Digger's Sad Tale

By any standards, his short life was unspeakably hard. The story goes that when George ‘Digger’ Stanley was a boy, his father sold him to a boxing-booth owner for a gold sovereign and a pint of beer. He was aged somewhere between 12 and 15. But no one, not even Digger himself, knew his exact age or for that matter where he was born. His birthplace was sometimes given as Kingston-on-Thames but other times as Norwich, Lincoln or Reading. Stanley was a traveller (or ‘gypsy’) and could not read or write. At the height of his fame, he wore a magnificent gold watch but he had to ask others to tell him the time. His boxing literacy, though, was never in doubt.

He learnt his trade on a travelling boxing booth under Billy Le Neve, the booth owner his father supposedly sold him to. Tackling men of all weights and sizes, Digger not only learnt how to box but how to employ the game’s darker arts. ‘He could break more rules, more artfully, than almost any other boxer of the past few decades,’ said his Boxing News obituary, but he was also ‘a superlatively clever boxer and ring strategist’.

Ali in Ireland

Photo by Ira Rosenberg

Muhammad Ali's lesser-known Irish roots and his fight in the Emerald Isle.

When you think of the great Irish-American fighters, Muhammad Ali probably isn’t the first name that springs to mind. Nevertheless, the Emerald Isle can at least stake a claim to the heavyweight great as one of its own. Ali’s maternal great-grandfather, Abe Grady, was born in County Clare, in the west of Ireland. Later, he moved to America, married an African-American woman and ultimately became a grandfather to Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady.

Despite his one-time connection with black Islamist group the Nation of Islam, Ali did not try to hide his Irish roots. In fact, in 2009, he visited his great-grandfather’s County Clare town of Ennis, meeting distant cousins and becoming the first person in 600 years to be given the freedom of Ennis. But it wasn’t Ali’s first time in Ireland. The by-then frail ex-champ had actually boxed there in 1972.

Forty-five years ago this week, Dublin’s Croke Park was the stage for if not a classic Ali performance, then at least an Ali promotion like no other.