Advertisement League of Ireland Horse Racing TV Listings GAA Fixtures The Video Review Behind the Lines Sportswriters discuss their careers and the work that inspires them. Rugby Weekly Extra Dive into all the news and analysis 3 times a week The Football Family Weekly insights from the week’s big talking points Advertisement More Stories Alamy Stock Photo written off TJ Doheny, the inter-county GAA player's boxer, looks to defy the naysayers once again The 38-year-old Portlaoise man seeks to become a two-weight world champion against Nick Ball in Liverpool tonight. 10.35am, 15 Mar 2025 Share options Gavan Casey ONE COULD HAVE been forgiven for projecting a symbolism onto TJ Doheny’s defeat to pound-for-pound star Naoya Inoue in Tokyo last September. Having fought gallantly in his challenge of the undisputed super-bantamweight ‘Monster’, even nicking a round or two off the four-weight world champion, Doheny peeled away from an assault in the seventh round holding his back. As his back muscles locked up and spasmed, he was forced to take a knee to avoid further punishment. Inoue [29-0, 26KOs] retained his belts. Doheny [26-5, 20KOs] had earned every cent of his lucrative retirement payday but his courage had written a cheque that his 37-year-old body couldn’t cash. There could be no qualms — Inoue was comfortably ahead (59-55 x2, 58-56). There was certainly no embarrassment — Doheny had exceeded expectations in taking it as far as the seventh. If anything, it seemed a graceful way to bow out: Inoue has for years made his name on violently mowing down world-level opponents but Doheny could be felled only by time itself. Even the 1/100 favourite Inoue, one of boxing’s true stars, respectfully inferred that Doheny’s remarkable journey in the boxing ring had reached its natural conclusion: “In this match especially, I want to celebrate how TJ Doheny brought the fight to this ring, and his career,” said The Monster of the Portlaoise man, who is hugely respected in Japan due to his previous upset victories in Inoue’s home country. “I would like to thank him.” Doheny, meanwhile, didn’t give an interview as he was carried out of the ring, upright, by his cornermen. He saw no grace in the situation whatsoever. He was furious. And he thought to himself, as he so often does, “I’m not f***ing done.” TJ Doheny’s all-round boxing ability has been undervalued for years but tonight at Liverpool’s Echo Arena, defending featherweight world champion Nick Ball must equally be careful not to underestimate the sheer pigheadedness with which Doheny refuses to relent to the consensus. There are more talented boxers in the world than TJ Doheny. There are certainly fresher athletes than the Laois southpaw, now 38 and six years removed from his own world-title reign. But there are few who raise their game in a more pronounced fashion when they’re being ‘written off’. Doheny is the modern-day inter-county GAA player’s boxer: he doesn’t say much but he hears enough that he can sustain himself with an insatiable urge to prove people wrong. (Back in 2015, when this writer was on an internship with Balls.ie, Doheny messaged to voice his disgust at his omission from a ‘Top 12 most exciting prospects in Irish boxing’ piece on the website. We would laugh about it three years later when Doheny won a world title ahead of every boxer who made the list). The irony is that Doheny’s professional boxing career was forged in an inter-county environment of sorts, just not in Ireland: after missing out on Irish selection for Olympic qualifiers ahead of Beijing 2008 (John Joe Nevin, who beat the County Laois man in the preceding national final, was chosen instead), Doheny upped sticks for Australia and took a year’s sabbatical in Sydney’s Bondi Junction district. Doheny, then in his early 20s, made a point of enjoying himself in ‘County Bondi’, working hard alongside fellow Irish immigrants on a construction site in the suburbs and playing equally hard during his downtime. Advertisement He was making enough coin that he wound up extending his stay, eventually dipping his toes back into boxing — although the lesser quality of the Australian amateur scene compared to home eventually became prohibitive to his career advancement in the ring. In 2011, Doheny was working as a scaffolder in the western Sydney suburbs for a company owned by two Kilkenny men, John and Bill Kinsella. The Kinsellas eventually told Doheny not to come back to work: they vowed instead to help him become a world champion in boxing’s paid ranks, sponsoring their Portlaoise protégé to the effect that he could live as a full-time athlete while he found his feet. Doheny will always be grateful to John and Bill for giving him his start. From his professional debut in a 200-seat community hall in Hurstville in March 2012, Doheny reeled off 14 victories and lived up to his billing as ‘The Power’ with 10 stoppages. Within three and half years, Doheny had outgrown the Aussie super-bantamweight scene. With the blessing of his trainer at Bondi Boxing Club, Tony Del Vecchio — and most importantly his fiancée, Rebecca, with whom he had a young daughter — he decided it was time to relocate to America. In 2015, Doheny shipped up to Boston and linked up with the man who penned that lyric, Ken Casey of the Dropkick Murphys. Casey, through his Murphys Boxing promotional-management company, was looking after several of Doheny’s peers from back home in Ireland and giving them step-up opportunities on America’s East Coast, including Spike O’Sullivan, Ray Moylette, and Niall Kennedy. Doheny, imbued by a higher quality of training and sparring Stateside, rattled off a couple of eye-catching stoppage wins in Beantown to improve his record to 16-0, 12KOs. In the middle of 2016, however, Rebecca became pregnant with their second child and returned to her support network back home in Australia, meaning Doheny’s permanent US relocation instead became a 10,000-mile work commute: he would train for 10 weeks at a time under Hector Bermudez in Braintree, Massachusetts, and then fly back to Sydney to tend to Rebecca after his fights. However, 2017 for Doheny began back home in Portlaoise, where his mother was in car accident which left her in a coma for nearly eight weeks. She thankfully recovered, with Doheny just about making it back to Australia in time for the birth of his first son, whom he and Rebecca christened TJ — but Theo James as opposed to Terrence John like his aul’fella (“That’s been a burden on me for my whole life,” Doheny once told RTÉ’s Ed Leahy. “I couldn’t name any child Terrence John.”). Training camp for his next stoppage victory in June 2017 meant that Doheny missed his daughter Nicole’s Confirmation. The personal sacrifices were starting to add up but so was everything else: further victories in Thailand and America lifted Doheny into position for a shot at the world title he craved. A stunning upset victory over Ryosuke Iwasa at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall in August 2018 saw Doheny become only the second ever boxer from Ireland or the UK — after Wayne McCullough in 1995 — to become a world champion on Japanese soil. ‘The Power’ defended the belt at Madison Square Garden, New York, before losing it in a fight-of-the-year-contending unification bout with fellow 122-pound champion Danny Roman in California in April 2019. Doheny, who refused to relent despite being dropped to the body twice, and who equally had Roman hurt upstairs, only burnished his reputation in defeat. But with a rematch not immediately forthcoming, Doheny’s career began to tail off from the age of 33, which is typically too old for a boxer in the lighter weight-classes wherein fast-twitch muscle fibre and reflexes are the name of the game. His second career defeat, a shock eight-round points decision to the European-level Ionut Baluta in Dubai in March 2020, appeared to spell the end for Doheny, who frankly looked disinterested in the ring. When he returned from a 17-month sabbatical, stepped up to featherweight, and lost to fellow Irishman Michael Conlan in Belfast during his next outing in August 2021, it was definitely over. And after a quick stoppage win in Dubai, a subsequent points defeat to local up-and-comer Sam Goodman in Sydney this week two years ago brought TJ Doheny’s story full circle: the Australian scene he had once left behind had caught up with him. A poetic way to bow out, right? Right?! Doheny, steered as he has been for 12 years by his manager, Mike Altamura, again flipped the bird at the prevailing narrative and resuscitated his career in Japan. Three stoppage victories, including a massive first-round upset of American prospect Japhethlee Llamido, catapulted him back to relevance, eventually culminating in Doheny’s spirited challenge of boxing’s most feared champion, Naoya Inoue, last September. Now 38 and financially comfortable, the Portlaoise man’s journey has for the first time zagged towards Britain, where he will step up in weight to challenge Liverpool’s Nick Ball (21-0-1, 12KOs). Ball, 10 years Doheny’s junior and boasting a string of impressive wins on his CV — including one over another featherweight with an Irish connnection, the Brian Peters-managed American Ray Ford — is the 1/20 favourite tonight at the Echo Arena. Doheny, still based in Sydney where he now has four kids with Rebecca, hasn’t so much taken the road less travelled as he has travelled every road available to him since leaving home in 2008. The prevailing wisdom is that the Pigheaded ‘Power’ from Portlaoise will finally run out of road tonight against Ball, live on DAZN; that Doheny is too small, that his body will break down as it did against Inoue, that he won’t be able to handle the Liverpudlian’s relentless activity at the age of 38. Gavan Casey Viewcomments Send Tip or Correction Embed this post To embed this post, copy the code below on your site Email “TJ Doheny, the inter-county GAA player's boxer, looks to defy the naysayers once again”. Recipient's Email Feedback on “TJ Doheny, the inter-county GAA player's boxer, looks to defy the naysayers once again”. Your Feedback Your Email (optional) Report a Comment Please select the reason for reporting this comment. Please give full details of the problem with the comment... This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic. Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy before taking part. 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