The footage is horrible, harrowing, traumatic. All the same, you can’t look away. The scene is the Regency hotel in Dublin in February 2016, the event a nondescript weigh-in before the big fight the following night. There’s terrible rock music playing. A couple of gormless-looking bald men standing on the podium bearing clipboards. A local cruiserweight called Gary Sweeney steps on to the scales in blue Superman briefs. The gormless bald men peer forward and write on their clipboards. Sweeney steps aside. All of a sudden, we hear the whip-crack of an assault rifle.
At which point, a lot of things happen at once. There’s breaking glass, chairs being overturned. We see a blurred Sweeney, still in his briefs, desperately fleeing for safety through a side door. Through the pop-pop of bullets and the din of grown men shouting, a single piercing child’s voice: “Daddy, what was that?” Within minutes the gunmen have departed, leaving one man dead and two wounded. But the main target of the attack, according to Irish police, has already left the building. Daniel Kinahan will live to fight another day.
For many, the first time they will have heard Kinahan’s name was last week, when Tyson Fury name-checked him three times in a video announcing an agreement to fight Anthony Joshua in 2021. If made, it will be one of the biggest fights in British boxing history. Yet for now, much of the attention has been fixed on the man who has helped to arrange it. The Criminal Assets Bureau in Ireland has said that Kinahan “controlled and managed” the operations of the family syndicate, and “has associations that facilitate international criminal activity in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America”. A 2019 Europol report describes the Kinahan gang as “an organised crime group” and “key players in the drug trade”. Kinahan, for his part, describes himself as “just an Irish businessman”. He has never been convicted of a crime.
A question, if you’re a boxing lover: how does all this make you feel? Repulsed? Depressed? Vaguely enthralled? There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, by the way. Some fans are simply delighted the fight is being set up. Others are ripping up their metaphorical season tickets and vowing never to watch the sport again. In many ways, the reaction to Kinahan’s brokering of Fury v Joshua serves as a mirror to boxing itself: a game that bombastically likes to think of itself as a struggle between the forces of eternal darkness and eternal light.
The truth is that both come from the same place and the first thing to observe is that this does not smell like your usual PR spiel. Joshua v Fury does not require phoney outrage or synthetic hype to sell it. Moreover, perhaps the real surprise here is not that Kinahan has managed to finagle his way into the upper echelons of the game, but that this in itself should be of any surprise to anyone. This is, after all, a sport that has built its very foundations on a confederacy of the irredeemable and the untouchable, the brash and the broken. Inside the ropes, these bruised young men with their beautiful dreams, many of whom come from the most unloved fringes. And then in the ringside seats, often drawn from the very same streets, the hustlers and the hucksters who weigh and barter them: the managers and the mobsters, the salesmen and the spivs and – occasionally – the downright reprehensible.
This has been boxing since its very earliest days: a sport endlessly debased, endlessly exploited, all too often run with the callousness and thuggery of a criminal empire. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was Frankie Carbo, the kingpin promoter and former gunman for Murder Incorporated. If Carbo or Blinky Palermo told you take a dive, you obeyed. In the 1970s, the torch passed to the ruthless Don King, a man who stamped one of his employees to death in the late 1960s (and was pardoned for it by the governor of Ohio). In the 1980s and 1990s, the game was reshaped again, as Las Vegas’s iron grip was blown out of the water by an upstart property and casino mogul by the name of Donald Trump.
And so: this is your final straw? It’s fine to find Kinahan’s involvement in professional boxing distasteful, even abhorrent. Frankly, I don’t disagree with you. But it strikes me that much of the shrill outrage comes from a place that wishes boxing were a sport it has never truly been and arguably has never really aspired to be. This has always been a flawed and dangerous game, a panoply of bleak moral choices. One where vice always seems to find a way in, like rain through a leaky roof. One that draws much of its vicarious fascination from deadly violence, both sanctioned and illicit. The emergence of Kinahan as one of the sport’s leading powerbrokers is many things. But a betrayal it is not.
In a way, it’s entirely fitting Joshua v Fury is likely to happen in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. These states are the new gangsters of sport, the new pimps and street corner thugs, carrying out their murders, fighting their proxy wars, laundering their reputations, this time buttressed by billions rather than millions. Should we really be shocked to discover there is a certain affinity – perhaps even a reverence – there? The darkness and the light come from the same place. It’s horrible, harrowing, traumatic. All the same, you can’t look away.