DOG DAYS
BUDDY McGIRT covers his face with his hands and begins to cry in his hotel room on a sunlit Saturday afternoon in London. The great American trainer, and former two-time world titlist, is 57 years old but the memories remain raw. McGirt shakes his head when I apologise for a question about his mother which has moved him to tears. He wipes his eyes and waves his hand as a sign that, once he has composed himself, he wants to keep talking. We are only 30 minutes into a two-hour conversation and there is so much that McGirt wants to share about his life in and out of the ring.
“She was my life,” McGirt says simply of his mother. “Everything I did in boxing was for her. I had a great career, I got to do things I’d dreamed of as a kid. But, more importantly, I got to take care of my mother. That was the greatest part for me. People ask: ‘What did you enjoy most about being world champion?’ The answer is easy. I enjoyed watching my mother enjoy my success. She had it so rough, being the mother of six and being violently abused by my stepfather.”
Before we get to the bleak heart of this story, and the suffering his mother endured which drove McGirt as a fighter and now as a trainer, he reaches for his phone to show me a photograph. It is of his mother, Dorothea Boynton, on the last day he saw her before her death four years ago. While McGirt flicks through his gallery I feel privileged to be in the company of a man so steeped in boxing and the bruising realities of ordinary life.
He has already told me about the days when great old masters of the ring, like Jersey Joe Walcott and Willie Pep, used to
