adversity in my life and I belief that God is directing me here and he has a plan for me and I think we’ll see that plan.
“El Hadri has a good record and he’s solid but he’s not Eric Donovan. He’s not as good as me, he’s not as fast as me, he’s not as slick as me, he’s not as intelligent as me, he doesn’t have the same experience as me.
“I give him his due and I respect him but I think the best Eric Donovan beats him and everything I’m doing throughout the camp, from the start of the camp to the end - that’s 11 weeks – and every single day of it has been about being victorious on the 24th and making the dream come true.”
WHATEVER happens tonight, Eric Donovan is a success story who won the biggest fight of his life and is now an inspiration who shares the tales of the wrong turns he took and the steps he took to get back on the straight and narrow with young people throughout Ireland.
“I tell you what: He’s well able to talk!” jokes Dominic O’Rourke.
“But he’s a complete turnaround compared to what he was. He was heading down the wrong road but he’s someone who has seen the light and he has helped a lot of people. He’s a great speaker, like he could turn his hand to anything when he puts his mind to it and he deserves this title for all the work he has put into it.”
El Hadri will give all he has for the title.
Thump, thump, thump… there’ll be no back doors in Eric Donovan tonight.
