Ennis Boxing Club rings in 50 years

The new boxing season is now in full swing and, while Ireland’s international boxers battle for world titles and the Olympic qualifying spots in Baku in Azerbaijan, action on the home front concentrates on domestic boxing and the various upcoming tournaments and provincial championships.

Many of Ireland’s elite youngsters will be recalled to the national training squads after the summer recess and the thoughts of all the male and female aspirants will turn to the club gyms throughout the county and province for their rigorous sessions over the coming weeks and months.
Ennis Boxing Club will celebrate its 50th year over the coming months and will kick off the season with an all-star tournament in the West County Hotel on Saturday, October 22. The venue was a massive boxing venue through the ’80s and ’90s, with boxing dinner-shows and championships abounding each year. It became the Mecca of boxing fans in Clare through those years.
All of the club’s four national title-holders, Conor Doyle, Sally Carrig, Keelan Sexton and Brian McDonagh will be in action and provincial title-holders Lee Sherlock, Wayne Danagher, Michael McDonagh and Jamie Keane will also fight on the bill.
It is hoped that past champions who brought glory to club and county over the decades will be guests on the night. the likes of Mike Queally and Mike ‘Fly’ Daly from the ’70s and the Crowley brothers, Don and Brian, along Trevor Markham from the ’90s will all show to celebrate the club’s milestone.
This year is also the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Irish Amateur boxing Association and, while the national association celebrates with the possible qualifiers for London’s 2012 Olympics, there will be much focus on the sport throughout the provinces in the coming months with patrons and members celebrating a century of wonderful service to youth.
It is not insignificant that so many boxers have won Olympic medals for Ireland and boxing generally has become synonymous with Irish sport throughout the world.
The recent spotlight on the New Hall (Paddy Conn’s) in Ennis, with the launch of Madden’s Furniture Store, brings to mind an era in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s when boxing was a massive crowd-puller to the dance hall.
The Kilrush Club, which was a renowned boxing academy in the 50s, would organise attractive tournaments in the venue with the help of many local enthusiasts and the ingenuity of Aidan Cahill from Kilrush. It is on record that upwards on 1,500 packed the hall for some of the tournaments, and when the Ennis club matured in the 1960s, they too staged their shows in the hall, with capacity crowds crammed into the venue.
In the ’70s, the Ennis club purchased the 24-foot boxing ring which was used for the Muhammad Ali-Al ‘Blue’ Lewis fight in Croker, and proudly used the massive ring in some of its tournaments in the New Hall venue. Many of the boxers who boxed in the shows would later recount how traversing the ring was like dancing around Croke Park, such was the huge area of the Ali-designed ring.
It is expected that a capacity crowd will enjoy the boxing in the West County in a fortnight, and perhaps many memories and stories will abound on the night of celebration and action.