Andrew Murray
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jamesmcdonnell
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 45238
- Joined: 12 Nov 2003, 06:11
Andrew Murray
Saw him for the 1st time at the Mayfair Sporting Club show last night, can understand why he was Irish prospect of the year, what a fantastic little fighter. Cannot remember the last time i saw such a well drilled 4 fight novice.
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TerribleTerry
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 5272
- Joined: 29 Aug 2003, 12:30
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TerribleTerry
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 5272
- Joined: 29 Aug 2003, 12:30
Sorry to hijack this thread....TerribleTerry wrote:remember him well mate. Shameknockout wrote:for a moment i thought you were talking about Andrew Murray from Guyana who sadly passed away at only 30 years old a few years back.
Good fighter but he had the misfortune to run into a monsterous Quartey in 1995....
yeah, 30 is no age .. car crash...
i was in cuba last month and seeing how they drove there and the quality of the roads and rail crossings... it got me thinking of , the 1992 olympic champion and three time world champion Roberto Balado who died in a road accident there age 25...
i lifted this story from sports illustrated website
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In the midst of this desperate tangle, at 6 a.m. on July 2, Roberto Balado grew impatient at a train crossing. He jerked his steering wheel, passed an idling school bus, edged onto the track. He had never seen a train here, not in 10 years. His favorite band, Pablo and His Elite, played on the cassette deck. Eight hours later, Balado, the reigning world and Olympic super heavyweight boxing champion, was dead at 25.
``He'd driven me to the boxing gym and gone off on some personal business, and on his way back he was killed, ''says Ariel Hernandez, Balado's best friend of 11 years and a two-time world-champion middleweight. ``The last thing he said was, `Wait for me. I'm coming back.' ''
Not since 75 Cubans, including the entire male and female national fencing teams, died in a plane crash in Barbados in October 1976, had Cuba's sports community suffered such a loss. But Balado's stature transcended boxing: He had won 56 straight matches, including the gold medal in Barcelona, and like all world-beating sports figures he was adored by Cuban socialists and dissidents alike. The news was barely reported in the U.S., but it shook Cuba like an earthquake. ``It was a national tragedy,'' says Juantorena. ``He was very much loved. Charismatic, very simple. Everybody took it hard.''
But few, perhaps, harder than Hernandez, who grew up with Balado in La Lisa, who copied Balado's work ethic, who listened when Balado chided him for partying too much and taught him how to be a good husband. Hernandez adored Balado's way of deflecting attention -- how he gave his medals away and how, when some fan said, ``That's Roberto Balado,'' he would respond, ``No, just Roberto.'' Hernandez was bathing when someone told him there'd been a crash. ``I went crazy,'' he says. ``I started running toward the scene. But when I got there they were taking him away.. . .''
With a friend Hernandez pedaled to Balado's modest, recently awarded home. Balado's wife, Dulce Monteagudo, was asleep when she heard knocking on the door. Hernandez was soaked with sweat. When they got to the hospital, Roberto was conscious; he told Dulce about the train. The bus had blinded him, he said; the train cracked right through the driver's door.
He'd broken six ribs. One was digging a hole in his lung. ``He asked me to take him home because he felt fine,'' Dulce says. ``But I could hear it in his voice: He wasn't fine. He was gasping.'' Still, Roberto was so big and so strong that when attendants couldn't lift him onto a stretcher to go get X- rays, he wrenched his body off the bed and got on the stretcher himself.
Roberto and Dulce had been a couple for eight years. She loved to watch him box; he would come home from a match disappointed if he hadn't heard her screaming advice from the stands. ``This was a disaster for me,'' she says now. ``Three years earlier I'd lost my baby [in a miscarriage], and now I lose him. And when he died, I'd had some symptoms of pregnancy. I think I lost a child again.'' At this she leaves the room. When she returns, she says, ``I tell you: I lost a friend and a great man, apart from a husband.''
It is uncanny, how strong she seems. ``Don't believe it,'' she says. ``Since he died, my spirit has shrunk.''
The funeral was held on a Tuesday. Juantorena and boxing legend Teofilo Stevenson and thousands of others came to the ceremony at Havana's Cristobal Colon Cemetery. Balado was buried in the Pantheon of Sportsmen. The coffin was made of bronze; a Cuban flag lay on top. The Central Committee of the Communist Party sent a wreath. On the headstone Dulce placed a picture of Roberto wearing a medal, with a Cuban flag on his shoulders, but rain has washed the image away. She says she will never watch boxing again.
Not long after the funeral, a truck pulled up to Dulce's house towing Roberto's white Lada. When there is a fatal accident in Cuba, the family is responsible for the wreck. So Dulce cleaned out the car herself, ejecting the tape, pulling out Roberto's little decorations, his bagful of boxing gear. ``It was his, and it's mine now,'' she says of the demolished vehicle. ``I keep it at a neighbor's house.''
Now Dulce is out the door and walking down the sidewalk in the dark, past one house. She stops at the next. The sound of TV floats through the window; the nightly news is just beginning. Dulce knocks, asks for the garage to be opened. ``I need another car because it's a long ride to the cemetery,'' she says. ``I've kept this because I keep thinking they'll replace it.'' But she hasn't been told a thing.
The garage door yawns open, groaning. The overhead light is so dim. In the stillness Balado's Lada -- another gift from Fidel -- resembles something savaged by a giant claw. The driver's door, shredded into three thin slices, hangs by a black strap. The hood, flipped upside down, sits on the engine. There is no windshield. License plate number 69549. Dulce stands outside in the night, looking in.
``A disaster of life,'' she whispers.
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jamesmcdonnell
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 45238
- Joined: 12 Nov 2003, 06:11
He was boxing within himself last night as it was his first six rounder, but his skills are poetry in motion, very compact, beautiful guard. He was the first to initiate every exchange, blocked everything which came his way, and then always finished the exchange with a shot of his own. At times it was like he was reading his opponent's mind.TerribleTerry wrote:I am well chuffed to hear that - I have been keeping an ear out for his progress as he is from County Cavan in Ireland - same area as my dad (not a million miles from McGuigan's Clones).
Would love to see him box - glad he is developing well.
James, did Orvill McKenzie box last night?jamesmcdonnell wrote:He was boxing within himself last night as it was his first six rounder, but his skills are poetry in motion, very compact, beautiful guard. He was the first to initiate every exchange, blocked everything which came his way, and then always finished the exchange with a shot of his own. At times it was like he was reading his opponent's mind.TerribleTerry wrote:I am well chuffed to hear that - I have been keeping an ear out for his progress as he is from County Cavan in Ireland - same area as my dad (not a million miles from McGuigan's Clones).
Would love to see him box - glad he is developing well.
I spoke with my friend last night and he said he was at the show waiting for Orvills fight
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jamesmcdonnell
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 45238
- Joined: 12 Nov 2003, 06:11
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jamesmcdonnell
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 45238
- Joined: 12 Nov 2003, 06:11
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TerribleTerry
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 5272
- Joined: 29 Aug 2003, 12:30
Great stuff - cheers for the heads up on that one.jamesmcdonnell wrote:He was boxing within himself last night as it was his first six rounder, but his skills are poetry in motion, very compact, beautiful guard. He was the first to initiate every exchange, blocked everything which came his way, and then always finished the exchange with a shot of his own. At times it was like he was reading his opponent's mind.TerribleTerry wrote:I am well chuffed to hear that - I have been keeping an ear out for his progress as he is from County Cavan in Ireland - same area as my dad (not a million miles from McGuigan's Clones).
Would love to see him box - glad he is developing well.
What did you make of Vegas? Is he a contender or a pretender?
not a criticism i must had... more a testement to your good work that i was surprised you had missed it....Ian 'Mr' McNeilly wrote:When was it, Knockout? We don't miss many these days but can't do them all.knockout wrote:BBN dont seem to mention it...jamesmcdonnell wrote:Never been to one of Derek's shows actually, he's been doing them a long while, must be doing something right.
was anyone there????/
last night in a russell sq hotel
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kevin
- Heavyweight
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kevin
- Heavyweight
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ApolloCreed
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 398
- Joined: 03 Mar 2008, 13:42
Re: Andrew Murray
Bump.
Seems a wasted talent then?
Seems a wasted talent then?
Re: Andrew Murray
The fact that no one has even anything to say would suggest so!ApolloCreed wrote:Bump.
Seems a wasted talent then?
He's 24 & 0 yet no one in the UK knows about him, fighting the type he has it's no wonder.
He needs to move fro Brian peters at this stage, he hasn't really got him any fights to speak of, I know he topped a bill against fagan and got some tv airtime but it was against terrible opponents...
From what I gather he seems happy beating this level of fighters.....
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slapbangwhallop
- Cruiserweight
- Posts: 2031
- Joined: 13 Dec 2010, 08:27
Re: Andrew Murray
His next fight will be against Gavin Rees for the European title. Enough of a step up?03mcgs0 wrote:The fact that no one has even anything to say would suggest so!ApolloCreed wrote:Bump.
Seems a wasted talent then?
He's 24 & 0 yet no one in the UK knows about him, fighting the type he has it's no wonder.
He needs to move fro Brian peters at this stage, he hasn't really got him any fights to speak of, I know he topped a bill against fagan and got some tv airtime but it was against terrible opponents...
From what I gather he seems happy beating this level of fighters.....
Re: Andrew Murray
slapbangwhallop wrote:His next fight will be against Gavin Rees for the European title. Enough of a step up?03mcgs0 wrote:The fact that no one has even anything to say would suggest so!ApolloCreed wrote:Bump.
Seems a wasted talent then?
He's 24 & 0 yet no one in the UK knows about him, fighting the type he has it's no wonder.
He needs to move fro Brian peters at this stage, he hasn't really got him any fights to speak of, I know he topped a bill against fagan and got some tv airtime but it was against terrible opponents...
From what I gather he seems happy beating this level of fighters.....
To answer your question... Yes and about time. When and where will it take place? I would actually predict Murray to out box Rees as long as he can stay on his feet for 12 rounds which may be very difficult for him.Come on now Slap you of all people have been one of his biggest critics for the last good while...
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slapbangwhallop
- Cruiserweight
- Posts: 2031
- Joined: 13 Dec 2010, 08:27
Re: Andrew Murray
Moi? Moi! unsupportive of an Irish fighter - dont tell the Brits, it will ruin my image! ;)03mcgs0 wrote:To answer your question... Yes and about time. When and where will it take place? I would actually predict Murray to out box Rees as long as he can stay on his feet for 12 rounds which may be very difficult for him.Come on now Slap you of all people have been one of his biggest critics for the last good while...
Purse bids go on rounds abouts May 2nd I think! Tough fight for him, altough I have never rated Rees but he does quite well in fights I dont expect him to. I certainly didnt expect him to last so long against the grinding Kotelnik.
Murray is a fighter I simply cant get excited about, love fella and great trainer, role model type guy, but no spark, no venom, no guile. Gets in there and works solidly behind the jab and earns boring points victories - gimme someadat Marty Rogan sauce anyday.
I fancy Rees to take it if he is on his game.
Re: Andrew Murray
slapbangwhallop wrote:Moi? Moi! unsupportive of an Irish fighter - dont tell the Brits, it will ruin my image! ;)03mcgs0 wrote:To answer your question... Yes and about time. When and where will it take place? I would actually predict Murray to out box Rees as long as he can stay on his feet for 12 rounds which may be very difficult for him.Come on now Slap you of all people have been one of his biggest critics for the last good while...
Purse bids go on rounds abouts May 2nd I think! Tough fight for him, altough I have never rated Rees but he does quite well in fights I dont expect him to. I certainly didnt expect him to last so long against the grinding Kotelnik.
Murray is a fighter I simply cant get excited about, love fella and great trainer, role model type guy, but no spark, no venom, no guile. Gets in there and works solidly behind the jab and earns boring points victories - gimme someadat Marty Rogan sauce anyday.
I fancy Rees to take it if he is on his game.
Jeez you are on here as well....
I agree with everything you have said about Murray on here. The lad seems top notch and I will support him but not sure how far he can realistically go even against some of the top Brits at the weight.