The last time Irish boxing filled Croke Park with a professional show, Muhammad Ali topped the bill and the Troubles raged in the background. Tomorrow night, as Katie Taylor walks out for what is billed as a farewell on home soil, one man in the stands will bridge those 54 years with a lifetime of memories and a ticket of honour.
Paddy Doherty, from Ballyshannon in Co Donegal, will take his seat in the Ard Chomhairle section with his family, a guest of Taylor’s camp and a living link to the night Ali fought Al “Blue” Lewis in Dublin.
Back then, on 19 July 1972, Doherty boxed on the undercard beneath the only Irish appearance of the man they called “the greatest”. Ali stopped Lewis in the 11th round. Doherty did his own part, halting Welshman Bobby Ruff in the second. Eighteen thousand people came to see Ali under the Croke Park lights, lured in by the vision and bravado of Michael “Butty” Sugrue, the Kerry circus strongman turned boxing promoter who somehow dragged a global icon into a city scarred by conflict.
It was the year the Five Nations Championship was abandoned because Scotland and Wales refused to travel to Dublin. One of the darkest years of the Troubles. Yet for a night, Croke Park belonged to boxing.
Tomorrow, it does again.
Doherty never imagined he would be back in those circumstances. Certainly not as a guest of a multi-weight world champion who has redrawn the map for Irish boxing. The call came out of the blue. Taylor, alongside her long-time manager Brian Peters, arrived at his home in Donegal.
He was stunned.
“Brian Peters called that he was in Donegal ... that morning, my wife said ‘Katie Taylor’s after coming in past the house’. I couldn’t believe it,” Doherty recalled. The visit, the invitation, the respect from a fighter whose name now sits alongside the giants of the sport, left its mark.
“What she has done for Irish boxing all over the world (is remarkable). Out from that, she’s a real lady,” he said. The whole family has been invited to Croke Park. “They invited the whole lot of us on Saturday night. It was a nice surprise. He (Brian Peters) said ‘I’ll see you in Croke Park’.”
For Doherty, now long retired after injury cut short his professional career in his 20s, the occasion must feel like closing a circle. From a boy starting out in Ballyshannon at 11, climbing through the amateur ranks, stacking Ulster and Irish titles from juvenile to senior, to Commonwealth Games bronze in Edinburgh in 1970. Eligible to box for Northern Ireland through his Fermanagh-born father, he became a standout light-middleweight on the Irish international scene, winning 15 of 16 amateur bouts.
London followed, and the pro game in 1971. That October he found himself on an Ali undercard at the Royal Albert Hall, when the American met Johnny “Gypsy” Frankham in an exhibition. When Ali came to Dublin the next summer, Doherty’s name was on the bill again.
He remembers the weigh-in at the Gresham Hotel. He remembers the noise in Croke Park. He remembers the moment Ali tapped him on the head as he walked into the ring.
“Most of the crowd came over the barrier into the ring. Even the security and the guards couldn’t keep them back, just to get to Ali,” he said. It was chaos. It was history.
Tomorrow, the numbers dwarf 1972. Professional boxing returns to Croke Park for the first time since that Ali show, with an expected 80,000 packing in to watch Taylor. It will be the best-attended boxing match in Irish history, a stage worthy of the woman who carried the sport on her back through Olympic gold and undisputed status.
Across the ring will stand Flora Pili, the undefeated 29-year-old French challenger. On paper, youth and momentum sit with Pili. Doherty looks at something else.
Taylor’s experience.
“If I’m talking to her before the fight, I’ll tell her, ‘if she keeps coming to her, to tie her up in knots ... let the referee do the breaking and get back for boxing’,” he said. The advice of a man who has lived the big night, felt the crowd surge, and still knows that composure and craft win fights when the noise is deafening.
He wants the evening to be worthy of her. A spectacle, yes, but also a send-off that matches a legacy he does not believe can be matched.
He is clear about that.
“I will be there (tomorrow night) for Katie Taylor; she’s so calm and nice ... a down-to-earth girl. What she’s done for boxing will never be done again,” Doherty said.
From Ali to Taylor, from 18,000 to 80,000, Croke Park has waited more than half a century for a night like this. Now the old fighter from Ballyshannon returns to the same arena, not with his gloves on, but with a front-row view of an era-defining Irish champion taking her final bow.
