The tragedies that shaped Michael Conlan
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Mark KriegelESPN
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in March 2019 ahead of Conlan’s fight against Ruben Garcia.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Everybody wants to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
Unless you’re a fighter. Then you always want to be Irish.
It’s good business, after all. Freddie Roach — who’s, in fact, of French-Canadian ancestry — will be the first to tell you, he sold a lot more tickets as “Irish” Freddie Roach.
This isn’t new, either. Perhaps you don’t recall Mushy Callahan, one of the first 140-pound champions, but you’ll admit it’s a better nom de guerre than Moishe Scheer, as he was born on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Boxing is a sport of immigrants. So maybe there’s some misguided romanticization for a time when they sprang forth from the steerage class, that holy trinity of white ethnics. Still, we don’t dwell on Jewish fighters. Or Italian ones. But the idea of the Irish fighter endures.
The Fighting Irish. Before they were a football team, they were a famous regiment — memorialized by Joyce Kilmer, himself a poet killed in battle.
Perhaps, then, it speaks to something ancestral.
So here comes Michael Conlan, 27, just 10-0, but already headlining his third consecutive St. Patrick’s Day card at the Garden (yes, albeit the small Garden) when he will fight Ruben Garcia (25-3-1). You’ve probably heard the story by now: having won bronze at the London Olympics, he was favored to win gold in Rio. Instead, following an epically bad decision, Conlan identifies the Olympic judges with his middle finger, and tweets at Vladimir Putin. Looking back, those acts were as profitable as they were profane. Seven months hence, Conor McGregor famously attends his debut, the first of his consecutive sellouts at the Hulu Theater.
Would it have all fallen into place if he were, say, from Azerbaijan?
No.
But you don’t have to love Conlan because he’s Irish. There are other reasons.
What catches the eye in and around 93 Cavendish Street — a neat, narrow row home where the Conlan boys came of age — are those splashes of fluorescence every few blocks: the murals. Most of them remain as they were during The Troubles — the last iteration of a centuries-old conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. This being a Catholic neighborhood, those memorialized were Republicans: the hunger striker Bobby Sands, the Gibraltar Three, IRA soldiers shot by British special forces and the so-called blanket protesters, who refused to wear the prison garb of common criminals.
Protestant neighborhoods on the other side of the “peace wall” have their own murals, their own fallen heroes. To an outsider, it’s difficult to keep score, to know the martyred from the murdered, the victims from the villains. But taken together the murals tell a single story: a history of the dead.
While the Good Friday peace accords were signed in 1998, when Conlan was only 7, the family had already seen its share of trouble. Michael’s mother, Teresa, was hit by a rubber bullet. Her husband, John, who hails from Dublin, was regularly brought in for questioning. A British Army barracks on the corner of Cavendish and Violet streets didn’t leave the Conlans feeling very protected. What Michael recalls most vividly, however, was the petrol bomb.
“Seen someone going on fire,” he says. “I was probably about 9.”
Aside from murals, what Belfast had in abundance were boxing gyms. “In a five-mile radius,” Michael says, “there’s like between 18 and 20 clubs.”
Jamie, the eldest Conlan brother who is also a professional boxer, says “we’re a nation born into fighting, especially in the north of Ireland.
“A boxing club was a way to express what we felt inside,” Jamie said. “You don’t understand where you’re getting this aggression — this kind of raw, animalistic wanting to let your hands go. You don’t understand why you’re throwing punches.”
John Conlan, who had been an amateur fighter in Dublin and is now coach of the esteemed Irish national team, had his own take.
“I don’t think we’re an aggressive race,” he said. “I just think we understand that piece in the ring: that little piece, man-to-man, face-to-face.”
If Jamie had a crazy kind of courage, Michael — five years his junior — had something else: innate, unusual, a sense of the ever-changing distance in the ring, the calculus of combat. He had a head for it, too.
“He knew instantly how to evade punches,” Jamie recalls. “He understood it’s not about who’s the hardest or the strongest or the most aggressive … it’s about knowing how to twist, how to mentally open you up, and then I’ll hit you.
“I remember Michael sticking his tongue out at a kid. They were only 10. … There was a wee crowd, and Michael understood he had to get him wound up, [to] embarrass him. … Soon as the guy lost his cool, Michael knew he’d won. The guy tried to headbutt him, and by then Michael was just playing with him. You don’t see that every day.”
By early adolescence, Conlan was on his way to establishing himself as Ireland’s best-ever male amateur fighter. The wins and losses would eventually tally 248-14, by his own account, and include gold medals at the World Championships, the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games, not to mention the two Olympic appearances. It was a storied journey that took him from India to Ankara to Azerbaijan, but it was back in Belfast where he took most of his losses.
He wasn’t alone. Conlan came of age with a generation that exchanged one set of troubles for another, drugs and booze.
“When the conflict was on, there were very, very little drugs in the neighborhood,” John recalls. “People got executed very quickly if they were antisocial. But when the conflict stopped, it seemed to quickly spiral out of control. … Young lads in the club would talk about being on four-, five-day benders.”
From age 13, Michael was doing cocaine, ecstasy and popping prescription pills. He’d often work out drunk, on vodka and Red Bull. It was a double life, carefully concealed from his parents and Jamie, or else they might cause him grievous bodily harm.
He won’t, however, concede that any of this had anything to do with seeing a man set on fire. “I just wanted to do what everybody else was doing,” he says. “I thought I was missing out.”
Maybe it was drug testing at the Commonwealth Games that started him toward sobriety. Certainly, it had something to do with Jamie, who recalls a night when Michael was out suspiciously late. A friend had spotted him drinking and let Jamie know.
The big brother got in his car, caught Michael at the aforementioned location, and began to unload.
“I gave him a slap. Actually more than a slap,” Jamie says. “I had to do it in front of his friends. To let them know, you can’t f— around.”
Then he drove his kid brother back to Cavendish Street and “beat him up and down the house.”
It wasn’t merely drugs and alcohol, though. There were other perils for kids from the north in the new millennium.
In the spring of 2008, Irish and English teams were set to meet at the Balmoral Hotel in Belfast. Kieran Farrell, a rough and aggressive fighter out of Manchester, seemed perfectly suited for Michael’s style.
“I was confident Michael was going to outbox him,” John says. As it happened, Michael didn’t outbox Farrell. In fact, he didn’t box at all. “He seemed to take punches willingly.”
Between rounds, he told his son he would stop the fight unless Michael began returning fire. He did, for a while, in a listless sort of way. Then he resumed taking punches. Suddenly, it dawned on the horrified father: “Michael wanted to feel pain.”
Afterward, Michael contemplated one of his rare losses and claimed not to care. Still, he wept as he said it. Turned out a friend of his had committed suicide.
“This was how he expressed his sorrow for the passing,” John says. “By letting somebody hit him.”
The way Michael heard, it had to do with drug money: “He didn’t know how to get out of paying these debts. Then, the only way he thought he could was killing himself.”
Chances are, if it weren’t drugs, it would’ve been something else. There have been more deaths by suicide in Northern Ireland since 1998, than there were from all the killings, assassinations and bombings during The Troubles. For all the horrors of that era, says Teresa Conlan, “There was a sense of community, a sense of belonging. And I think now that that’s gone. … There’s this loneliness. Depression sets in. The aftermath of what actually happened. … OK, you’re just supposed to be normal now?”
Michael stopped counting the number of friends he lost by suicide: “About 10…15…maybe more.” Wakes. Cemeteries. Funerals. After a while, he stopped going. He’d already spent enough time in the kingdom of the dead.
At 17, he came home with a tattoo: rosary beads and a crucifix around his neck, clearly intended to be seen. It was a religious marking, but it wasn’t political. It was an affirmation of who he was. And where he was going.
His father, recalling how difficult it was for Catholics in Northern Ireland to get work under the best of circumstances, was inconsolable. “You’ve destroyed your body,” he said. “You’ll never get a job.”
“I don’t need a job,” Michael said. “I’m going to be a fighter.”
So, what saved Michael Conlan?
That beating from his brother Jamie certainly helped. And the one from Kieran Farrell, too.
“Losing helped,” Michael says. “Losing brought me back to reality.”
So did the love of his parents.
The idea that boxing saved him is only partially true. As any fighter knows, no one can really save you but yourself. Outside of that, the best you can do is set a decent example.
Toward that end, Michael recalls the summer of 2012. He couldn’t have known what would lie ahead: the Garden, the bad decision in Rio, an American promoter cutting him a check. He’d just returned from London, 20 years old and despondent. The bronze medal seemed a great victory for everyone except Michael himself. It wasn’t gold, he thought. And then he saw something from the car: a burst of color on the corner of Violet and Cavendish streets, where the British Army barracks used to be.
It’s not a perfect likeness. But that’s not the point. Here was a fighter, but not a soldier. In West Belfast, Michael Conlan’s was the first mural its kind. In a kingdom of the dead, he was alive, full of ambition and possibility.
There’s reason enough to root for Michael Conlan.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
TORONTO — Thirty-two years of frustration and failure, of disappointment and self-loathing, of trauma worn as a badge of honour, burst in magnificent fashion Friday night. The sixth inning of Game 1 of the World Series was an exorcism. Toronto, one of the world’s great metropolises, a city that has loved its baseball team through decades of it not loving back, screamed and bellowed and remembered what championship baseball looked like. And the Toronto Blue Jays, architects of an 11-4 devastation of the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers, did more than just author one of the greatest offensive innings in World Series history.
They showed the world what they were already certain of coming into the 121st World Series: They are no pushovers.
“We’ve had a genuine feeling for a long time that if we just played a certain brand of baseball, that we then will win the game,” Toronto right-hander Chris Bassitt said, and he’s right. In an era of copious strikeouts, the Blue Jays don’t. In a time of shoddy defense, the Blue Jays play clean. And even against a juggernaut like the Dodgers, a team full of late bloomers and second chancers can look like a dominant force.
Nothing personified that like the bottom of the sixth. It was one of the great half-innings in World Series history, a nine-run frenzy filled with everything the Blue Jays’ offense does well. Toronto entered the series with by far the best offense in Major League Baseball this postseason, scoring 6½ runs a game, nearly two more than the Dodgers. The sixth illustrated how.
Starting with a six-pitch walk, adding a single, drawing a hit-by-pitch on the ninth pitch of the at-bat and chasing two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell set the tone. A single scored the first run and gave the Blue Jays a 3-2 advantage. A nine-pitch walk scored another run and a single added one more. And after a tapper to the mound drew the first out on a force play at home, Blue Jays manager John Schneider called on his third pinch hitter of the inning, Addison Barger.
The past week has been hectic for Barger. On Monday night, the Blue Jays ousted the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series to clinch the pennant. Barger said the next morning, he flew to meet his wife at the hospital for the birth of their third child. A day later, he flew back to Toronto for the Blue Jays’ workout — but didn’t have anywhere to stay.
“They set up a place, but I was like, for a few days, I’m not paying for a hotel room,” Barger said. “I know that sounds crazy, but I’m just trying to save a buck.”
So after crashing on the couch of Blue Jays outfielder Myles Straw for a couple of days, Barger spent Friday night with teammate Davis Schneider, sleeping on a pullout couch in the living room of the hotel suite that overlooks Rogers Centre from center field. Barger wasn’t exactly comfortable — Schneider said he heard squeaks from the bed as Barger tried to find peace — but it didn’t impede him from unleashing the biggest hit of his young career.
On a 2-2 slider from reliever Anthony Banda, Barger rocketed a ball over the center-field wall for the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, unleashing chaos inside the domed stadium, where primal screams bounced off the roof and reverberated to create a tsunami of sound.
The Blue Jays’ expertise in this style is nothing new — they won the most games in the AL this season precisely because they’re so adept at grinding at-bats like sandpaper to pitchers’ souls — but to see it on this stage, against a Dodgers team that limited Milwaukee to four runs in the National League Championship Series, hammered home that Toronto will not be just another layover on Los Angeles’ path to back-to-back championships.
The deluge continued. A Vladimir Guerrero Jr. single. Another home run, from catcher Alejandro Kirk, who went 3-for-3 and had drawn a nine-pitch walk in the first, when the Blue Jays made Snell throw 29 pitches and forecast his early exit. All told, Toronto saw 44 pitches, scored nine runs — the third most in a World Series inning and the most since 1968 — and turned a 2-2 nailbiter into an 11-2 stomping.
This is who the Blue Jays are. They’ve got a superstar (Guerrero) and a veteran of playoff wars (George Springer) and a returning All-Star (Bo Bichette, who played for the first time since Sept. 6, at a position, second base, that he hadn’t played since he was in Triple-A six years ago). The rest of their lineup is stocked with players who have bought into Toronto’s philosophy that as long as the Blue Jays don’t beat themselves, they’re good enough to outlast anybody — even a team as talented as the Dodgers.
“If we don’t strike out and we don’t give outs away and we essentially don’t beat ourselves and don’t give up home runs, we’re going to win the game,” Bassitt said. “It’s not about facing any team. It’s just the belief in our team that no matter who we play, this brand can win.”
It’s the kind of brand that has made the city fall in love with the Jays again. Toronto knows baseball heartbreak. After consecutive championships in 1992 and 1993, the Blue Jays fell into a pattern of perpetual mediocrity. Even when they were good in the mid-2010s, they fell short in the ALCS. Their previous three postseason berths ended in wild-card series sweeps. They tried to get Shohei Ohtani in free agency. He went to the Dodgers. They tried to get Juan Soto in free agency. He went to the New York Mets. The Blue Jays, snakebitten for decades, entered 2025 with little hope for a turnaround.
Baseball is funny that way, though. Sometimes, a team coalesces around an idea, and that idea turns into an ethos, and that ethos fuels a revolution. And the Dodgers are so good that all of this joy, this wellspring of emotion and excitement, could be short-lived. Maybe this was the apex of a season that was great, just not great enough.
Or perhaps the 44,353 at Rogers Centre were onto something when, with two outs in the ninth and Ohtani at the plate, a chant started to percolate through the stadium.
“We don’t need you,” Blue Jays fans said to the best player in the world. They didn’t need him this season. They didn’t need him Friday. They didn’t need him going forward.
It was hubristic, but that’s understandable. For the past 32 years, Toronto hasn’t experienced a night like this. The Blue Jays have had moments, sure. The Jose Bautista bat flip. The Edwin Encarnacion home run. All of it, ultimately, for naught. This time, though? With this team of true believers? In a city that’s living a dream?
The rest of the World Series will provide the answer. On this night, however, it was true. The Toronto Blue Jays needed only themselves. And they were plenty.
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Alden Gonzalez
TORONTO — The bases were loaded with none out, Game 1 of the World Series was still tied, and a sold-out Rogers Centre crowd was going berserk when Emmet Sheehan came out of the bullpen in Friday’s sixth inning.
Sheehan is a 25-year-old with fewer than 150 career innings in the major leagues. Before that moment, he had checked into the middle of an inning only once before, while following an opener Sept. 15. What followed — a nine-run barrage that propelled the Toronto Blue Jays to an 11-4 rout in their first World Series game in 32 years — highlighted a glaring weakness the Los Angeles Dodgers carry into this final round:
If their starters don’t pitch deep into games, they’re in trouble.
“Just a tough game,” Dodgers ace Blake Snell said after recording just 15 outs, “but a lot to learn.”
On the eve of this World Series, the Dodgers learned Alex Vesia, one of their best relievers, was dealing with what the team described as a “deeply personal family matter” that would force his removal from the roster. Vesia’s absence essentially whittled down the list of trusted high-leverage relievers to four: Sheehan, Anthony Banda, Blake Treinen and Roki Sasaki. Two of them, Sheehan and Sasaki, are converted starting pitchers.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts hoped to give Sheehan only clean innings in these playoffs. But when Snell’s 100th pitch plunked Daulton Varsho in the upper back to load the bases with the score tied 2-2, it was Sheehan who was called to clean up the mess. When he put the next three hitters on base, it was Banda’s turn. And by the end of Banda’s outing — featuring the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, courtesy of Addison Barger, and a two-run homer by Alejandro Kirk — the Blue Jays had become the first team to score at least nine runs in a World Series inning since the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
“We just didn’t make pitches when we needed to to keep that game close,” Roberts said.
Sheehan allowed an RBI single to Ernie Clement on his second pitch, giving the Blue Jays a 3-2 lead, their first of the game. Then, he lost pinch-hitter Nathan Lukes on a full count, issuing a bases-loaded walk, and left a changeup over the plate that Andres Gimenez lined for another run-scoring single. Banda was called on to face the left-handed-hitting Barger, but Banda’s 2-1 slider caught too much of the plate, resulting in the 413-foot home run that elated Blue Jays fans. Three batters later, Kirk hit Banda’s 1-0 fastball near the middle of the zone 403 feet.
It was the first time Banda had allowed two home runs in an appearance, and it came at the worst time.
“I just didn’t do a very good job of executing,” Banda said.
With Vesia off the roster, Evan Phillips recovering from Tommy John surgery and Michael Kopech no longer considered viable, Banda and Treinen are the only remaining back-end relievers from last year’s bullpen-fueled championship run. The two relievers signed over the offseason to supplement that group, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, struggled throughout the year and were not deemed healthy enough to crack the World Series roster. It’s why Treinen and Banda are so critical, even during up-and-down seasons. It’s why Sheehan, a breakout starting pitcher who has allowed seven runs in 3⅔ innings this postseason, needs to pitch better.
“With the construct of our pen, we’re going to need them,” Roberts said. “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of baseball, but they certainly got to make good pitches.”
The Dodgers’ pitching staff held the Milwaukee Brewers to four runs while sweeping them in the National League Championship Series, during which they deployed only their best pitchers. Sasaki, Vesia and the Dodgers’ four starters — Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani — accounted for all but nine of the Dodgers’ outs in that series, a byproduct of their rotation’s dominance.
In this series, though, they face a Blue Jays lineup that is every bit as patient but far more powerful than Milwaukee’s. Snell, lacking his typical fastball command and struggling to locate his changeup, needed 29 pitches to escape the first inning and ran his pitch count into the triple digits before recording his first out in the sixth. In five-plus innings, he allowed eight hits and issued three walks. When he exited, the bullpen was tasked with recording 12 outs.
Before the relievers recorded just three, the game was essentially over.
“We’re confident,” Snell said of a Dodgers team that entered the World Series with a 9-1 record in these playoffs. “We know how good we are. That was a tough game, and then they came out swinging it and had a better game. It’s four games. You got to win four.”
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