Years ago, when he was just finding his way in the world of boxing writing, Donald McRae was in conversation with the greatest of them all, the late Hugh McIlvanney. He’s telling this story now down a Zoom line and makes sure to preface it by saying he won’t embarrass himself by trying the accent.
But if you’ve read any McIlvanney or if you ever heard him speak when he was alive, it won’t be hard to imagine his warning to the younger McRae. “He said to me, ‘Ambivalence is going to be your constant companion,’” says the South African author and journalist now.
“Which is such a McIlvanney way of putting it. But it’s so pertinent because you’ve got to live with it in boxing. It’s that constant fluctuation between the good and the bad. The hypocrisy of it. Talking about the beauty of boxing and how it saves lives but at the same time acknowledging that it damages and maims and kills people.
“I will get duped by it and think that this is actually going to make me feel so alive. And then a day later, it makes you feel so dejected and dirty. You think, ‘Why did I ever think it would be any different?’”
All of which gives a flavour of how McRae finds himself in the here and now. Still in love with boxing, irredeemably and despite himself. But exhausted with it too. After the thick end of four decades of writing about the sport, he has released The Last Bell, which he says will be his final boxing book.
[ Millions of dollars ‘under the table’: Daniel Kinahan’s backroom role in boxingOpens in new window ]
“In the six years of boxing that I covered for this book, so much happened,” he says. “The Kinahan saga, which I know had been going on for some time, became just impossible to ignore. And then all the positive drug tests and then the Saudis moving in – it just felt like one dark wave after another engulfing the business of boxing.
“I got to the point where maybe I was worn out. I took genuine pleasure in Alexander Usyk because I like and admire him. But my excitement at seeing him become undisputed heavyweight champion of the world was minuscule compared to all the other feelings I had about the way boxing had gone and the way boxing and Saudi were now working so closely together especially.
“So I think it’s got to a point where I will still follow boxing because I love to interview fighters. I will go to certain fights. But I think I’m going to limit my writing to journalism. And maybe I’ll become a better journalist now because perhaps I’ve been a bit too sentimental in my coverage of boxing. And maybe I can be a bit more forensic and a bit harder in my assessment of it.”
It is 29 years now since Dark Trade was published. McRae’s first boxing book remains one of the great journeys into the sport’s black heart and won him the first of two William Hill Sports Book of the Year prizes. Whatever beats The Last Bell to the prize this year – if anything does – will have to be pretty extraordinary.
Though it isn’t exactly a sequel to Dark Trade, it finds McRae back digging in the same sort of mines. It was a book he had in his head for a long time but really only found himself itching to get started in late 2018. By pure happenstance, it coincided with a time of terrible loss in his life – his sister who was only three years older than him died at just 60. Within the following 18 months, both his mother and father died back in South Africa. His wife’s mother died a year to the day after his own.
All around him, the ravages of time and illness ground away. In December 2018, his family was as it had always been – himself, his sister and his parents. By mid-2020, only he remained. His father died in the teeth of the pandemic and he could only watch the funeral on a video feed in his house in London. He didn’t really know it but he needed boxing more than ever.
“The last time I saw my sister, she was in hospital and we had no idea then that she would die just a matter of weeks later. But I spoke to her then about the idea of starting this book and although she wasn’t a boxing fan, she loved the fighters. She said, ‘The stories are just amazing. You should do it.’ Once I lost her, even though I accepted her death, it did kind of unhinge me.
“Boxing is like all sport, at times it just all seems so unimportant. But I think there’s a line in the book where I say something like it makes me feel so f**king alive. Even though it’s silly. It’s when your senses are so heightened and you are pulsating with life like a teenager pulsating with acne. You just feel, ‘Wow.’
“And I think I wanted that back because I didn’t want to wallow in grief. I kind of accepted what had happened. I know this comes to all of us. But I wanted that feeling of being lit up on the inside. Boxing does that to me.
“There are many fights that are covered in the course of the book, like Katie Taylor against Amanda Serrano in New York, where I was absolutely lost in however long that fight lasted. I was just lost in it and I didn’t think of anything else. So I guess that was kind of the pull for me because I thought I could just lose myself for a while in boxing again.”
These fighters’ lives are on the line. And I think it forces them to look quite deeply into themselves, if you get them on a good day where they’re willing to talk about those deep emotions
— Donald McRae
McRae has made his name in journalism interviewing sportspeople of all kinds. The famous and the unknowns, all sports, all walks of life. But he has never made any secret of the fact that boxers sing to him in a key the rest can’t reach. And so he went looking for stories and again and characters again started to populate the book with them.
In Isaac Chamberlain and Patrick Day, he found the side of boxing that is always shimmering with peril. In Andy Lee, he found boxing’s decency. In Tyson Fury, its madness. In Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, its pure, uncut adrenaline hit.
“Katie Taylor said to me that the Olympics when she lost in 2016, that’s still seared inside her, that defeat. And she just took it. You lose the Champions League final or World Cup final in football and of course it’s going to scar you a little bit inside. But in boxing, the scars and wounds are so much deeper. And when you get the opportunity to hear them talk about these things, and sometimes in quite poetic ways, as a writer you become such a sucker for it, don’t you?
“The humanity of boxers is definitely the thing that draws me in. Because the way fighters talk about fear – and the best of them do say, ‘Of course I’m scared.’ They’re not so scared of being hurt. They’re scared of being exposed.
“There’s something naked about being a fighter. I think that your emotions are stripped bare. It’s one thing to lose, but it’s another thing to be knocked out. Obviously it’s seen mainly as a masculine sport and for a lot of these guys, their masculinity is shredded when they get knocked down.
“Obviously these sports carry danger, but boxing’s like nothing else in the sense that these fighters’ lives are on the line. And I think it forces them to look quite deeply into themselves, if you get them on a good day where they’re willing to talk about those deep emotions.
“And you can get beguiled by that. Because then you sit down and watch a fight or you settle in for a night of fights and it turns out to be anything but amazing. I feel that so much. It lets you down so often. But the nights when it is good, it’s incredible.”
Ultimately though, boxing is rotten. We know this. On so many levels and in so many different ways. The Last Bell covers the period over the past decade or so when whatever last scrap of dignity boxing had got washed away.
In Ireland, we were the canaries in the coal mine – when Tyson Fury announced on social media in June 2020 that Daniel Kinahan had made the deal for him to fight Anthony Joshua, the public revulsion here was instant. It turned out to be the beginning of the end.
“It was a watershed moment, wasn’t it?” says McRae. “Because I’d begun to despair. In the UK, no one would speak in boxing about Kinahan. No one would talk about him. It was all, ‘Oh, you can’t talk about Kinahan, he’s too intimidating’. Or it was, ‘No one wants to hear about that.’
“And it was the writers in Ireland who did their job. I loved it because they just never gave up. They kept coming back to Kinahan and the feud and the drugs, the death that stalked the streets of Dublin for a time. I think Tyson felt sort of untouchable and Kinahan maybe even felt untouchable because it looked like he could go on being in boxing with no consequence. But once Tyson made that video, it blew up then, didn’t it? And it was a big, big moment. And things did change.”
As the book goes on, more and more of what McRae loves about boxing feels like it gets further and further away. The increasing presence of Saudi Arabia, the seemingly unchecked levels of doping in such a dangerous sport – all of it becomes a cloud that gradually obscures the parts of boxing he loves.
“I always attempt to distinguish between boxing, which I love in terms of the fighters, the fights, the drama of it. I love that. I still do. But what I’ve come to loathe and actually, even though I hate is not a word I use because I tend not to hate things – but I did come to kind of hate the business of boxing.
“I’m still going to write about boxing for The Guardian. We’ll see how that goes because I’m now going to be focusing quite a lot on the business of boxing. But I’ll still continue doing the interviews for a long time hopefully. I feel my energy levels are as high as ever. And my curiosity is as deep as ever.”
♦ The Last Bell by Donald McRae is published by Simon & Schuster and is out now
