BY JOHN FITZGERALD
At 92, Jimmy Walsh is still head coach at Callan Boxing club, but he believes he wouldn’t occupy that exalted position in his hometown had it not been for some timely medical interventions
In particular, Jimmy told me he’s grateful to what he calls a top-class family of doctors. He told me the story.
It began on October 12, 1950. Jimmy was unloading timber at Fiddown Toll Bridge for transportation to a mine in Wales. Some lengths of timber fell from the lorry, taking Jimmy with them.
A thighbone was shattered and he could see it cutting through the flesh. He has never forgotten the pain that convulsed his whole body. He called for help, for relief from an agony beyond endurance.
At that moment, a man was standing at the end of the Toll Bridge about to pay his fare. Seeing and hearing the commotion, he rushed to the scene of the accident. It was Dr Anthony Ryan from Portlaw.
Luckily, he had his medical equipment with him. Wasting no time, he gave Jimmy an injection to quell the pain and then attended to the injury. Jimmy spent four months in hospital and had to walk with crutches for several weeks after that.
But he got back on his feet and was soon boxing, hurling, and dancing again, in between working as a demolition expert. He blew up tree stumps and old buildings, and no man in the district knew more about the correct and effective use of gelignite than Jimmy did. When people heard an explosion, they knew that Jimmy had removed an obstruction of some kind -whether natural or manmade- from the landscape.
The years passed, with Jimmy fending off a spate of hard knocks and health upsets.
The arrival of Dr Jim Ryan in Callan as a GP was a milestone in Jimmy’s life. The new doctor was the son of Dr Anthony Ryan who had rushed to his aid at Fiddown Bridge all those years before. Dr. Ryan became involved with the Callan Boxing Club, so he got to see a lot of Jimmy on the local sporting scene as well as in a medical capacity.
If the memory of the Fiddown accident is still strong for Jimmy, so also is the day he suffered a heart attack about ten years ago. Dr. Ryan saw to him immediately and conveyed him to hospital, where he made a gradual recovery.
He recalls “As I lay there in St Luke’s, being well looked after, I mused on the fact that the two doctors to whom I owed my life were father and son.”
More recently, Jimmy concluded that life saving could run in some families when another doctor introduced himself to him. This was Dr. Anthony Ryan, son of Dr Jim Ryan and called after his grandfather who was present at Fiddown Bridge in 1950.
He gave Jimmy a checkup of the kind that all of us should have now and again, and Jimmy’s mind travelled back to his first encounter with the Ryan clan.
Thanks in large part to his doctors, he remains, at 92, Head Coach at Callan Boxing Club. Though not as active nowadays, he still offers advice and shares his boundless wisdom.
Over the decades, he has won scores of fights. Along with another famed local man, Johnny Donovan, he fought his way across Ireland and Britain, eliciting glowing reviews from sport writers- and he has a vast collection of awards for dancing, as I mentioned in a previous article.
In 2016, the IABA initiated Jimmy into the Boxing Hall of Fame for Coaching. At one point, he coached the great Clare Grace, and he has kick-started many a boxing career.
Reflecting on a long and action-packed life, Jimmy says, “I believe that God somehow gave me a helping hand, through the healing hands of these good men…three generations of life-savers.”
