The late Ollie Browne Death of the only Kerry boxer ever to have won a national senior c'chip title. John Barry writes about the late Ollie Browne, of Tralee, who died last week. Not alone did Browne make boxing history, but he trained Kilgarvan town three county SHC titles in the 1950s. Tralee man, Ollie Browne, who died last week, held the great distinction of being the only Kerry man ever to have won a national senior boxing title. It resulted in the Hall of fame Award being conferred on him at the 2001 Kerry Sports Stars Banquet in the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney. Browne, who was aged 84, won the Irish bantamweight title in 1940 in just his 20th competitive bout and, indeed, his club, Desmond Boxing Club, didn't want him to have a crack at the Irish championship that year because of his inexperience. He had been beaten in the Munster flyweight final the the previous year in Limerick by a boxer called "Mugsy" Ryan and the fact that he had come along in the 1939/'40 season and had reversed the result with Ryan in the Munster bantamweight final didn't carry too much weight with the club members. In a interview after he had been chosen as Kerry Hall of Fame winner for 2001. Browne said "To be truthful about it, the club thought that I had no chance of winning the Irish senior title. However, one of the members, Johnny Morgan, stood up at a meeting and said that he would take me to Dublin at his own expense if the club wasn't prepared to meet the cost. "That changed the minds of the people at the meeting and off I went to Dublin in Pa Ryan's taxi. I stayed near the National Stadium where the Championships were taking place, and the rest, as they say, is history." Browne scored a knockout victory in the first fight and cruised through to the final against against Myles "Blackman" Doyle, from Dublin. It wasn't expected that he would beat Ryan, a tremendous favourite with the Dublin fans, but, in front of an attendance of 2,000 at the National Stadium, he scored a technical knock-out victory in the first round, with Doyle having to retire because of a split eye. The news was quickly relayed to Tralee and there was a terrific welcome awaiting Browne on his return home. A cavalcade of cars met him in Castleisland and accompanied him to Austin Stack Park where the Tralee Catholic Boy Scouts Band was waiting to lead a parade to his home in Railway Terrace. He had become the stuff of legends. "That parade is something I will always fondly remember," recalled Browne in his Hall of Fame interview. "A man called Owen Liston carried the cup and replica I had won and it was wonderful to come back into your own town and be treated as a hero like that. "All the papers were full of my victory and the Irish Independent had a banner headline across the back page which read: "Kerry Boy Wins Title." Ollie Browne had come a long way in a remarkably short time. Born on June21, 1920, he had never fought as a juvenile and he only took an interest in boxing when his father, Richard, who was from Cork, sent away for a set of gloves, using coupons which he received for smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes. He subsequently joined Desmond Boxing Club and as it turned out, he quickly showed a lot of natural talent under the watchful eye of the club's coach, an Army man was named Percy Dunne, who was attached to Ballymullen Barracks. "My feet were very good and I was very fast with the hands: I had a particularly good right hand and I suppose I had I had good boxing sense as well," recalled Browne. However, when he met "Mugsy" Ryan in the Munster lightweight final of 1938/'39, he was very much a novice in the sport and he learned a lot from the experience. This was proved a year later when he beat Ryan to take the Munster bantamweight title. His great Irish title victory followed in the National Stadium and he strongly maintained that he should have been adjudged the winner the following year as well. It was to be a re-match with "Blackman" Doyle in the national final and Browne said that he outfought the Dublin man in every one of the three rounds. "It was very hard to get a result against a Dublin boxer in the National Stadium, at that time anyway, but even the partisan Dublin crowd knew that I had had got a raw deal," said Browne in his interview. "It was wonderful to become the first Kerry man to win a national senior title but it would have been something else to have done it two years in a row." That defeat at the hands of Doyle cost Browne a trip to America, but there was a consolation prize of a trip to Poland. However, the second World War intervened and Browne couldn't travel. Luckily so. "If I had gone to Poland, I would have been in Warsaw when the German invasion took place, so I had reasons to count my blessings there," he said. Browne, was, however, to travel all over Ireland to boxing tournaments in the years that followed and he recorded a huge series of victories. He also boxed with success in England. During his entire career, he was knocked out only once. It happened at a tournament in Dingle and the knockout punch was delivered by a man called Leahy from Listowel. "I had beaten him easily when I met him before that and, to tell you the truth, it was pure carelessness on my part," he recalled in his Hall of Fame interview, conducted in January of 2002. "He was only a young fellow starting off, but he had a desperate dig and he caught me with one of his best. It took me two years to get him back into the same ring and there was, I can tell you, no repeat." Browne, who ran a physiotherapy business in Tralee for over 40 years, took a keen interest in the GAA and, in fact, he trained the Kilgarvan team which won three county senior hurling championship titles in the 1950s (1953, 1956 and 1958). He also trained the hurlers of Mallow for a period, as well as the footballers of Kenmare. In his Hall of Fame interview, he offered this opinion about boxing today: "The system of judging is the most stupid thing in the world and the form of headgear being used is a sweat of a thing as well. "But I suppose they'll hardly pay too much attention to me." Courtesy of the Kerryman August 2004 Tweet

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