THE post of Women’s National Team Coach is still advertised on the USA Boxing website. Outlined in the job description are 13 “duties and responsibilities”, seven “requirements” and, at the bottom, six words about “compensation”. It reads: “Commensurate with experience. Employee benefits package.”
It sounds so matter of course that it almost goes without saying. But in his current job as Head Coach with the Irish Amateur Boxing Association [IABA] Billy Walsh is not being paid a salary “commensurate with his experience” and, if there is a benefits package, it doesn’t include a pension. Imagine. And people wondered why Walsh would leave.
These critical omissions are part of a much bigger picture. For years Walsh has not been treated with the respect he deserves from his own federation. At every turn they have left him short. Walsh has galvanised his feelings against that pointed coldness but over time that relationship has been grating and corrosive.
Think of the calculated indignities. After the Beijing Olympics, when Gary Keegan’s departure left a vacancy for a High Performance Manager, the IABA tried to appoint somebody else over Walsh’s head when Walsh was by a mile the outstanding candidate for the job. It if wasn’t for a desperate intervention by the Irish Sports Council [ISC] the deed would have been done and Walsh would have been lost to Irish boxing.
Even then, the IABA couldn’t bring themselves to give Walsh the role description to which he was entitled. He was the Head Coach performing all the practical duties and responsibilities of the High Performance Manager.
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That distinction might seem nebulous from a distance but it was an intensely political nuance. The High Performance unit was regarded with hostility by a large core of old-school IABA people as an Irish Sports Council imposition; they didn’t ask for it, they never wanted it. The title of High Performance Manager, with all it implied, was a sports council creation, it was their language and their thinking. They refused to concede that title to Walsh; instead they put their own words on it.
The wonder is not that Walsh is on the verge of leaving but that he has stayed so long. The simple answer is love. His emotional investment in this project has been incalculable. Committed to paper every year are performance plans and targets and outcomes but there is no column to record how much of him it consumed. He treated the boxers like his sons.
When the High Performance Unit started, more than a dozen years ago now, they didn’t have enough money for day-to-day accommodation when the boxers were in camp so they bought blow-up beds and slept on the floor of their gym on the South Circular Road. Boxers and coaches together. In winter, they froze. Months later an attic space over the dressing rooms was converted and bunk beds were installed. Back then nobody was paying any attention to Irish amateur boxing except to say, in passing, that it had been underachieving for decades.
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Walsh was never a suit, inflated by a title. He was hands-on with the athletes, their problems, their ambitions. When Keegan left he had to learn different skills and become an administrator but he was still intimate with the boxers’ lives. How do you replace that?
Sitting in his office 18 months ago, while another round of negotiations between him and the federation were grinding towards another deficient outcome, Walsh tried to explain what keeps him here when there were other offers abroad. The success of Irish amateur boxing had not just been the greatest story in Irish sport for the last decade it had caused a splash in the greater boxing world. Walsh’s talents and his achievements were being acknowledged everywhere.
“It’s been very difficult,” Walsh said at the time. “Probably 80% or 90% of the time I can control what I can control. The rest — the 10% — sometimes wrecks your head. If you let that take over you it will take over your whole day. So we try to just block it out. There are offers from other countries and there are times when you’d say, ‘Why don’t I go?’. But it was our baby from the beginning. No matter what, my heart is in Irish boxing.”
So how has it come to this, with Walsh on the verge of leaving for America? Because the IABA have allowed it to happen. They have known about the American interest in Walsh since February.
As late as last Saturday the sports council tried to iron out a package that would satisfy Walsh and that the IABA could tolerate. Walsh was agreeable and the initial indications were that the IABA were on board; by Tuesday they weren’t.
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Contact between the IABA and the ISC this week has been less than nominal. It is understood that contact between the IABA and Walsh has been minimal. Leaving home would be a huge wrench for Walsh but he has visited Colorado, where the USA Women’s boxing programme is based, and he liked it there. He is prepared to go.
For Irish boxing the timing couldn’t be worse. Ireland have qualified seven boxers for the World Championships in October where Olympic qualifying places will be on the line. In a few weeks’ time boxing’s High Performance Unit will leave the old gym on the South Circular Road for a new facility at the Institute of Sport in Abbotstown. The Olympics is less than 12 months away. Nothing should be distracting them from that focus.
The IABA has a simple duty of care to Irish boxing. Walsh’s departure would be a staggering dereliction of that duty. On their heads be it.