BELFAST, BOXING & EAMONN MAGEE

For a brief time, Eamonn Magee was champion of the world. In December 2003 at an ice rink in Cardiff, The Belfast Irishman beat the English journeyman James Vincent for the World Boxing Union version of the welterweight title. In most boxing biographies that moment might serve as a climax, or at least the fulcrum on which the story balances: the hard road to triumph, the twisting path that follows. But in The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee, the winning of the belt is merely part of a long, downhill coda, as if the championship were too little too late, because there had already been too many other fights, too many other, more telling, tales to tell.

Magee’s story reminds me, in some ways, of Sonny Liston’s. The former heavyweight champ and baddest man alive became defined not by his journey from prison to the title, but by his losses to Muhammad Ali and especially by the cloud of fixing that hung over the second loss, to the so-called ‘phantom punch’. Writing about Liston’s mysterious death by supposed overdose, alone in Las Vegas, age 40 or thereabouts (his birth had never been recorded) the sportswriter Bill Nack quoted a boxing PR man, Harold Conrad: ‘I think he died the day he was born’. Unlike Liston, Magee is still with us at 48, but like the American, he was born into the kind of circumstances which tend to impose a difficult fate, and fate, in Eamonn Magee’s case, was particularly…