On a tour of England in October, 1971, Muhammad Ali visited The Wellington, strongman Butty Sugrue’s pub in Shepherd’s Bush, London. At one point in the festivities, the Kerryman and Ali had a one-on-one chat during which the landlord asked the former heavyweight champion of the world to consider a fight in Ireland, the profits from which would go to a charity close to his heart.
“Like Joe Louis, he is deeply interested in the welfare of the mentally handicapped,” said Sugrue. “So, I put the idea to him and asked him would he fight in Dublin. He told me he would go anywhere at any time to fight for the mentally handicapped children, and he promised me then to do this fight for £100,000.”
Whether Ali made any personal assurances about a future bout for any charity is open to question but there is no doubt the idea of him boxing in Ireland seems to have been born during that encounter. Not that this kind of forensic detail mattered to the sceptical media in Ireland. They were not convinced by Sugrue’s announcement in March 1972 that the most famous athlete in the world would be coming to Dublin that summer. As if a former circus strongman could pull off such a feat.
‘Can Butty Produce Ali Here?’ asked The Irish Press, the incredulous tone of the headline setting the tone for much newspaper coverage about that possibility over the next few weeks.
A master at garnering cheap publicity, Sugrue enjoyed a reputation as something of a carnival barker, often guilty of delivering less than he promised, forever enmeshed in madcap ventures designed to drive up revenue at one of his establishments. Barely four years had passed since he had last made international headlines. In his second attempt at one of the lesser spotted world records, he persuaded Mick Meaney, a Tipperary-born barman at the Admiral Nelson, a pub he then ran in north London, to spend 61 days in a coffin, buried 11ft below the surface.
A classic slice of Sugrue grotesquerie. Before the burial, he organised “The Last Supper”, a meal at which Jack Doyle, one-time heavyweight contender turned cabaret act, sang songs. Meaney was then placed in his “all-mod cons” coffin. Watched by large numbers of Irish expatriates wearing solemn black suits and gleaming white shirts, he was passed through the window of the bar and lifted on to a flatbed truck-cum-hearse that took him to his “final” resting place at Mick Keane’s building yard. When Meaney finally emerged from his subterranean spot more than two months later, it was to a kiss from the glamorous figure of Diana Dors, and the soundtrack of the London-Irish Girl Pipers.
Questions were subsequently raised about the nature of that enterprise in the House of Commons, a measure of how well Sugrue sold the stunt to the media and how famous he had become in Britain. It was all a long way, literally and metaphorically, from Gortnascarry, the townland near Killorglin in southwest Kerry where Michael (his official name) was born on July 24th, 1924. One of the six children (three sons and three daughters) of Daniel and Anna Sugrue, he earned the sobriquet “Butty” early on due to his short, thick build and prodigious strength.
In his youth, he had been an amateur boxer at a time when budding Killorglin pugilists fought in a ring set up in the fabled Oisin Ballroom on Iveragh Road. Alongside his brother Tim, known to all as “Fly”, he also travelled to compete at tournaments in Cahersiveen, Tralee and Castleisland. Around then he started to gain a reputation for being abnormally strong. Popular lore in the area held that his power was down to the amount of goat’s milk he drank in his formative years. English newspapers, prompted by his own anecdotes, later attributed his brawn to an idyllic rural childhood spent chasing wild rabbits and eating them raw.
Variously described as somewhere between 5ft 5in and 5ft 8in in height, with a few stubborn wisps of hair clinging to his otherwise balding pate, he was a small, squat man blessed with incredible power. As a young lad during a stint working the peat bogs in Offaly, he entertained larger colleagues by hoisting them over his head and holding them there. In the pre-television era, that gift was remarkable enough for him to eventually parlay it into a modicum of fame. Leaving the turf-cutting behind, he spent much of the 1940s and early 1950s traversing the country as a headline act with Duffy’s Circus.
Most evenings, he entered the ring to the sound of his colleague Michael Doyle fingering the accordion, the audience gasping the instant they realised the musician was perched atop a chair that Sugrue held between his teeth while walking along. Posters declared him “Ireland’s Strongest Man!” and few quibbled with the billing. Those who did were invited into the spotlight to see if they could match his feats. Usually, he lifted four 56lb shop weights attached to a steel cart axle (also 56lb) above his head and then watched the doubters and naysayers fail one by one to replicate his action.
Another trick was to sit 10 men on a trailer before dragging it around the big top with a rope clenched between his teeth. Typical sideshow fare, the kind of act that the people of a town remembered, and it made Sugrue nationally famous. When the adults repaired to the pubs afterwards, they spent hours figuring out how such a small man could be so strong. At school the next day, kids talked of little else. Over time, his legend grew and grew and the story about him tugging a double-decker bus across O’Connell Bridge in Dublin with those ever-resilient gnashers became national lore.
Emigrating to London in the early 1960s, Sugrue arrived in a city teeming with Irish and opportunity. A teetotaller, he got involved in the pub business, an industry where his name recognition and flair for promotion brought exiled compatriots flocking to his bars. If his quiet manner and gentle ways belied his illustrious past as Ireland’s strongest man, customers caught glimpses now and then of his remarkable abilities. Troublemakers left his establishments in a hurry. He wouldn’t fight anybody, he’d just grab at them, and once he’d gained a substantial hold, the miscreant was bodily lifted from the premises and warned not to return.
Not long after Nelson’s Pillar was blown up on O’Connell Street in Dublin in 1966, Sugrue put the word out that the head of the statue would be making an appearance in the Admiral Nelson on a certain night. The place was packed to the rafters when the proprietor announced that, unfortunately, some ne’er-do-wells had stolen the head from a wheelbarrow in the backyard the previous evening. Only Sugrue could get away with disappointing people on that scale.
For all these misadventures, stunts and half-truths, Sugrue’s friends regarded him as intensely loyal, and he had an admirable history of assisting Irish people in London, most especially Doyle, an increasingly pathetic alcoholic. If the Corkman needed a place to stay, he knew his Kerry pal would come through for him. Once, he accompanied the former contender to Elstree Studios for a summit with Marlon Brando, who had sent his Rolls-Royce to ferry them to the set of The Countess of Hong Kong. Both men had been married to Movita Castaneda, a Mexican film star, and Brando wanted information from Doyle to help him negotiate his divorce. Sugrue tagged along as security in case the discussion between the ex-husband and the wannabe ex-husband turned ugly. It didn’t. The trio got on so well that Sophia Loren stood in for a photograph with them that day.
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For the rest of the decade, Sugrue became such a staple in London tabloids that one columnist affectionately dubbed him “the splendid spoofer”. Photographs of somebody sitting on a chair that he was clasping in his teeth or shots of him grimacing while holding back a revving motorcycle (a stunt he enacted on the Tonight with Dave Allen television show) were regular features in the English press. Yet, the showbiz persona was very different from his private self. Noted for his charity and generosity to those struggling, he once performed his strongman act for the delighted inmates of Maidstone Prison.
In 1970, he pulled together a star-studded evening at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of “the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children and St Patrick’s Island”. With the Irish tenor Josef Locke as the headliner, support acts included The Johnstons (featuring Paul Brady), the New Faces and an up-and-coming singer called David Bowie, strumming a 12-string, and singing Space Oddity. Quite the line-up.
Wanting to help kids was a typically noble project of his but the St Patrick’s Island aspect of the fundraising was more dubious. The previous year, in a supposed move to stop it being taken over by hippies, he had purchased this tiny islet off the coast of north Dublin. He wanted to build a spiritual and health retreat facility there, a place where “slim men will grow big and big men will grow slim”. There may have been truth to that intention but, not long after the announcement, Mick Jagger had to deny newspaper reports he had bought the 16 acres located 1.5km from the mainland off the Kerryman.
“I’m not in the business of buying islands,” said Jagger. “What’s more, I have never heard of Mr Sugrue.”
That would have made the Rolling Stone unique because Sugrue was an extraordinarily adept self-publicist and stories about him were legion. He once challenged the combined Oxford-Cambridge boat race crews to a tug of war. They demurred. He regularly called out publicans around the world, offering them £500, sometimes doubling that sum, if they came to London and matched his feats of strength. None ever took him up on the offer.
This, then, was the picaresque character purporting to bring Ali to Ireland and many of the country’s sportswriters just could not reconcile his chequered history of bizarre exploits with his present lofty intentions. Yes, Sugrue had succeeded in bringing Louis on a tour of Ireland in 1966, as a cabaret act, not a fighter, and inevitably bragged he had lifted the former heavyweight champion in a chair clean off the ground with his teeth. But that promotion lost money and turned into a farce. And, while getting a superannuated boxer decades removed from his pomp to sing at The Arch Ballroom in Tallow, west Waterford, was a singular achievement, it was not the same as trying to import the most box-office athlete on Earth to fight. Surely he was not seriously going to try to do this ...
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The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland by Dave Hannigan is published by Merrion Press
