Gavan Casey

FRESH OFF AN impressive victory in California on 9 June, Callum Walsh headed on a lads’ holiday to Albufeira, Portugal, with his group of friends from back home in Cork.

“I was like a tourist attraction over there,” smiles the 22-year-old Walsh. “There was people my age coming out to find me and everything, looking for pictures and stuff.”

Walsh has been a professional boxer for only a wet week in the grand scheme, rattling off seven wins — and six by stoppage — since he turned over a couple of years ago.

But his world is changing. Or rather, Walsh is changing his own world.

At the time when the pandemic struck in 2020, he was a highly rated underage amateur talent who had recently generated a bit of noise in Irish-boxing circles with an explosive run through his first Seniors, eventually losing the welterweight final to Belfast’s Aidan Walsh.

Callum was also working seven days a week on a fishing boat which docks in his hometown of Cobh, hauling pots in order to be able to afford car insurance so that he could drive to training.

But when Covid visited Ireland’s shores, gyms closed and training stopped. In early 2021, Walsh made the call to pack in the job and head to California, where his father is based, and where the 19-year-old southpaw intended to burnish his fistic talents until boxing could restart back home.

Roll it on two and half years: Walsh lives in Los Angeles. He trains as a professional at boxing’s most famous gym, the Wild Card in Hollywood, where he has been taken under the wing of its Hall-of-Fame head coach, Freddie Roach.

He is promoted by Tom Loeffler, the highly regarded American who platformed the Klitschko brothers and Gennady Golovkin to the global masses. And he is also both heavily backed and sponsored by UFC president Dana White, a close friend of Loeffler’s who is not directly involved in Walsh’s sport but simply liked the cut of his jib.

Consequently, even at this formative stage of his pro career, Walsh now routinely headlines Loeffler’s 360 Promotions cards live on White’s streaming platform, UFC Fight Pass.

Partly as a result of all of these factors — but equally because he’s an intuitive youngfella who understands the business he’s in — Walsh already boasts an Instagram following of 135,000 people.

And that’s why he’s now recognisable not only in Cork, but in the southern Algarve as he and his childhood friends discovered about a fortnight ago.

“And d’you know what? It wasn’t just Irish people coming up to me,” Walsh explains from his family home in Cobh. “There was actually Portuguese people, Spanish, French…

“I’m just there thinking, ‘How do they even know who I am? How am I after reaching these people?’ But they’re like, ‘Oh, we see you on Instagram’ — or wherever…

“Nah, it was cool, to be fair.

“My friends are thinking the same as me, like: ‘How is this happening?’ But obviously there’s a bit of piss-taking as well! ‘Ah, we’re sick of you, we can’t bring you anywhere,’ y’know? ‘We’re just trying to have a night out.’

“The thing is, they’re the ones that always get caught to take the photo,” Walsh laughs.

After a harrowing recent run for Irish boxing in which industry leaders Katie Taylor and Michael Conlan, among others, suffered devastating defeats, Walsh boldly declared that he will soon become the new face of the sport in this country.

It’s the kind of diktat that will rile up a traditionalist when it’s decreed by a seven-fight fledgling pro, but it’s scarcely delusional at the same time.

Whatever about popular Iberian holiday destinations, Walsh is already well known in the 18-30 bracket of sports fans in this nation.

They seem drawn not only to his growing boxing prowess but to his social media output, particularly on Instagram where he adds a humorous twist to mundane elements of his daily life.

For example, he recently shared a screenshot of what he described as his favourite message that he has ever received — one from a randomer from Cork who wrote simply, “Story kid. Do you want a box into the jaw?”

Or another: following his victory over Carson Jones in LA earlier this month, for which he won a WBC rankings belt and moved into the sanctioning body’s top 20 at light-middleweight, Walsh composed a spoof video back home in Cobh about ‘the belt going to his head’. In a well-shot, minute-long sketch, his incredulous friends grow increasingly angry as Walsh wears the WBC belt over his shoulder while cutting the grass on a ride-on lawnmower, or as he emerges from the shower before a night out with the belt protecting his modesty, or as he tries to use it instead of a seatbelt as he hops into a friend’s car.

As Walsh sees it, it’s all part of the job spec.

“Like, nowadays, anyway, boxing is not just something where you just go in there and fight,” he explains.

“It’s just not that anymore. It’s become a new thing, now, with social media. I feel like I know how to use social media very well, and how to get fans. I know how to keep them entertained, keep giving them stuff, and make them feel like they know me.

“When I meet people now, they feel like they know who I am, personally, just from watching me online.

“But it’s also the fact that I’m taking big fights. I’m not afraid to fight anyone. I proved that in my last fight: there’s not many prospects, people coming up, who would fight Carson Jones when they’re 6-0 themselves — somebody with 60-odd pro fights, he’s only been stopped four times…

I took the fight because I’m confident in my ability, but I also know I’ve been talking and talking all the time, saying I want to be this, I want to be that, so I had to prove it, y’know? And I did: I put him away in four rounds. Nobody has ever done that to him before.

“And I think all of that is why I’m well on my way to becoming the new face of Irish boxing.”

A prospective poster boy needs to eventually fight in Ireland, however. Walsh is back out in California on 26 August — so what about a slot on the bill if Katie Taylor and Chantelle Cameron run it back in Dublin as expected in November?

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Walsh says.

I think if I fight at home, I want it to be for me, y’know? I want it to be ‘The Callum Walsh Homecoming’. To be fair, now, it would be an honour to fight on a Katie Taylor undercard, but when I come home I want it to be ‘me’. I want to come home to a crowd that’s all there for me. I want to be a main event back in Ireland.

Indeed, Walsh is already eyeing an outing at Madison Square Garden in November. It would make for his second fight on America’s East Coast following a successful night in Boston on St Patrick’s weekend.

Getting incrementally closer to Páirc Uí Chaoimh, at least…

“Yeah, but sure that’s why I need to keep fighting in the meantime, keep improving, keep growing the fanbase… See, with coming home, me and my team, Tom [Loeffler] and everybody, we don’t want to rush anything. We don’t want to rush home and have a show that’s not as big as it could become eventually. Might as well just keep building now and come home when it’s massive.”

So, for the time being, Walsh will travel home not for fights but between them.

He’s old enough, now, to appreciate some of the mundanities he left behind in Cobh when he relocated to LA as a 19-year-old.

It’s this everydayness to which he chooses to escape at 22, winding down from grueling training camps as well as the accompanying pressures of being an athlete whose time is increasingly in demand across the Atlantic.

And to the local deli counter too, of course.

“When I left Cobh, I was thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’ But I was in LA for so long the first time I went there — I stayed there for a year and a half the first time — I was thinking, ‘I can’t wait to go back to Cobh.’

And to be fair, like, even though I’m this professional boxer now that people are getting to know, every time I come home I just do the same things as I used to always do. I just go out with my friends, we go to the gym, we go to the shop and get a breakfast roll… It’s not like anything has changed. That’s why I like coming home. Everything is still the same. It’s like going back to reality, y’know what I mean?

“I’d hate to be the fella that goes away and comes back a different person. A lot of people say that once you start making money, once you start getting this and that, it’ll change you. But I feel like I’m still the same person.

“I’m a fairly chilled out person. When I come home, I like to just relax and do what I normally did. I don’t think I’ll ever change.”

Walsh will jet back to LA soon to start work for his bout on 26 August. His opponent has not yet been determined but he will once more headline at the Commerce Casino, and the card will be broadcast live on UFC Fight Pass.

And he will prepare once more at Freddie Roach’s Wild Card, the world-renowned gym at which he decided to chance his arm when he first put boot to tarmac in LA in early 2021.

“I just kinda landed on,” Walsh smiles. “Straight to LA, showed up at the Wild Card, went in to do a training session and just to meet Freddie and stuff. He made me spar on my first day!”

It wasn’t just any old sparring session either: the still teenaged Walsh was paired with a 30-odd-year-old Blair Cobbs, then an undefeated prospect, and currently rated as a top-10 or top-15 welterweight after his victory over Maurice Hooker last year.

“I went and I did six rounds with Blair,” Walsh recalls. “I’d never done six rounds before in my life — I was only used to doing three rounds from the amateurs.

“But Freddie was happy enough and he let me stay. And I’ve just been there ever since.”

Ironically, it was at Roach’s boxing gym where the young Walsh first began to cross-pollinate with the UFC — not through Dana White initially but through one of his organisation’s flagship fighters.

It was an especially significant moment for Walsh, who was rendered starstruck in Hollywood and wound up forging a lasting connection.

“When I was growing up, I was actually more a UFC fan,” he explains. “I’ve been boxing since I was six and I love [physically] boxing, but I never really watched boxing, to be honest, unless it was a massive fight. Me and my friends, we always used to go to one of our houses to watch UFC when there was UFC on.

“I remember when I first got to Wild Card, I looked over and I was like… ‘I’m sure that’s Tony Ferguson?’ I didn’t want to say anything to him — but I got home, then, and found out that it was him.

I remember how hard he was training. And I always do want to be the hardest worker in the gym so I was like, ‘Right, I’m just gonna try and keep up with Tony now and we’ll see how we get on.’ Every day he was there, I was just trying to do the same kind of stuff he was doing. After a while, we just got talking and, eventually, we became like training partners. It was mad enough.

“Every time I’d train with Tony, I’d be thinking, ‘Jeez, I’m training with Tony Ferguson…’ But I am a bit more used to it now, we’re good friends and we’ve a good relationship. It’s a bit more normal now.”

Still surreal to Walsh, though, is having Ferguson’s employer — whose skin is in another game — champion a young boxer from Cork at every opportunity.

“Dana White is somebody that I used to just watch on telly, whether he was there with Conor [McGregor] or whoever,” Walsh smiles.

“Now the fact that I actually know him… Like, his whiskey brand, Howler Head, is my main sponsor. I’m being posted all over the UFC’s social media, I’m fighting on UFC Fight Pass… It’s unbelievable.

I definitely did not expect any of this when I went to LA — especially having that backing from Dana.

“It’s… It’s crazy”, Walsh laughs, “and it’s still crazy every time I think about it.”

Watch ‘King’ Callum Walsh as he headlines the Commerce Casino on Saturday, 26 August, live on UFC Fight Pass.