Here are the answers to the 27th edition of the annual column quiz: 1 - IRELANDS youngest current professional is Balbriggan welterweight Gerard Whitehouse, who turned 19 on August 9 last and made a winning debut in Downpatrick on November 1. 2 - REGULARS will know that we throw a googly every year and heres this years: the last Irish boxer to win a world title fight in America prior to Andy Lee was Ireland first female professional, Drogheda featherweight Deirdre Gogarty, who won the IBF title by beating Bonnie Canino in New Orleans in March 1997. 3 - THE number of Irish born fighters made their professional debut during 2014 is 18. They were, in order: David Maguire, Conrad Cummings, John Joe Nevin, Casey Blair, Anthony Connolly, Declan Geraghty, Paul Hyland Jnr, Derek Potter, Tommy McCarthy, Ciaran Bates. Eamonn Magee Jnr, Sean Turner, Jason Quigley, Gearoid Clancy, Darren Mangan, Michael McKinson, Gerard Whitehouse and Noel Murphy. 4 - THE first father and son to win Irish amateur championships were Willie Carroll Senior and Junior; Senior won at featherweight at the inaugural championships in 1911 and Junior took the flyweight crown a dozen years later. 5 - THE Olympic gold medallist who became a world pro champion in the shortest timespan was Vasyl Lomachenko, who achieved the feat in 22 months, or 678 days to be precise. Or 667 days after his debut. 6 - THE Irish amateur champion who won a pro title on his debut was Charlie Nash, who won the vacant Northern Ireland lightweight title by beating Ray Ross in October 1975. 7 - WHAT Gabriel Bernal, Carmelo Bossi, Antonio Cermeno, Jimmy Ellis, Sandro Lopopolo, Matthew Saad Muhammad and Ernie Terrell all have in common is that they are former world champions who passed away during 2014. 8 - TONY Canzoneri, Wayne McCullough and Rocky Juarez all lost half a dozen world title challenges. Canzoneri and Betulio Gonzalez both lost eight world title bouts, but only five of Gonzalezs were challenges (itals). Both also had one drawn challenge, while Juarezs total includes one for an interim title. 9 - THE world heavyweight title challenger who before the big fight said: All I want is a referee who can count to ten and doesnt stutter was Larry Holmes, prior to his four round loss to Mike Tyson in January 1988. 10 - IRELANDS youngest world champion was Jack McAuliffe, who was 20 years and 219 old when he won the lightweight title in October 1886. 11 - OUR oldest champion was Brian Magee who was 36 years and 51 days old when he won the interim WBA super-middleweight title in July 2011 and 37 years and 153 days old when he was elevated to regulr champion the following November 9. 12 - THE boxer who was stripped of a World Championships gold medal when it emerged that hed had two pro bouts two years earlier was Ruslan Chagaev in 1997. He won - and kept - a second gold medal four years later. 13 - THE truly historic nature of the first of the five meetings of Jimmy Ingle and Paddy Dowdall - in the National Stadium in January 1940 - was that they were both reigning European Championships gold medallists, having won out at flyweight and featherweight, respectively, at the same venue eight months earlier. 14 - THE first Irish amateur champion to win either a British, Commonwealth or European title as a professional was Freddie Gilroy, who won the first two of those championships by stopping Peter Keenan in 11 rounds in January 1959. 15 - THE first brothers to box for Ireland in the same international were Ando and Tommy Reddy, in Irelands 6-4 win over America in the National Stadium in April 1952. Ando beat Kenny Wright at flyweight and Tommy beat James Hairston at featherweight. 16 - THE last time Ireland had two world champions at the same time was in January 1997, when Steve Collins reigned as WBO super-middleweight champion and Wayne McCullough relinquished the WBC bantamweight title on the eve of his unsuccessful challenge to Daniel Zaragoza for the same organisations super-bantamweight crown. In fact, between 30 July 1995 (when McCullough won his title in Japan) and 13 April 1996 (when Eamonn Loughran lost the WBO welterweight title to Jose Luis Lopez), we had three (itals) simuultaneously. 17 - THE Irish world champion who won a Canadian crown along the way was Mike McTigue, who had two reigns as middleweight title holder in the early 1920s. 18 - IRELANDS youngest ever Olympic medallist was Johnny Caldwell, who was 18 and 205 days old when he won his quarter-final in Melbourne in 1956. Our only other teenage medallist was John McNally, who was 19 years and 272 days old when he clinched our very first boxing medal in Helsinki in 1952. 19 - KENNY Egan was our oldest medallist at 26 years and 225 days in Beijing in 2008. He was 89 days older than Tony Socks Byrne was when he won his bronze medal in Melbourne. 20 - THE three-time Irish champion who emigrated to Rhodesia and won in an international against Ireland in Harare in September 1959 was Paddy Kelty, who won national titles at flyweight in 1949, bantamweight in 1951 and featherweight in 1954. He had a 10-3 international record while boxing for Ireland and beat Dickie Hanna in the Harare match, Rhodesias first ever official international.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:06:47 +0000
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