'Granda’s dream': Matthew McCole cherishing the moment after Irish Elite title win

There were times when he wanted to throw the wraps from his hands for good - but Matthew McCole couldn’t have walked away unaccomplished.

Last Thursday night at the Girdwood Community Club in Belfast, McCole finally got his hands on the prize he craved.

At last, he could call himself an Irish Elite champion.

The Dungloe native, boxing out of the Illies Golden Gloves, defeated Eugene McKeever to become Donegal’s 18th Irish Elite champion. He also became the first man from the county to win the light-middleweight crown since Ballyshannon’s Paddy Doherty, who won back-to-back titles in 1970 and 1971.

“It has been a long wait,” McCole, a perennial bridesmaid at this level until now, tells Donegal Live.

“Nothing much was different. I fought him before and at least twice before I felt that I should have got the decision. I knew I could beat him. I had a wee bit more composure. It was about not diving in with him in certain aspects. I worked a bit on confidence and controlling.

McCole had met McKeever four times previously and lost all four. 

The only surprise here, perhaps, was that the final verdict was a split decision, albeit a 4-1, in favour of the west Donegal ace, for McCole was the dominant figure over nine memorable minutes.

He says: “I felt good. I could think clearly in the head and I knew what I was going to do. Maybe in the last two months, I could feel that this was going to happen. You just don’t know until it does happen.

“It was mad. It’s something that I have chased for years.”

A seven-time Irish champ at Colleges and Senior (intermediate) level, McCole booked his final spot when beating JoJo McArdle from the Holy Trinity ABC last Tuesday night.

McCole wasn’t leaving without the title this time and he was handed a unanimous decision to take the win over McKeever, who beat another Illies puncher, Cahir Gormley, in his semi-final.

Since his father, Jim, sustained life-altering injuries McCole has been training at Illies, but he gets much more than training and sparring at the club.

Club coach Eamon Duffy and his wife Sadie - the world-renowned referee and judge - regularly take McCole into their home.

“Without them, I couldn’t do it,” he says. “There were loads up from Dungloe and from Illies. It was brilliant to see.

“People don’t realise who goes into it or what’s behind it. So many - too many - are behind me. I’d be afraid to start naming names. Sometimes it mightn’t take much for someone to give you something. That might be all they do or give, but it could make a big difference.

“The weeks change now. I be up in the Ulster High Performance a lot. I was up three days a week, but with the PhD coming to an end, I’ve been doing more at home and only up there twice a week. Training is still, twice a day, five days a week. It just depends on where I’m at, whether it’s home, Buncrana or up in the Ulster High Performance.”

McCole is a PhD student at ATU Donegal in Letterkenny, working on an environmental monitoring dissertation that he hopes to complete by the end of the year. Boxing has halted the progress on his studies a little, but McCole isn’t complaining.

He is now in the box seat to be the Irish light-middleweight puncher at the 2025 World Boxing World Championships in Liverpool.

He says: “I don’t want to get too far ahead. I’m in prime position, so just hopefully it all clicks into place now.”

Last May, his beloved grandfather and Dungloe boxing stalwart Hudie McCole passed away. A few months earlier, the Donegal boxing community united to pay homage to his 56-year service to the sweet science.

“It was always granda’s dream,” he says. “To get it for him, even though he’s gone, is just so satisfying. It’s an itch scratched, a box ticked.”

Boxing is in the McCole blood. Matthew’s father Jim was a long-time coach in the club and an uncle, Brendan, won Irish Army and Irish Junior titles before representing Ireland in Golden Gloves competitions in Michigan and Chicago, where he lost to Lorenzo Smith, who later fought for WBO world super lightweight and WBO world welterweight titles.

There were days when McCole wondered if it was all worth it, nights when he thought of ending the seemingly-endless combinations on the punchbag.

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He says: “It was hard to keep going. There were plenty of days when I just wanted to pack it all in. When you get a bad decision - and I have had too many of those - it makes you sick. To get out of bed can be a handlin’ at times.

“When I knew that I could do it, it was something that I just couldn’t let rest at all. As much as I might have said ‘fuck this’ at times, I just couldn’t walk away.

“I just wasn’t able to get over the line. I kept the resilience and kept trying. People had a bit of empathy with that. You could see the relief on me when I won.”