HE can’t remember a time when words came easily. His grandfather has the same speech impediment, his uncles have it too and the issues Pody (Padraig) inherited made him shy and introverted in his younger years.
At school he sat at the back and kept his head down. Maybe he understood his teacher, maybe he didn’t; either way he wasn’t going to ask for help because confusion was much better than feeling humiliated in front of the class.
“It might seem like it doesn’t affect me,” he says.
“But deep down… It’s not the end of the world but it’s… It is challenging.
“I remember once at school I sat in the wrong seat or something and this guy goes: ‘Tut-Tut, move’.
“That’s the only time I can ever remember being angry over someone saying something to me. It affected me more because I didn’t ask questions and I used to hate the times when the teacher got us all to read a paragraph from a book.
“I was sitting there thinking: ‘Shit, shit, shit… I have to do this’. I left school without any qualifications and I think my speech problems were a massive factor in that. It was just about getting through school day by day.”
He went to a teacher once to ask for help. Maybe a speech therapist could work with him? The teacher agreed to look into it. Pody is still waiting to hear back.
So he taught himself to manage with careful breathing and by speaking more slowly but years later, as a grown man on the brink of making his debut as a big, tough professional boxer, he was still more comfortable keeping his head down at the back of the room.
“I was on the Ryan Burnett (versus Lee Haskins) bill and I went along to watch the press conference,” he explains.
“I was sitting at the back of the hall and then I saw my name on a card at the top table. I thought: ‘Shit, I’m going to have to go up here and answer questions!’”
Success in all sports goes hand-in-hand with talking to the media. Recently married, he knew that winning titles could provide for the family he wanted to raise with his wife Natasha so, there and then, he had a serious decision to make.
He made it.
“I said: ‘F**k it, I’m doing it’,” he adds with a smile.
Nerves racing, heart pounding, he took his seat between Ian Tims and Tyrone McCullagh on the dais. Sure enough Eddie Hearn asked a question and Pody’s answer was short but short was good enough. It was a crucial threshold moment for his career, for his life.
“I knew that if I got anywhere in boxing I would have to do those media events and I wouldn’t let it stop me,” he says.
“If people joke or slag me about the way I talk then that’s up to them. I won’t opt out of anything and hurt my career because I have a speech impediment.”
HAVING a ball at his feet or in his hands whether it was playing up front for St James’s Swifts or in midfield with the O’Donnell’s club in Gaelic Football was always a challenge he enjoyed.
He won back-to-back Antrim championships with ‘The O’Ds’ and, incidentally, the second of those finals was the last match played at Casement Park.
As for boxing, his dad Alex brought him and his older brother to their local club when he was 11 but he didn’t connect fully with the noble art until he was 14 and by then St James’s had become a boxing hotspot. Everybody, including his neighbours and good friends Dee Walsh (now his coach) and Ruairi Dalton, had the gloves on.
“There was maybe eight or nine of us boxing and we all got lifted in my street,” Pody explains.
“One of the lads’ dad’s had a minibus and he used to pick us all up.”
Within a month he reached the final of his first tournament and his coach Frankie McCourt encouraged, scolded and implored the tall, talented prospect to come to training consistently because there were early signs of the natural punching power that has earned him the menacing sobriquet ‘The Hammer’.
When he was 15 he sparred an older opponent and hit him with a bodyshot: THUMP!! The lad went down like a roll of lino. But he had “a love-hate relationship” with boxing throughout his amateur days.
“I was out of it far too much,” he admits.
HAVING left school with no qualifications, there was little focus to his life and by the age of 18 he had moved out of his family home and was living a nomadic existence. Along with a friend, he moved from house to house and from job to job: tarmacking, roofing, a bit of painting and decorating…
“It was never stable for me,” he says.
“I was never a big partier, I went out on a Saturday night but that was it. I never got into anti-social behaviour or drugs, or even drink really but, same as school, I never really committed to boxing, I didn’t take it seriously.”
For four years he was rarely seen in a gym and then, aged 26, he made a dramatic comeback and almost made the 2014 Commonwealth Games squad. He’d returned to training in Gleann ABC just three weeks before that year’s Ulster Championships – reckoned to be the qualification mark for making the team – and beat Derry’s Sean McGlinchey in the final.
His easy-come-easy-go attitude counted against him and, controversially, a box-off (pictured above) was ordered. This time McGlinchey won and he was named in the team for Glasgow instead.
“At the time I took it very personally because I was strung along for about three months,” says McCrory.
"They told me to come to squad training and I went to Germany for a training camp but they always knew I wasn’t going to go. They strung me along just to keep me quiet.
“I hated the Ulster board and I hated McGlinchey at the time but then I realised it wasn’t his fault. He was just a fighter like me looking to better himself and he got to go to the Commonwealth Games and won a bronze medal.
“At the time I was thinking: ‘That could have been me’ but, looking back on it all now, things have worked out well for me and me and Sean are good friends, we speak regularly.
“As for the Ulster board and amateur boxing, it stank a bit then but I have a decent relationship with them now. I’ve been to a few of their events as a guest, so there’s no grudges for me.”
It’s all water under the bridge now but the wounds took time to heal and it seemed certain that, after that 2014 slap in the face, Pody McCrory really was finished with boxing.
IT was only after he got married in 2017 and welcomed his first child into the world that he came back again and this time he committed to the sport.
He’d always wanted the family life and he realised that boxing was a way for him to provide his children with more than he’d had in his day.
“The biggest thing for my boxing career was getting married and then having a kid,” he says.
“It gave me a purpose, it gave my life a meaning. I want to be able to say to my kids: ‘Look, I did this so if I can do it, you can achieve whatever you want’. I always wanted a family, I always wanted kids and now we have three kids under five. We found out within six weeks of getting married that we were expecting a baby and that’s when I decided to give boxing a go.
“I want to give my kids a nice lifestyle, I want to be able to go on holidays with them. I didn’t go abroad until I was 15 and it was my granda who brought us so I want to give my kids more than I had. I want to provide for them and be a role model for them as well.”
His children live in a different world to the one he grew up in and he hopes it stays that way.
When he was growing up in West Belfast, the Troubles were raging. Life then was such a contrast to today - his parents were married in jail and visits to see his dad in Long Kesh were part of everyday life.
As a child he happened to be in the Sinn Fein office on the Falls Road when three people were murdered by a renegade RUC officer.
“I’m very happy that we have peace now,” says the father of three who now works as a physical trainer at Gym Co.
“I would never want my kids to have to go through that. I watch the news and I stay up to date with current politics. I would call myself a proud nationalist and one day I would love to see a United Ireland. But I would never like to see the return to the Troubles on the streets.”
HE tied the knot with Natasha in March 2017 and just before the happy couple set off on honeymoon to the USA he was told he’d be making his professional debut on the undercard of the Ryan Burnett-Lee Haskins world title fight at the SSE Arena that June.
“That was a dream,” he says.
“Just to fight at the SSE… I’d been to loads of fights there. ‘Big Rogie’ (Martin Rogan), Frampton… I knew it was a great venue - I’ve been to ice hockey there as well.
“So to get the opportunity to make my debut there was amazing for me.”
He dropped Jacob Lucas in the first round of his first fight and went on to win on points and next was a spot on the ill-fated Frampton-Gutierrez bill.
“Carl Frampton is my idol in boxing,” he says.
“We got to fight week and it was Burnett times-five. The crowd, the atmosphere, the media… Everything about it was times-five and then we had that accident when the guy (Gutierrez) fell in the shower and the whole thing was called off…
“I felt so let down by it. I was thinking: ‘What’s it all about?’ I put in eight weeks’ in training camp and it wasn’t even the cost of it, it was just the whole experience and then it fell apart and I was like: ‘Boxing’s shite’.
“Then Kieran (Farrell, his manager then before he switched to Conlan Boxing) phoned me and said he had for me a fight in Bolton but when we got to fight week it was called off as well. I was thinking it wasn’t meant to be.”
HE was wrong of course. There were a few bumps early on but since he got motoring every highlight has been topped by a new one.
He beat old amateur rival McGlinchey in his fifth fight as a pro and won the Irish super-middleweight title in his ninth by stopping out-gunned Steve Collins junior at the Feile in Falls Park.
Three fights and two Covid-interrupted years’ later, he brought the house down at the Feile with a hammer-handed win over unbeaten Russian Sergei Gorokhov that won him the WBC International Silver title.
Knocking out Celso Neves followed that and any remaining McCrory doubters were silenced when he dismantled world-rated Marco Antonio Periban at the SSE Arena last August.
His dad was among the 120 supporters who followed him to Frankfurt, Germany last October to watch Pody win the IBO light-heavyweight world title with a dominant performance that has to rank among the best ever by an Irish fighter away from home against local favourite Leon Bunn.
He’s 34 now so he doesn’t plan to waste any time and on May 27 he’ll tango with experienced Brazilian Yamaguchi Falcao (24-1-1) at the SSE Arena in a final eliminator for a shot at the WBA super-middleweight title.
Victory will mean that a jackpot rumble with WBA ‘super’ champion and pound-for-pound global icon Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez would be, if not probable, certainly possible.
McCrory-Canelo! What a fight! Where would it take place? Vegas? The MGM Grand? Madison Square Garden? How will McCrory deal with Canelo’s movement? His power? How would Canelo deal with his?
All good questions but the first for Pody will always be one that doesn’t occur to most of us: How will he handle the public speaking?
“People talk about Canelo and all that and it sounds amazing but then I think: ‘Shit, there will be one of those events where you have to stand up on the stage and speak into a microphone in front of people’,” he says.
“I won’t let it stop me but it’s something most people don’t have to worry about. Somebody will go: ‘Oh I’d love to fight in the Garden - the big hype!’ I’m like: ‘Yeah, brilliant but I’m going to have to get through these small bumps first in terms of speaking publicly’. That’s always in the back of my mind.
“I always worry that one day I mightn’t be able to get the words out.”
Get there first and cross that bridge when you come to it, I urge him and that's what he'll do.
Belfast's Cinderella Man has a long way to go yet.
