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Emmet Brennan: Defying the Odds at 33
Emmet Brennan takes on Kevin Cronin on Friday, September 20, at Dublin's 3Arena
Emmet Brennan was pretty excited. In just his third professional fight, the 2020 Irish Olympian had landed a fight in New York City, and he couldn’t wait to get into the ring with Devaun Lee.
How excited? He woke up on fight day on March 7 and his mouthpiece was nowhere to be found. Now, if you know how fighters operate, their mouthpieces, these aren’t picked up at the local sporting goods store and thrown into battle on fight night. These are molded to fit the mouth in order to provide the best protection.
Now Brennan had a problem. He went downtown and grabbed a couple of self-molding mouthpieces that obviously didn’t give an optimum fit, but he went into battle anyway, winning a hard-fought eight-round majority decision.
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Consider that a lesson learned.
“Sometimes you need something like that to happen to realize that, look, I want to go on and do bigger and better things in my career. I’ve got to get my house in order now. So it was a great learning curve that stuff like that happened to me in the last fight because my preparation for this fight has been spot on. There's no chance of anything like that happening this time around.”
Sometimes it’s the little things that can throw you off your game, but when Brennan makes his second appearance at Dublin’s 3Arena on Friday to face Kevin Cronin for the Celtic super middleweight title, he’s expecting to be firing on all cylinders in front of his hometown fans. And he needs to, because the 33-year-old plans on being out the door by the time he’s 37, making every fight an important one.
“It's no secret and it's not something to hide,” said Brennan. “I'm not exactly young for a professional boxer. I'm 33. I've done things a lot later in life, but I'm also fresh. I'm not like a 33-year-old that's out there and been in sparring wars for the last 10 years and out there taking some heavy shots. I'm still young, I'm still feeling fresh, but, at the same time, the clock is slightly against me. So I’ve got to make up for that lost time and that’s what I've done. I'm fighting for the second time for the Celtic title in my first four fights. Devaun Lee, who I fought in New York, nobody really fights him in the third fight. If you look at his box.rec, most people are fighting him around 10, 11, 12 fights.
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So, although next week I will only be 4-0, I will have probably the maturity and the professional age of someone that maybe is 10-0 or 11-0 because of the fights that I've been in. So I'm definitely going to look to be slightly fast tracked, but, at the same time, you still got to be managed well because professional boxing is a business and things got to be done right. Sometimes if you go too quick, you'll just get found out and you might get beaten by someone that just has a little bit more experience than you.”
Luckily, Brennan has former world middleweight champion Darren Barker in his corner, and being a former Olympian adds to Brennan’s marketability, making him a prospect to watch, and one who can sell tickets, as he sold 150 tickets in New York City on just three weeks’ notice. But then again, that spotlight also makes him a target, because a win over a high-profile up and comer like him makes every opponent fight harder.
“What I've noticed is when you're fighting these people that might be a typical journeyman, because you're an Olympian, you have a hit in your head. They're going to fight that five percent or 10 percent better because they want to beat an Olympian. You look at amateur boxing, the Olympics is the pinnacle of the sport. So even if you’re a journeyman, the fella that fought in my first fight (Angel Emilov) had maybe 50 losses and 11 wins. So he didn't have a great record, but he went to win the fight because obviously he's fighting an Olympian, and he wants to beat an Olympian. So you're not going to get any easy fights because of that.”
That’s just fine with Brennan, simply because he loves the sport and everything about it. So while fame and glory are part of the deal, they’re not the main part for him.
“One thing that's my sort of ethos and who I am, it's about going for it because when we get to be older in life, the things that you're going to regret is the things that you didn't go after. At least I know I'm going after this dream now, and if it works out, it works out. But if it doesn't work out, I can live with that. I know I went after the dream.”
And if he hits his mark, that dream includes a return to New York City, mouthpiece with him at all times.
“When I was a kid, the dream for me was always to be an Olympian, to be an Irish National champion. But I always had the dream to fight in Madison Square Garden, as well. You're not going to do that as an amateur boxer. So that's still the dream that I haven't ticked off yet. For me, when I'm thinking back to when I was a kid and when I was looking at boxing, Madison Square Garden was always the big event, it was always the big venue. That's something that stuck in my mind since I was a kid. And, for me, if I stayed amateur, I obviously couldn't realize that dream. I've obviously realized the dream of becoming an Olympian and sometimes you just got to move with the times and make the decision. So, for me now, it's about having the focus to just keep on winning. If I keep on winning and I'm in New York and getting that big Irish crowd behind me, Madison Square Garden naturally is going to happen.”
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