THOMAS CARTY WILL tonight box at the 3Arena in his home city of Dublin for the third time in less than 18 months, on the undercard of Callum Walsh’s homecoming bout against Przemyslaw Runowski.
There was a time five or six fights into his professional career when up-and-coming heavyweight Carty wondered if he would ever get the chance to box in Dublin at all. Now, he practically has a residency there, having earned two stoppage victories on Matchroom’s Katie Taylor-Chantelle Cameron cards last year.
The next step will be to get his own face on the poster, but the 28-year-old ‘Bomber’ (8-0, 7KOs) must first look after business against Argentinian opponent Jonathan Exequiel Vergara (6-1, 3KOs) in the chief support bout tonight.
“We know the run of the place now,” Carty smiles. “The Carty Party know the run of the place and know how long it takes to get back to the pub and stuff. So yeah, no, it’s all good.
“I’m on the crest of this wave of Irish boxing returning to Dublin in the 3Arena. It’s great timing and I think I’ve really made the most of it.”
Carty’s undercard bouts at the venue have quickly become an event in their own right, hence 360 Promotions’ decision to grant him the second-last slot before headliner Walsh tonight.
The Dubliner is among pro boxing’s more gregarious characters, a well-spoken sort who is typically respectful of his opponents.
But when Glasgow’s Jay McFarlane visited these shores for Carty’s 3Arena debut, the home fighter was forced to change tack.
McFarlane became the antichrist during fight week, even donning a Shamrock Rovers jersey during the weigh-in as a means of antagonising Carty, a Bohemians diehard. That much worked, but it cost him a painful night. Carty dropped the Scot three times, halting him in the third and taking the roof off a feral fight venue.
“He really brought out the best of me and I rose to the occasion,” Carty says of McFarlane and his 3Arena bow last May.
“I thought at the time that there was an awful lot of pressure. I said, ‘Jeez, all the talk this fella is doing. I can’t let him beat me now — a Rovers jersey?!’
“Everybody was loving it that week. The atmosphere for my fight was nuts and then, I hate to say it, but everybody left and went to the bar straight after that for a couple of fights.
“Apparently the stadium emptied and it didn’t fill back up until Katie. Apparently, now — I didn’t see it.”
In fairness, it was plenty full for Gary Cully’s chief support bout — but Carty is right that it was a lot emptier at 8pm than it had been an hour earlier, a sign of his ticket-selling power in his own city.
Carty is managed by British heavyweight world-title challenger Dillian Whyte, and he routinely posts pictures from the training camps of the world’s top heavyweights who draft him in for sparring.
A six-foot-four southpaw with natural speed and high-level amateur pedigree, Carty was as solid an Oleksandr Usyk tribute act as Anthony Joshua or Tyson Fury could have found anywhere in the world as they prepared for their recent bouts with the Ukrainian great.
But such sparring is, of course, symbiotic, and it has taught Carty plenty on either side of the ropes.
“Like the way, the way I see it myself, it was an eye-opening experience to spar these guys — and spar them on a regular basis, too, to be completely honest: ‘AJ’, Fury, this, that and the other.
“And I think I’m ranked around 80th or something in the world at the moment — out of, say 1,500 active heavyweight boxers, I’m in the top 80, top 90 in the world already after very few fights.
“But the margins from the guys who are in the top 90 to the top 10 are really small.
“Like, it’s not that it’s not a million miles away. It’s still quite a significant difference. But I’m nearly four years a pro now — three and a bit — and what I’ve discovered is that the difference is experience. And it’s a cliché, and I hate using clichés, but you really cannot buy experience.
“Not just in the ring but even experience doing media, stuff like this, and at different levels as it gets bigger and bigger. It’s all part of it.
“The stakes get higher and you need experience. You can’t just be dropped in at the top, you know? You need to build to it.”
Carty, unlike most boxers at a similar juncture in their careers, is a full-time athlete, a luxury partly made possible by sponsors.
He has no idea how peers in the sport find the time to train professionally while holding down other employment. “My missus will ask me to drop her to work”, he says, “and I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh, God, that’ll be 20 minutes….’ Y’know what I mean? I barely have time as it is!”
Carty, who is plainly intelligent but didn’t enjoy school, understood fully the risk of choosing boxing as his career path, even if family members and teachers were far less understanding. He reckons a lot of them considered him a “waster” for a period of time. But they’ll be at the 3Arena tonight. Their kids will be wearing his t-shirts. That much is satisfying.
And Carty knows it could all end earlier than scheduled, too, in which case he’ll have to make a dramatic career change. But the aim for the moment is to keep chasing better opportunities, bigger paychecks, and a life more interesting than most.
“Like, as soon as I stop enjoying it as a whole, I’m finished,” he says of boxing.
“Like, whether I wind up doing what I want to do in the sport or not, I really enjoy what I do.
“I don’t have a boss, I’m my own boss. D’you know what I mean? I don’t have a time to be in work or anything like that, or have any issues with anybody above me. The buck stops with me, I like the set-up.
“The ceiling for me in terms of what I want to do in boxing, I’d be happy once I secure myself financially. But what keeps me in this sport, I think, is that competitive edge, I suppose.
“Like, if I wasn’t boxing today and I was working a job, I’d be doing something on the side, some kind of sport or something that I would have to be the best at.
“When I do something, I do it properly — and it’s not often I do anything to be completely honest — but if I do something I do it right. When I clean the house, I don’t just tidy it up — it’s absolutely sparkling, industrial-style.
“Same with boxing: I’ll do it fully and with all my best effort and best intentions or I just won’t bother at all.”
Thomas Carty takes on Jonathan Exequiel Vergara at Walsh v Runowski at the 3Arena tonight. Tickets are available via Ticketmaster.ie.
