https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/ ... d-champion
‘I’ve had a beautiful wee life,” Eamonn Magee says soon after he has opened the front door in his dressing gown and cracked open his first beer of the day just after 11 on a Monday morning. The former boxer, who knocked down Ricky Hatton in 2002 and was a world champion when he won the WBU welterweight title, is cut and bruised from being attacked the night before.
Magee’s left hand is also swollen with an obviously broken finger making him wince whenever it brushes against his can of Carling. Such pain, however, is fleeting compared with the deeper hurt that runs through him in Ardoyne, the tough Republican enclave of Belfast, where Magee’s life has been scarred by violent sectarianism, tragedy and alcoholism.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Magee says as he takes another slug of warm beer. His battered, 46‑year‑old face crinkles and the lump under his left eye looks even more like a purple mouse as he echoes: “I’ve still had a wee beautiful life.”
Magee is in trouble again because he and the writer Paul Gibson have produced a raw and riveting book which opens like this: “A book? Listen, I’ve been beaten with baseball bats, I’ve had my throat slashed, I’ve been kidnapped and exiled out of the country. I’ve been shot twice, I’ve been in prison and my son’s just been stabbed to death. Amongst all that, I was the welterweight champion of the world while drinking the bar dry and doing enough coke to kill a small horse every night. My life’s not a book. It’s a fucking movie script.”..................