It feels rather fitting that the 40th anniversary of Barry McGuigan’s greatest night should fall on a weekend which includes not one but two events taking place in UK football stadiums. After all, McGuigan’s greatest night, against Eusebio Pedroza in 1985, played out in the middle of the pitch at Loftus Road Stadium, home of Queens Park Rangers. It is remembered as much for that, its location, as McGuigan’s inspired 15 rounds and Barry’s father, Pat, singing “Danny Boy” during the pre-fight introductions.
There is, and always has been, just something special about football stadium fights in the UK. Aside from the fact they attract larger crowds and create a greater noise, a fight in a football stadium moves us ever closer to the image of gladiators inside a colosseum, therefore only adding to the tribalism and theatre of it all.
This weekend two Brits, Fabio Wardley and Callum Simpson, will both headline shows at football stadiums and, unlike McGuigan, will be representing the teams they support. In the case of Wardley, that means Ipswich Town, whose ground, Portman Road, hosts his heavyweight fight with Justis Huni, an Australian. As for Simpson, his team is Barnsley, and it is on their pitch, at Oakwell Stadium, he will compete for the vacant European super-middleweight title against Italy’s Ivan Zucco.
Neither Wardley nor Simpson have so far scaled the heights like McGuigan, of course, but they have no doubt taken inspiration from the Irishman’s fight at Loftus Road 40 years ago and understand the importance of big fights at football stadiums. Not only that, they both have an association with the two clubs mentioned, which should promise a good turnout on Saturday as well as for future fights.
“From a promoter’s point of view, it’s probably easier to sell tickets because the database is there for the fans and they know a lot of the season ticket holders are going to go because there’s a novelty to it,” said Chris Billam-Smith, a cruiserweight whose affiliation with AFC Bournemouth led to him winning his WBO title at their Vitality Stadium in 2023. “They’re going to go to their favourite ground to watch boxing instead of football. It had never been done at Bournemouth and that meant it was one of those occasions where people wanted to say, ‘Yeah, I was there.’ Down in Bournemouth there hasn’t been a lot of boxing in recent years and suddenly it’s getting a bit of a resurgence and the people in the community want to be a part of that.
“It’s the same for these Wembley [Stadium] fights. [Anthony] Joshua vs. [Daniel] Dubois, for example, was a fight between two British heavyweights at Wembley and people wanted to say, ‘I was there.’ That’s why these stadium fights feel like special nights, because they are different from what we see as ‘normal’ boxing events. The football clubs know this and they want to get involved. They see one club do it and now they want to do it as well. We’ve seen Barnsley, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace all host fights recently and they’ve all done it in slightly different ways. The fans turn out every time because it’s a new experience. The whole town gets behind the football club when the club is in a smaller town, or area, and that means that if there is an event at the stadium, whether it’s a music gig or a boxing match, you’re almost guaranteed to sell tickets and attract interest.”
Of all the fighters who have been inspired by McGuigan, few have been more inspired than Chris Billam-Smith. For not only is the cruiserweight from Bournemouth trained by McGuigan’s son, Shane, but he has also spent plenty of time in the company of the former featherweight champion, both soaking up his advice and listening to all the old war stories.
The Pedroza fight, in particular, is forever a talking point when McGuigan is around. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t avoid being asked about it, and the hunger to hear about the experience has never abated in the 40 years since the fight happened. Young boxers still want to know what it was like to dethrone a great champion in front of 27,000 fans in a football ground and McGuigan is only too happy to revisit that time in a life otherwise beset by difficulties and, alas, tragedy. He was, on that magic night in west London, able to exist only in the moment and worry about nothing else. He was able to listen to his father serenade him before battle and then, even better, make his old man proud by snatching the WBA featherweight title from a Panamanian champion hard to read and harder to beat.
“He was impassive,” McGuigan told me, speaking of the Pedroza he encountered on June 8, 1985. “He never gave me anything. I thought I had him in the seventh [round] and he came back in the eighth and then I thought I had him in the ninth and he came back. His legs went; I went crazy.
“I knew in about round nine that I had him, but he never gave up. He had a poker face. Look at the pictures of the fight. His expression never changed. All the really great fighters have that ability to stay poker-faced in the heat of battle – not all of them, but most of them.
“Even though they have a poker face, you can still tell when you're in that punching distance and you're right on them and you're breathing and you're sweating and you're smelling. It's body language, I'm telling you.”
Of course, because Pedroza was the visitor that night, it was a lot easier for him to control his emotions, remain cool, and perform with a necessary detachment for 15 rounds. For McGuigan, on the other hand, it was not so simple. By his own admission, he needed to block out the sound of his father singing “Danny Boy” for fear of “breaking into tears” and he also suggested that the occasion itself was reason enough to collapse. “You're holding it in,” he said. “Your adrenaline is screaming.”
To distract himself, McGuigan said a silent prayer, over and over again, and in that moment envied Pedroza’s ability to go about the job without an entire stadium – an entire nation, no less – riding on his back and living vicariously through him.
“They [the English fans] were fairly apathetic for that fight, whereas we had 12,000 people come over from Ireland and they all got hammered that day and it was almost like they were in the ring with me by the time the first bell rang,” McGuigan recalled. “They behaved themselves impeccably well, but when I came out to the ring I had to be surrounded by police.
“Afterwards there was a big rush to the ring and Tom Cryan – God rest him, he's long gone – and Sean Kilfeather, two Irish journalists, were sitting there and a couple of Irish fellas stood on their heads and shoulders to climb closer to the ring. It was very funny. It was a great night.”
Such was the noise inside Loftus Road, McGuigan and Pedroza struggled to hear the referee’s instructions and the sound of the bell to end each round. Even the referee, McGuigan said, had difficulty knowing when a round was meant to finish. This led to some spells of confusion during the fight, most notably in round 13, when McGuigan struck Pedroza three times after the bell. “It wasn't like I purposely hit him after the bell,” McGuigan said. “Santiago del Rio [Pedroza’s manager] came in and he fucking remonstrated and was shouting. It wasn't my fault, though.”
By that point in the fight McGuigan had sensed he had broken Pedroza’s will, but could neither rest on his laurels nor fully block out the pain of everything he had endured to get there. It had been a long, arduous battle, one analogous to McGuigan’s life.
“I had to move my head so much,” he said. “My neck was so sore after the fight and I couldn't swallow for about three days. He kept hitting me on the Adam's apple. He didn't mean to. He just kept happening to land there. I was lucky really. When he fought [Juan] Laporte [in 1982], he found him 150 times. I subdued that side of things because I kept so busy. I kept the pace so high. I knew he needed time and knew he liked to slow the pace down. I knew the only way to beat him was to make sure he didn't have that luxury.
“When I started to hurt him at close range, I believed I could get the better of him. I remember hurting him with a left hook to the body in the fifth round – boom, boom, boom with the final hook – and he gasped. He kept that poker face, though, so I wasn't sure I'd properly got him. He shoved me away and the bell went ding. He then lifted his leg up before walking back to his stool and that was the sign. I knew I'd got him. I could see my brother [Dermot] down at the side of the ring getting animated and jumping up and down. We were getting to him.”
In the end McGuigan got him and was duly awarded a unanimous decision at the bout’s conclusion. Today, he calls the win against Pedroza his “best night” and his win against Juan Laporte, which took place four months prior, his “best performance”. His “most courageous performance”, meanwhile, came 12 months after beating Pedroza when McGuigan lost his WBA featherweight title against Steve Cruz in the 125-degree heat of the Las Vegas desert. He also calls that one his “worst night”, though knows, given the circumstances and the trouble he had making weight, it could have been even worse. “It was all too fleeting,” McGuigan said. “It should have been longer-lasting. I know that had Vegas not happened, I would have held onto the title for considerably longer. But such is life.”
Some things, like title reigns, last only a short time. Legacies, however, last a lot longer.
