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'The toughest white boy ever to step in the ring with Floyd' doesn't do Dublin's Robert Gorman justice
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again....
BUSINESS
ENTERTAINMENT
'The toughest white boy ever to step in the ring with Floyd' doesn't do Dublin's Robert Gorman justice
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
9 hours ago 57,106 39
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again.
Raymond Moylett and Robert Gorman Gorman (blue) in action with Mayo's Ray Moylette (red) in 2009
Source: Lorraine O'Sullivan/INPHO
Eight years on from his famous spar with an all-time great, ‘Rodge’, now 33, is finally tracked down in…Balbriggan.
His old boxing club, Bracken BC on the town’s Station Street, had said they no longer had a phone number for him, but pointed towards a Facebook pseudonym which ultimately paid dividends.
He commits to a 20-minute chat at 3:10pm on a Thursday, and fields a grand total of three questions – two of which are the result of mishearings on the interviewer’s behalf. But he speaks for just shy of an hour and 10 minutes.
His Vegas escapades amount to just half of the story which he proceeds to unfurl, but nonetheless it’s in Vegas where it begins, and at Ricky Hatton’s 2007 victory over José Luis Castillo to be precise.
An impressionable young Gorman watched ‘The Hitman’ eviscerate the Mexican icon’s liver with a bullet-like left hook, and vowed to return – the next time with gloves and a gumshield in his luggage – and chance his own arm on the Strip. It was an epiphanic moment shared with a close friend sat beside him, and one which transpired to alter the course of his life for both better and worse.
“My own business was coming to an end at the time,” Gorman says. “I was running a carpentry business and I just wasn’t in a good place with it, basically. It was wrecking my head and I wanted out of it. So when I came home after the Hatton fight, I decided to go training full-time, finished with the carpentry, and went on the dole.
“In 2008, I had no reference or nothing, but I told my boxing coach that I felt America was the place, and I felt Vegas was where it all happens, and I knew it was the place to make me a better boxer.
“I just wanted to do it on me own. I was under everyone’s thumb at home, and I wanted to go it alone. I said, ‘Right, I’m going to go over to Vegas for the summer, test the waters, and see why the American fighters are so good.’
“I like Irish boxing but it was just too structured, and I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Being told what to do, where to do it – it was affecting me own boxing. I wasn’t my own boss. I wasn’t allowed to be me own boss.”
And so off he went the following summer, without so much as Irish amateur honours to his name, and little more than a pipedream and a pal to keep him on the straight and narrow in Sin City.
“Rumour had it – or at least I heard it – that Wayne McCullough had a boxing gym over there and was training pros, so my plan was to get over there, work my arse off, and climb the ladder,” Gorman recalls. “With that, I set off for Vegas with one of me best friends Brian Kavanagh – my strength and conditioning coach.
“I was booked into the Hard Rock Hotel for a week, so my plan was to take a week’s holidays over there to get settled in, then get Wayne to train me full-time and really learn the fundamentals of American boxing, and why the pros are so good. This was all in me head – this is what I had set out to do before I got over there. I brought my savings with me – I had saved all of the money I had.
Anyway, we arrive up to Wayne McCullough’s house, and he’s a lovely, genuine skin, but he says, ‘No, I don’t train boxers. They come up to spar from time to time, but I’m not a trainer’. So with this I got a cold shiver and thought, ‘Ah, everything is shattered – now what the **** am I going to do?’ Because I was expecting I’d pop to Wayne, train five times a week, learn from Wayne – a former world champion – yada, yada, yada.
“But with that he says, ‘I can see you’re determined, you obviously want something out of this. You wouldn’t be over here with all your bags if you didn’t.’
“So he rang Bob Arum and recommended me to the Top Rank Gym, because he’s well respected over there – that’s where he did his own training. So he got my foot in the door there, and he actually even recommended that I be put up in an apartment. It was really starting to build up for me. I was delighted.”
Rodge and Wayne Wayne McCullough (left) and Robert Gorman (right)
But the time had come for friend and coach Brian to go home, and Gorman makes no bones about the fact that his departure came close to derailing their entire masterplan.
“I was over there then the second week on my own,” he says, “and I had to get me shopping, bed covers and everything else, and it was just going all wrong. I got a bike and it got a ****ing puncture – everything was just working out arseways for me. So I sat down in my room and I just said to myself, ‘I have to go home, just pack up.’ I left it get the better of me.
“I knew if I rang anyone, and I mean anyone – my mother, my brother – they would have told me to come home; ‘Ah, you’ll be grand. Just get back into carpentry,’ or whatever. I’m still amazed by it but I didn’t ring any of them – I rang Brian, and he literally told me what I needed to hear as well as what I wanted to hear, and it was that if I came home, he’d kick the bollocks out me, and that it would be the worst thing I’ll ever do in me life.
“As soon as he said it to me I thought, ‘This is it. I have to get my **** together. I am making this work, because everybody wants me to fail’ – and it doesn’t matter who it is: to some degree, people want you to fail.
“It all just went up from there. I was set up in the apartment, I was set up down at the Top Rank Gym, I got introduced to everyone and I was me own boss. I was asking anyone – anyone to spar me. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s what I believed would ultimately make me a better boxer.”
To begin with, he sparred former WBC World bantamweight champion McCullough every Saturday; they formed a potent partnership, with the Belfast man eventually assuming the role of trainer in spite of his earlier insistence.
As the weeks went by, Gorman began accruing serious mileage in the ring, trading leather with all-comers and improving exponentially in the process. His all-action style turned heads, as did his ravenous appetite for body shots.
“And then the door opened for Yoriorkis Gamboa,” he says.
At this time, ‘El Ciclon de Guantánamo’ was a juggernaut – the hottest property in pro boxing bar none. An Athens Olympic gold medallist, the super-featherweight sensation had won his first 11 bouts, nine by stoppage, and had long been earmarked as a future pound-for-pound kingpin.
“My confidence was now through the roof,” Gorman explains, “and someone from the Top Rank got onto Wayne and asked if I’d spar Gamboa. Now, this was after three-and-a-half months in Vegas, so my savings of two grand was starting to run well dry at this stage. So I needed this. I needed to get paid for sparring.
“I got the phonecall for Gamboa and they said they’d pay me 80 dollars a round to spar him – eight rounds at a time, five nights a week. I was ****in’ delighted when I heard that, so I was. Over the moon! So I went up to the gym where Hatton trained for Mayweather, because they wanted to show me Gamboa sparring before I got in with him. And he actually minced the four lads he was sparring. And I mean minced them. He just wiped the floor with every one of them – none of them could carry on.
“I was kind of quaking in me boots, but I wanted to know what I was made of. I looked at the lads he was destroying and thought, ‘I’m not these lads. Let’s do this.’
The following week, McCullough picked Gorman up at 2pm and dropped him down to the Thai boxing gym in which the feared Cuban was holed up while preparing for his upcoming bout with the 25-0 Marcos Ramirez.
The Balbriggan banger went toe-to-toe with the Caribbean terremoto, and became imbued by both his performance and the subsequent plaudits.
“The first two minutes, I was rigid,” he admits. “But after that I was elusive and I was loving it; I just needed to let go, and as soon as I let go, as Wayne said, I was flying – Gamboa’s guys loved it.
Now, he can bang, and this was when Gamboa was a serious force to be reckoned with, and that’s not blowing me own trumpet. In 2008, he was destined for the highest of highs; he was mincing lads inside four rounds, six rounds. His record alone was phenomenal. At the time, I didn’t even have an Irish intermediate title to my name, I had nothing by way of recognition.
“But sparring with him, to myself, I became an Irish champion, a world champion – call you what you want – because even his team said to Wayne, ‘If you keep training him, you’ll have a world champion’.
“I said to myself, ‘This ****er is an Olympic gold medalist and on his way to a world title, and I have one in me – I know it for a fact’. I rattled him in his boots as well a few times, just as he did me of course!”....
ENTERTAINMENT
'The toughest white boy ever to step in the ring with Floyd' doesn't do Dublin's Robert Gorman justice
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
9 hours ago 57,106 39
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again.
Raymond Moylett and Robert Gorman Gorman (blue) in action with Mayo's Ray Moylette (red) in 2009
Source: Lorraine O'Sullivan/INPHO
Eight years on from his famous spar with an all-time great, ‘Rodge’, now 33, is finally tracked down in…Balbriggan.
His old boxing club, Bracken BC on the town’s Station Street, had said they no longer had a phone number for him, but pointed towards a Facebook pseudonym which ultimately paid dividends.
He commits to a 20-minute chat at 3:10pm on a Thursday, and fields a grand total of three questions – two of which are the result of mishearings on the interviewer’s behalf. But he speaks for just shy of an hour and 10 minutes.
His Vegas escapades amount to just half of the story which he proceeds to unfurl, but nonetheless it’s in Vegas where it begins, and at Ricky Hatton’s 2007 victory over José Luis Castillo to be precise.
An impressionable young Gorman watched ‘The Hitman’ eviscerate the Mexican icon’s liver with a bullet-like left hook, and vowed to return – the next time with gloves and a gumshield in his luggage – and chance his own arm on the Strip. It was an epiphanic moment shared with a close friend sat beside him, and one which transpired to alter the course of his life for both better and worse.
“My own business was coming to an end at the time,” Gorman says. “I was running a carpentry business and I just wasn’t in a good place with it, basically. It was wrecking my head and I wanted out of it. So when I came home after the Hatton fight, I decided to go training full-time, finished with the carpentry, and went on the dole.
“In 2008, I had no reference or nothing, but I told my boxing coach that I felt America was the place, and I felt Vegas was where it all happens, and I knew it was the place to make me a better boxer.
“I just wanted to do it on me own. I was under everyone’s thumb at home, and I wanted to go it alone. I said, ‘Right, I’m going to go over to Vegas for the summer, test the waters, and see why the American fighters are so good.’
“I like Irish boxing but it was just too structured, and I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Being told what to do, where to do it – it was affecting me own boxing. I wasn’t my own boss. I wasn’t allowed to be me own boss.”
And so off he went the following summer, without so much as Irish amateur honours to his name, and little more than a pipedream and a pal to keep him on the straight and narrow in Sin City.
“Rumour had it – or at least I heard it – that Wayne McCullough had a boxing gym over there and was training pros, so my plan was to get over there, work my arse off, and climb the ladder,” Gorman recalls. “With that, I set off for Vegas with one of me best friends Brian Kavanagh – my strength and conditioning coach.
“I was booked into the Hard Rock Hotel for a week, so my plan was to take a week’s holidays over there to get settled in, then get Wayne to train me full-time and really learn the fundamentals of American boxing, and why the pros are so good. This was all in me head – this is what I had set out to do before I got over there. I brought my savings with me – I had saved all of the money I had.
Anyway, we arrive up to Wayne McCullough’s house, and he’s a lovely, genuine skin, but he says, ‘No, I don’t train boxers. They come up to spar from time to time, but I’m not a trainer’. So with this I got a cold shiver and thought, ‘Ah, everything is shattered – now what the **** am I going to do?’ Because I was expecting I’d pop to Wayne, train five times a week, learn from Wayne – a former world champion – yada, yada, yada.
“But with that he says, ‘I can see you’re determined, you obviously want something out of this. You wouldn’t be over here with all your bags if you didn’t.’
“So he rang Bob Arum and recommended me to the Top Rank Gym, because he’s well respected over there – that’s where he did his own training. So he got my foot in the door there, and he actually even recommended that I be put up in an apartment. It was really starting to build up for me. I was delighted.”
Rodge and Wayne Wayne McCullough (left) and Robert Gorman (right)
But the time had come for friend and coach Brian to go home, and Gorman makes no bones about the fact that his departure came close to derailing their entire masterplan.
“I was over there then the second week on my own,” he says, “and I had to get me shopping, bed covers and everything else, and it was just going all wrong. I got a bike and it got a ****ing puncture – everything was just working out arseways for me. So I sat down in my room and I just said to myself, ‘I have to go home, just pack up.’ I left it get the better of me.
“I knew if I rang anyone, and I mean anyone – my mother, my brother – they would have told me to come home; ‘Ah, you’ll be grand. Just get back into carpentry,’ or whatever. I’m still amazed by it but I didn’t ring any of them – I rang Brian, and he literally told me what I needed to hear as well as what I wanted to hear, and it was that if I came home, he’d kick the bollocks out me, and that it would be the worst thing I’ll ever do in me life.
“As soon as he said it to me I thought, ‘This is it. I have to get my **** together. I am making this work, because everybody wants me to fail’ – and it doesn’t matter who it is: to some degree, people want you to fail.
“It all just went up from there. I was set up in the apartment, I was set up down at the Top Rank Gym, I got introduced to everyone and I was me own boss. I was asking anyone – anyone to spar me. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s what I believed would ultimately make me a better boxer.”
To begin with, he sparred former WBC World bantamweight champion McCullough every Saturday; they formed a potent partnership, with the Belfast man eventually assuming the role of trainer in spite of his earlier insistence.
As the weeks went by, Gorman began accruing serious mileage in the ring, trading leather with all-comers and improving exponentially in the process. His all-action style turned heads, as did his ravenous appetite for body shots.
“And then the door opened for Yoriorkis Gamboa,” he says.
At this time, ‘El Ciclon de Guantánamo’ was a juggernaut – the hottest property in pro boxing bar none. An Athens Olympic gold medallist, the super-featherweight sensation had won his first 11 bouts, nine by stoppage, and had long been earmarked as a future pound-for-pound kingpin.
“My confidence was now through the roof,” Gorman explains, “and someone from the Top Rank got onto Wayne and asked if I’d spar Gamboa. Now, this was after three-and-a-half months in Vegas, so my savings of two grand was starting to run well dry at this stage. So I needed this. I needed to get paid for sparring.
“I got the phonecall for Gamboa and they said they’d pay me 80 dollars a round to spar him – eight rounds at a time, five nights a week. I was ****in’ delighted when I heard that, so I was. Over the moon! So I went up to the gym where Hatton trained for Mayweather, because they wanted to show me Gamboa sparring before I got in with him. And he actually minced the four lads he was sparring. And I mean minced them. He just wiped the floor with every one of them – none of them could carry on.
“I was kind of quaking in me boots, but I wanted to know what I was made of. I looked at the lads he was destroying and thought, ‘I’m not these lads. Let’s do this.’
The following week, McCullough picked Gorman up at 2pm and dropped him down to the Thai boxing gym in which the feared Cuban was holed up while preparing for his upcoming bout with the 25-0 Marcos Ramirez.
The Balbriggan banger went toe-to-toe with the Caribbean terremoto, and became imbued by both his performance and the subsequent plaudits.
“The first two minutes, I was rigid,” he admits. “But after that I was elusive and I was loving it; I just needed to let go, and as soon as I let go, as Wayne said, I was flying – Gamboa’s guys loved it.
Now, he can bang, and this was when Gamboa was a serious force to be reckoned with, and that’s not blowing me own trumpet. In 2008, he was destined for the highest of highs; he was mincing lads inside four rounds, six rounds. His record alone was phenomenal. At the time, I didn’t even have an Irish intermediate title to my name, I had nothing by way of recognition.
“But sparring with him, to myself, I became an Irish champion, a world champion – call you what you want – because even his team said to Wayne, ‘If you keep training him, you’ll have a world champion’.
“I said to myself, ‘This ****er is an Olympic gold medalist and on his way to a world title, and I have one in me – I know it for a fact’. I rattled him in his boots as well a few times, just as he did me of course!”
rodgey 2 Gorman and 'El Ciclon de Guantánamo', Yuriorkis Gamboa
But with the Irish Intermediate Championships beckoning in December, the time had come for Gorman to check out and head home to acquire the recognition he craved.
He won the Intermediates but didn’t enjoy them, explaining how he “didn’t bring America back home” with him – instead carrying the pressure of having already made somewhat of a name for himself back across the Atlantic.
“Everyone was hearing about me back home at this stage. I was over in America training with Wayne McCullough so that was a big thing, and I let that get the better of me.
“I didn’t win it with style, the way I wanted to win it, the way I’d been sparring in America. I brought fighting instead of the boxing I had learned. It was the old me, but just that tiny bit better, and just enough to win the Intermediates in a pure dinger of a final. I actually got Boxer of the Year from the IABA a few months later and it was mainly down to that final.”
And so it was back to Vegas in the summer of 2009 for another jousting J1, but this time as an Irish Intermediate champion, still evincing a confidence earned in some of the world boxing’s most perilous bullpens a year prior.
As it so happened, he’d made quite the splash in 2008, and before he jetted back for the second leg of his American odyssey, he received the news that would culminate in his becoming a cult hero within Irish boxing, and a legend on his native streets.
“Now, I knew Mayweather was in preparation for [Juan Manuel] Marquez, and I knew I’d built up a good reputation at the Top Rank Gym. But if it wasn’t for Rafael Garcia [son of the legendary cut-man by the same name], who would train me instead of Wayne when I was in the Top Rank, it would never have happened. He said to his Da, who was Mayweather’s cut-man for years, ‘Tell Floyd we’ve got this Irish kid who’s similar to Marquez.’
Eventually he tells me, ‘Right, we’ve got you on the team for Mayweather to get ready for Marquez’, which was just brilliant for me. I was on top of the world, because I was coming on in spades, and I had the World Championships qualifiers coming up in September.
“I went back over, anyway – budget set up, sparring with Wayne set up – everything had been set up since the year before. I was set to get $100 per round for sparring Mayweather, basically; I didn’t hear how many minutes, how many rounds, how many days.
“So me and Rafael went down the first day, doing our own pad work, but Mayweather didn’t come. Second day, Mayweather didn’t come. And that was the thing with his training – he does what he wants. He might come in and just decide not to spar, and hit the bags for half an hour instead like he does in his videos, and then leave.
“But he had Mexicans and Latinos in there, he had all the hard-as-nails lads. Even if they didn’t have great boxing records, they’d stay in there with him. But he could bounce off them as well, because they weren’t all that good either. He’d play with them, basically, and use them as a punchbag. But they didn’t give a ****. These were all lads on little or nothing. Pennies. They just wanted to feed their families.
“Anyway, as the days went on, Floyd basically hears that there’s this tough Irish white boy in the gym, and so he decided to leave me ’til last, which he did.”
Source: Rappler/YouTube
Gorman’s stint with the returning champ arrived a couple of days into camp, but before a punch was exchanged he was force-fed a taste of Mayweather’s infamous attention to detail; even in the gym, as it transpires, the undefeated stylist has a boderline sociopathic predilection for controlling his environment.
Eight years before Conor McGregor endured what have become typical stipulations and sticking points in order to secure his own Red Panty Night, his fellow Dub found himself wrapped in Mayweather’s red tape.
“Now, that man might not be as strong as an ox but he’s as fit as a horse, no ifs, buts or maybes about it,” Gorman says.
“He did four three-minute rounds with a Mexican, and then with a Spanish guy, and then it was my turn. And it was just out of the blue when I got called, because he was just so un-****ing-predictable. And I’m a man of routine, so if I’m sparring at two o’clock, I want to know I’m sparring at two o’clock. He does what he wants, when he wants, but I couldn’t let him get to me.
“So I just wanted to get my sparring done, get the feather in me cap, and that was it. And basically… Oh, yeah, it wasn’t even me own headguard I was wearing! I wasn’t even allowed wear my own gloves. It was so un-****in’-comfortable, I’m not going to lie to ya, because it was all his ****in’ rules, his equipment.
“He’s an arsehole, actually,” the Dubliner continues.
“I wasn’t allowed to go up and talk to him, or even talk about gloves: ‘should I wear 16oz?’ or whatever. It was just, ‘Here are these gloves, you’re wearing them, and that’s that’.
“And the headguard was a piece of **** as well.”
Concessions to ‘Money’s pedantics made in a heartbeat, it was finally Gorman’s turn to test himself against the world’s best.
“I’m on my way into the ring, and Rafael says, ‘Just enjoy it, just get a feel for it’. And it was literally a case of, ‘All right, Floyd’s ready, get in, get in, get in.’ That actually worked to my advantage, because I hadn’t got a half an hour to think about the fact that I was about to box the best fighter on the planet. It was just a case of, ‘get in, spar Mayweather, get out’; no anticipation, no build-up, just get the **** in and do what you do.
“So I step in with him and we start sparring. And out of the blue, he just starts talking to me!
“‘You white thrash piece of ****, you ain’t got **** on me! You’re not gonna last!’
And I wasn’t used to this – I’d never had a person talking to me in the boxing ring before. I didn’t know what was going on! So I just started talking back: ‘Yeah, world champion me hole. Is that all you got? Come on you little *****!’
“And then I started having fun. I was loving it! Because I let go; I entirely let go because I was talking back, chatting away to him: ‘You’re no champion.’
“So I get back to my corner and Rafael tells me we were after doing a six-minute ****in’ round! Then it turns out we were only getting a 30-second break [as opposed to the standard minute], and we end up doing four six-minute rounds. So you’re talking double rounds with Floyd Mayweather. But as I learned, it depends what humour he’s in.”
It was far from plain sailing, of course.
“Trust me, being in that position for six minutes with Floyd Mayweather was to go through hell. At one stage when I went back to the corner and got a drink, I turned around and he was back in my face, back talking to me. So back I went yapping at him, and it just rolled on and rolled on
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again....
BUSINESS
ENTERTAINMENT
'The toughest white boy ever to step in the ring with Floyd' doesn't do Dublin's Robert Gorman justice
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
9 hours ago 57,106 39
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again.
Raymond Moylett and Robert Gorman Gorman (blue) in action with Mayo's Ray Moylette (red) in 2009
Source: Lorraine O'Sullivan/INPHO
Eight years on from his famous spar with an all-time great, ‘Rodge’, now 33, is finally tracked down in…Balbriggan.
His old boxing club, Bracken BC on the town’s Station Street, had said they no longer had a phone number for him, but pointed towards a Facebook pseudonym which ultimately paid dividends.
He commits to a 20-minute chat at 3:10pm on a Thursday, and fields a grand total of three questions – two of which are the result of mishearings on the interviewer’s behalf. But he speaks for just shy of an hour and 10 minutes.
His Vegas escapades amount to just half of the story which he proceeds to unfurl, but nonetheless it’s in Vegas where it begins, and at Ricky Hatton’s 2007 victory over José Luis Castillo to be precise.
An impressionable young Gorman watched ‘The Hitman’ eviscerate the Mexican icon’s liver with a bullet-like left hook, and vowed to return – the next time with gloves and a gumshield in his luggage – and chance his own arm on the Strip. It was an epiphanic moment shared with a close friend sat beside him, and one which transpired to alter the course of his life for both better and worse.
“My own business was coming to an end at the time,” Gorman says. “I was running a carpentry business and I just wasn’t in a good place with it, basically. It was wrecking my head and I wanted out of it. So when I came home after the Hatton fight, I decided to go training full-time, finished with the carpentry, and went on the dole.
“In 2008, I had no reference or nothing, but I told my boxing coach that I felt America was the place, and I felt Vegas was where it all happens, and I knew it was the place to make me a better boxer.
“I just wanted to do it on me own. I was under everyone’s thumb at home, and I wanted to go it alone. I said, ‘Right, I’m going to go over to Vegas for the summer, test the waters, and see why the American fighters are so good.’
“I like Irish boxing but it was just too structured, and I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Being told what to do, where to do it – it was affecting me own boxing. I wasn’t my own boss. I wasn’t allowed to be me own boss.”
And so off he went the following summer, without so much as Irish amateur honours to his name, and little more than a pipedream and a pal to keep him on the straight and narrow in Sin City.
“Rumour had it – or at least I heard it – that Wayne McCullough had a boxing gym over there and was training pros, so my plan was to get over there, work my arse off, and climb the ladder,” Gorman recalls. “With that, I set off for Vegas with one of me best friends Brian Kavanagh – my strength and conditioning coach.
“I was booked into the Hard Rock Hotel for a week, so my plan was to take a week’s holidays over there to get settled in, then get Wayne to train me full-time and really learn the fundamentals of American boxing, and why the pros are so good. This was all in me head – this is what I had set out to do before I got over there. I brought my savings with me – I had saved all of the money I had.
Anyway, we arrive up to Wayne McCullough’s house, and he’s a lovely, genuine skin, but he says, ‘No, I don’t train boxers. They come up to spar from time to time, but I’m not a trainer’. So with this I got a cold shiver and thought, ‘Ah, everything is shattered – now what the **** am I going to do?’ Because I was expecting I’d pop to Wayne, train five times a week, learn from Wayne – a former world champion – yada, yada, yada.
“But with that he says, ‘I can see you’re determined, you obviously want something out of this. You wouldn’t be over here with all your bags if you didn’t.’
“So he rang Bob Arum and recommended me to the Top Rank Gym, because he’s well respected over there – that’s where he did his own training. So he got my foot in the door there, and he actually even recommended that I be put up in an apartment. It was really starting to build up for me. I was delighted.”
Rodge and Wayne Wayne McCullough (left) and Robert Gorman (right)
But the time had come for friend and coach Brian to go home, and Gorman makes no bones about the fact that his departure came close to derailing their entire masterplan.
“I was over there then the second week on my own,” he says, “and I had to get me shopping, bed covers and everything else, and it was just going all wrong. I got a bike and it got a ****ing puncture – everything was just working out arseways for me. So I sat down in my room and I just said to myself, ‘I have to go home, just pack up.’ I left it get the better of me.
“I knew if I rang anyone, and I mean anyone – my mother, my brother – they would have told me to come home; ‘Ah, you’ll be grand. Just get back into carpentry,’ or whatever. I’m still amazed by it but I didn’t ring any of them – I rang Brian, and he literally told me what I needed to hear as well as what I wanted to hear, and it was that if I came home, he’d kick the bollocks out me, and that it would be the worst thing I’ll ever do in me life.
“As soon as he said it to me I thought, ‘This is it. I have to get my **** together. I am making this work, because everybody wants me to fail’ – and it doesn’t matter who it is: to some degree, people want you to fail.
“It all just went up from there. I was set up in the apartment, I was set up down at the Top Rank Gym, I got introduced to everyone and I was me own boss. I was asking anyone – anyone to spar me. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s what I believed would ultimately make me a better boxer.”
To begin with, he sparred former WBC World bantamweight champion McCullough every Saturday; they formed a potent partnership, with the Belfast man eventually assuming the role of trainer in spite of his earlier insistence.
As the weeks went by, Gorman began accruing serious mileage in the ring, trading leather with all-comers and improving exponentially in the process. His all-action style turned heads, as did his ravenous appetite for body shots.
“And then the door opened for Yoriorkis Gamboa,” he says.
At this time, ‘El Ciclon de Guantánamo’ was a juggernaut – the hottest property in pro boxing bar none. An Athens Olympic gold medallist, the super-featherweight sensation had won his first 11 bouts, nine by stoppage, and had long been earmarked as a future pound-for-pound kingpin.
“My confidence was now through the roof,” Gorman explains, “and someone from the Top Rank got onto Wayne and asked if I’d spar Gamboa. Now, this was after three-and-a-half months in Vegas, so my savings of two grand was starting to run well dry at this stage. So I needed this. I needed to get paid for sparring.
“I got the phonecall for Gamboa and they said they’d pay me 80 dollars a round to spar him – eight rounds at a time, five nights a week. I was ****in’ delighted when I heard that, so I was. Over the moon! So I went up to the gym where Hatton trained for Mayweather, because they wanted to show me Gamboa sparring before I got in with him. And he actually minced the four lads he was sparring. And I mean minced them. He just wiped the floor with every one of them – none of them could carry on.
“I was kind of quaking in me boots, but I wanted to know what I was made of. I looked at the lads he was destroying and thought, ‘I’m not these lads. Let’s do this.’
The following week, McCullough picked Gorman up at 2pm and dropped him down to the Thai boxing gym in which the feared Cuban was holed up while preparing for his upcoming bout with the 25-0 Marcos Ramirez.
The Balbriggan banger went toe-to-toe with the Caribbean terremoto, and became imbued by both his performance and the subsequent plaudits.
“The first two minutes, I was rigid,” he admits. “But after that I was elusive and I was loving it; I just needed to let go, and as soon as I let go, as Wayne said, I was flying – Gamboa’s guys loved it.
Now, he can bang, and this was when Gamboa was a serious force to be reckoned with, and that’s not blowing me own trumpet. In 2008, he was destined for the highest of highs; he was mincing lads inside four rounds, six rounds. His record alone was phenomenal. At the time, I didn’t even have an Irish intermediate title to my name, I had nothing by way of recognition.
“But sparring with him, to myself, I became an Irish champion, a world champion – call you what you want – because even his team said to Wayne, ‘If you keep training him, you’ll have a world champion’.
“I said to myself, ‘This ****er is an Olympic gold medalist and on his way to a world title, and I have one in me – I know it for a fact’. I rattled him in his boots as well a few times, just as he did me of course!”....
ENTERTAINMENT
'The toughest white boy ever to step in the ring with Floyd' doesn't do Dublin's Robert Gorman justice
Six months after ‘injuring’ Mayweather in Vegas, Gorman found himself on a Balbriggan beach contemplating suicide.
9 hours ago 57,106 39
‘WHATEVER BECAME OF Robert Gorman?’
It’s a question doing the rounds in Irish boxing circles of late, and with good reason.
In the summer of 2009, the Balbriggan brawler appeared to have the boxing world at his feet. An Irish amateur standout sharpening his tools on the unforgiving Las Vegas gym circuit, he was drafted in to spar the pound-for-pound finest fighter on the planet, Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather, who was set to return to the ring two years after knocking out Ricky Hatton and retiring undefeated.
News of their throwdown immediately rendered Gorman a local superstar back home, but the Americans would stand up and take notice soon after; Mayweather’s comeback bout versus Juan Manuel Marquez was postponed due to an injury sustained by the former, and Gorman, as the last man to spar the world’s best, was suspected of having delivered the body blow – quite literally.
His name adorned every boxing forum on either side of the Atlantic; ‘Robert Gorman – the little-known Irish amateur who broke Floyd’s ribs’.
But after a solitary amateur fight on his return home to Ireland, Gorman – the iron-pawed, body-breaking paladin – was never heard from again.
Raymond Moylett and Robert Gorman Gorman (blue) in action with Mayo's Ray Moylette (red) in 2009
Source: Lorraine O'Sullivan/INPHO
Eight years on from his famous spar with an all-time great, ‘Rodge’, now 33, is finally tracked down in…Balbriggan.
His old boxing club, Bracken BC on the town’s Station Street, had said they no longer had a phone number for him, but pointed towards a Facebook pseudonym which ultimately paid dividends.
He commits to a 20-minute chat at 3:10pm on a Thursday, and fields a grand total of three questions – two of which are the result of mishearings on the interviewer’s behalf. But he speaks for just shy of an hour and 10 minutes.
His Vegas escapades amount to just half of the story which he proceeds to unfurl, but nonetheless it’s in Vegas where it begins, and at Ricky Hatton’s 2007 victory over José Luis Castillo to be precise.
An impressionable young Gorman watched ‘The Hitman’ eviscerate the Mexican icon’s liver with a bullet-like left hook, and vowed to return – the next time with gloves and a gumshield in his luggage – and chance his own arm on the Strip. It was an epiphanic moment shared with a close friend sat beside him, and one which transpired to alter the course of his life for both better and worse.
“My own business was coming to an end at the time,” Gorman says. “I was running a carpentry business and I just wasn’t in a good place with it, basically. It was wrecking my head and I wanted out of it. So when I came home after the Hatton fight, I decided to go training full-time, finished with the carpentry, and went on the dole.
“In 2008, I had no reference or nothing, but I told my boxing coach that I felt America was the place, and I felt Vegas was where it all happens, and I knew it was the place to make me a better boxer.
“I just wanted to do it on me own. I was under everyone’s thumb at home, and I wanted to go it alone. I said, ‘Right, I’m going to go over to Vegas for the summer, test the waters, and see why the American fighters are so good.’
“I like Irish boxing but it was just too structured, and I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. Being told what to do, where to do it – it was affecting me own boxing. I wasn’t my own boss. I wasn’t allowed to be me own boss.”
And so off he went the following summer, without so much as Irish amateur honours to his name, and little more than a pipedream and a pal to keep him on the straight and narrow in Sin City.
“Rumour had it – or at least I heard it – that Wayne McCullough had a boxing gym over there and was training pros, so my plan was to get over there, work my arse off, and climb the ladder,” Gorman recalls. “With that, I set off for Vegas with one of me best friends Brian Kavanagh – my strength and conditioning coach.
“I was booked into the Hard Rock Hotel for a week, so my plan was to take a week’s holidays over there to get settled in, then get Wayne to train me full-time and really learn the fundamentals of American boxing, and why the pros are so good. This was all in me head – this is what I had set out to do before I got over there. I brought my savings with me – I had saved all of the money I had.
Anyway, we arrive up to Wayne McCullough’s house, and he’s a lovely, genuine skin, but he says, ‘No, I don’t train boxers. They come up to spar from time to time, but I’m not a trainer’. So with this I got a cold shiver and thought, ‘Ah, everything is shattered – now what the **** am I going to do?’ Because I was expecting I’d pop to Wayne, train five times a week, learn from Wayne – a former world champion – yada, yada, yada.
“But with that he says, ‘I can see you’re determined, you obviously want something out of this. You wouldn’t be over here with all your bags if you didn’t.’
“So he rang Bob Arum and recommended me to the Top Rank Gym, because he’s well respected over there – that’s where he did his own training. So he got my foot in the door there, and he actually even recommended that I be put up in an apartment. It was really starting to build up for me. I was delighted.”
Rodge and Wayne Wayne McCullough (left) and Robert Gorman (right)
But the time had come for friend and coach Brian to go home, and Gorman makes no bones about the fact that his departure came close to derailing their entire masterplan.
“I was over there then the second week on my own,” he says, “and I had to get me shopping, bed covers and everything else, and it was just going all wrong. I got a bike and it got a ****ing puncture – everything was just working out arseways for me. So I sat down in my room and I just said to myself, ‘I have to go home, just pack up.’ I left it get the better of me.
“I knew if I rang anyone, and I mean anyone – my mother, my brother – they would have told me to come home; ‘Ah, you’ll be grand. Just get back into carpentry,’ or whatever. I’m still amazed by it but I didn’t ring any of them – I rang Brian, and he literally told me what I needed to hear as well as what I wanted to hear, and it was that if I came home, he’d kick the bollocks out me, and that it would be the worst thing I’ll ever do in me life.
“As soon as he said it to me I thought, ‘This is it. I have to get my **** together. I am making this work, because everybody wants me to fail’ – and it doesn’t matter who it is: to some degree, people want you to fail.
“It all just went up from there. I was set up in the apartment, I was set up down at the Top Rank Gym, I got introduced to everyone and I was me own boss. I was asking anyone – anyone to spar me. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s what I believed would ultimately make me a better boxer.”
To begin with, he sparred former WBC World bantamweight champion McCullough every Saturday; they formed a potent partnership, with the Belfast man eventually assuming the role of trainer in spite of his earlier insistence.
As the weeks went by, Gorman began accruing serious mileage in the ring, trading leather with all-comers and improving exponentially in the process. His all-action style turned heads, as did his ravenous appetite for body shots.
“And then the door opened for Yoriorkis Gamboa,” he says.
At this time, ‘El Ciclon de Guantánamo’ was a juggernaut – the hottest property in pro boxing bar none. An Athens Olympic gold medallist, the super-featherweight sensation had won his first 11 bouts, nine by stoppage, and had long been earmarked as a future pound-for-pound kingpin.
“My confidence was now through the roof,” Gorman explains, “and someone from the Top Rank got onto Wayne and asked if I’d spar Gamboa. Now, this was after three-and-a-half months in Vegas, so my savings of two grand was starting to run well dry at this stage. So I needed this. I needed to get paid for sparring.
“I got the phonecall for Gamboa and they said they’d pay me 80 dollars a round to spar him – eight rounds at a time, five nights a week. I was ****in’ delighted when I heard that, so I was. Over the moon! So I went up to the gym where Hatton trained for Mayweather, because they wanted to show me Gamboa sparring before I got in with him. And he actually minced the four lads he was sparring. And I mean minced them. He just wiped the floor with every one of them – none of them could carry on.
“I was kind of quaking in me boots, but I wanted to know what I was made of. I looked at the lads he was destroying and thought, ‘I’m not these lads. Let’s do this.’
The following week, McCullough picked Gorman up at 2pm and dropped him down to the Thai boxing gym in which the feared Cuban was holed up while preparing for his upcoming bout with the 25-0 Marcos Ramirez.
The Balbriggan banger went toe-to-toe with the Caribbean terremoto, and became imbued by both his performance and the subsequent plaudits.
“The first two minutes, I was rigid,” he admits. “But after that I was elusive and I was loving it; I just needed to let go, and as soon as I let go, as Wayne said, I was flying – Gamboa’s guys loved it.
Now, he can bang, and this was when Gamboa was a serious force to be reckoned with, and that’s not blowing me own trumpet. In 2008, he was destined for the highest of highs; he was mincing lads inside four rounds, six rounds. His record alone was phenomenal. At the time, I didn’t even have an Irish intermediate title to my name, I had nothing by way of recognition.
“But sparring with him, to myself, I became an Irish champion, a world champion – call you what you want – because even his team said to Wayne, ‘If you keep training him, you’ll have a world champion’.
“I said to myself, ‘This ****er is an Olympic gold medalist and on his way to a world title, and I have one in me – I know it for a fact’. I rattled him in his boots as well a few times, just as he did me of course!”
rodgey 2 Gorman and 'El Ciclon de Guantánamo', Yuriorkis Gamboa
But with the Irish Intermediate Championships beckoning in December, the time had come for Gorman to check out and head home to acquire the recognition he craved.
He won the Intermediates but didn’t enjoy them, explaining how he “didn’t bring America back home” with him – instead carrying the pressure of having already made somewhat of a name for himself back across the Atlantic.
“Everyone was hearing about me back home at this stage. I was over in America training with Wayne McCullough so that was a big thing, and I let that get the better of me.
“I didn’t win it with style, the way I wanted to win it, the way I’d been sparring in America. I brought fighting instead of the boxing I had learned. It was the old me, but just that tiny bit better, and just enough to win the Intermediates in a pure dinger of a final. I actually got Boxer of the Year from the IABA a few months later and it was mainly down to that final.”
And so it was back to Vegas in the summer of 2009 for another jousting J1, but this time as an Irish Intermediate champion, still evincing a confidence earned in some of the world boxing’s most perilous bullpens a year prior.
As it so happened, he’d made quite the splash in 2008, and before he jetted back for the second leg of his American odyssey, he received the news that would culminate in his becoming a cult hero within Irish boxing, and a legend on his native streets.
“Now, I knew Mayweather was in preparation for [Juan Manuel] Marquez, and I knew I’d built up a good reputation at the Top Rank Gym. But if it wasn’t for Rafael Garcia [son of the legendary cut-man by the same name], who would train me instead of Wayne when I was in the Top Rank, it would never have happened. He said to his Da, who was Mayweather’s cut-man for years, ‘Tell Floyd we’ve got this Irish kid who’s similar to Marquez.’
Eventually he tells me, ‘Right, we’ve got you on the team for Mayweather to get ready for Marquez’, which was just brilliant for me. I was on top of the world, because I was coming on in spades, and I had the World Championships qualifiers coming up in September.
“I went back over, anyway – budget set up, sparring with Wayne set up – everything had been set up since the year before. I was set to get $100 per round for sparring Mayweather, basically; I didn’t hear how many minutes, how many rounds, how many days.
“So me and Rafael went down the first day, doing our own pad work, but Mayweather didn’t come. Second day, Mayweather didn’t come. And that was the thing with his training – he does what he wants. He might come in and just decide not to spar, and hit the bags for half an hour instead like he does in his videos, and then leave.
“But he had Mexicans and Latinos in there, he had all the hard-as-nails lads. Even if they didn’t have great boxing records, they’d stay in there with him. But he could bounce off them as well, because they weren’t all that good either. He’d play with them, basically, and use them as a punchbag. But they didn’t give a ****. These were all lads on little or nothing. Pennies. They just wanted to feed their families.
“Anyway, as the days went on, Floyd basically hears that there’s this tough Irish white boy in the gym, and so he decided to leave me ’til last, which he did.”
Source: Rappler/YouTube
Gorman’s stint with the returning champ arrived a couple of days into camp, but before a punch was exchanged he was force-fed a taste of Mayweather’s infamous attention to detail; even in the gym, as it transpires, the undefeated stylist has a boderline sociopathic predilection for controlling his environment.
Eight years before Conor McGregor endured what have become typical stipulations and sticking points in order to secure his own Red Panty Night, his fellow Dub found himself wrapped in Mayweather’s red tape.
“Now, that man might not be as strong as an ox but he’s as fit as a horse, no ifs, buts or maybes about it,” Gorman says.
“He did four three-minute rounds with a Mexican, and then with a Spanish guy, and then it was my turn. And it was just out of the blue when I got called, because he was just so un-****ing-predictable. And I’m a man of routine, so if I’m sparring at two o’clock, I want to know I’m sparring at two o’clock. He does what he wants, when he wants, but I couldn’t let him get to me.
“So I just wanted to get my sparring done, get the feather in me cap, and that was it. And basically… Oh, yeah, it wasn’t even me own headguard I was wearing! I wasn’t even allowed wear my own gloves. It was so un-****in’-comfortable, I’m not going to lie to ya, because it was all his ****in’ rules, his equipment.
“He’s an arsehole, actually,” the Dubliner continues.
“I wasn’t allowed to go up and talk to him, or even talk about gloves: ‘should I wear 16oz?’ or whatever. It was just, ‘Here are these gloves, you’re wearing them, and that’s that’.
“And the headguard was a piece of **** as well.”
Concessions to ‘Money’s pedantics made in a heartbeat, it was finally Gorman’s turn to test himself against the world’s best.
“I’m on my way into the ring, and Rafael says, ‘Just enjoy it, just get a feel for it’. And it was literally a case of, ‘All right, Floyd’s ready, get in, get in, get in.’ That actually worked to my advantage, because I hadn’t got a half an hour to think about the fact that I was about to box the best fighter on the planet. It was just a case of, ‘get in, spar Mayweather, get out’; no anticipation, no build-up, just get the **** in and do what you do.
“So I step in with him and we start sparring. And out of the blue, he just starts talking to me!
“‘You white thrash piece of ****, you ain’t got **** on me! You’re not gonna last!’
And I wasn’t used to this – I’d never had a person talking to me in the boxing ring before. I didn’t know what was going on! So I just started talking back: ‘Yeah, world champion me hole. Is that all you got? Come on you little *****!’
“And then I started having fun. I was loving it! Because I let go; I entirely let go because I was talking back, chatting away to him: ‘You’re no champion.’
“So I get back to my corner and Rafael tells me we were after doing a six-minute ****in’ round! Then it turns out we were only getting a 30-second break [as opposed to the standard minute], and we end up doing four six-minute rounds. So you’re talking double rounds with Floyd Mayweather. But as I learned, it depends what humour he’s in.”
It was far from plain sailing, of course.
“Trust me, being in that position for six minutes with Floyd Mayweather was to go through hell. At one stage when I went back to the corner and got a drink, I turned around and he was back in my face, back talking to me. So back I went yapping at him, and it just rolled on and rolled on
Read the rest at
http://www.the42.ie/robert-gorman-35...urce=shortlink
it didn't seem that long when i was copying and pasting it
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