Even now, a couple of weeks later, I still have to pinch myself – I remember I am world champion and think “How did this happen?”
ON THE long Arabian night when Oleksandr Usyk became the first boxer this century to hold all four main heavyweight belts and made a decent claim to be one of the greatest of all time, the crowd in Riyadh, which of course included Cristiano Ronaldo, was treated to one of the other great staples of the fight game – a real-life Rocky story.
Anthony Cacace’s life is Cinderella Man re-imagined in the 21st century in West Belfast. With his shock defeat of Joe Cordina on the Usyk-Tyson Fury undercard, he became Ireland’s first world super-featherweight champion. It was the realisation of a dream he has held since he first walked across the road from his house to the Oliver Plunkett’s gym in Andersonstown.
It has been anything but a straight route to the top, however. There have been roads that led nowhere. Big, career-defining fights cancelled at the eleventh hour. He has changed trainers and managers on more than a few occasions. He had to pick up casual work on building sites and in Subway just to keep putting food on the table for his young family.
All the while, he never gave up on his dream. Kept his vision of one day coming home to ‘Andytown’ as a world champion, something that now, at 35 years of age, he is able to do.
‘It’s all worth it now,’ Cacace chortles over Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s a couple of weeks since he came home to a hero’s reception in West Belfast as the IBF super-featherweight champion, having shocked the boxing world by stopping the Welshman in the eighth round.
‘Even now, a couple of weeks later, I still have to pinch myself, when I am walking around the house and then, I just remember that I am world champion and I think “my God, how did this happen?”
‘There was plenty of times when I didn’t think it would. And there were hundreds of times down the years when I thought about hanging up the gloves, there were times when I was basically retired and it wasn’t my decision,’ he recalls with a sigh.
‘I hadn’t boxed in two years and I didn’t know if I would ever get another fight. Opponents were pulling out, couldn’t get opponents and you just wonder if this might be it. So, yeah I worked in Nico’s pizza restaurant, who are now one of my sponsors, there were weeks I was doing delivery six nights a week. I made sandwiches in Subway, spent time on site, did a spot of landscape gardening, all this was just to get by, raise a family. And yeah, it’s all worth it now.’
Even his moment of glory didn’t arrive without a hitch. Originally, his showdown with Cordina was supposed to be in February but it was postponed because of an injury suffered by Fury in training. The Welshman honoured his obligation, for which Cacace is eternally grateful. ‘Joe Cordina is a man of honour and there are few enough of them in this game,’ he says.
And despite having seen the dark side of the pro game, all the broken promises and missed opportunities, Cacace insists that he never fell out of love with the sport. ‘For me, this is an addiction. It is something that runs deep in my life, it is all I know what to do and I don’t know how not to do it. It has always been within me. It has always been there, always will be.’
Cacace calls himself the ‘Andytown Apache’ but he also considers himself an Italian-Irishman. He is just as proud of his Italian heritage – his father comes from a small village outside Sorrento – as his Belfast roots. Tony Cacace met Irene when she was travelling through Italy in the 1970s. He was so smitten that he left his village in the hills of Naples and followed her back to her native West Belfast. Just when the Troubles were at their darkest.
‘My dad landed over in Belfast at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s. To this flat in West Belfast. It must have been some cultural shock. But my dad is a wee legend, he even adopted the Andytown accent.’
They moved into an estate in Andersonstown, where a young Anto would wander into the Oliver Plunkett’s boxing club one day. ‘Patsy McAllister and Anto Taylor in that club, they took me under their wing. They saw that I had a bit of talent and they did everything to nurture it.’
Boxing had competition for his attention in the early days as he played some soccer – his greatgrandfather lined out for the great Belfast Celtic team – and also GAA with St Agnes, where he still has many friends. ‘I did it all growing up, played the Gaelic and hurling for Aggies, which is the maddest GAA club in the world. I have some great memories from those days and still have some great friends from there.’
He was a decent amateur and given his raw talent, he could have been part of the medal factory that Gary Keegan and Billy Walsh were building in South Circular Road. But as he admits now, life got in the way during his late teens.
‘I suppose I do look back on my amateur days with a bit of regret, because people thought I was good enough to do something. But when you are 16 and 17, there are girls, there is drinking at the weekends, that wee bit of life that you think you are missing out because you are stuck in a gym. I was there, but was fortunate enough to understand what was needed to become a top fighter, so I came back from that. I wish I would have concentrated more on my amateur days, but those days are well gone and I am pretty happy where I am now.’
The past few weeks has been about shining a different light on Andersonstown, showing a side of it that so rarely gets seen in the media.
Cacace feels that he has a responsibility to show that so many good people can come out of his estate. And everyone appreciates that. He has lost count of the number of times that he has been stopped in the street. He has taken to bringing the belts around in the boot of his car because everyone wants a picture with them.
This is what life is like when you are on top of the world, somewhere Anto Cacace did doubt he would ever be, when he was turning over soil or making sandwiches in a Subway, just to put bread on the table. It is a story we should all get behind – a genuine modern-day Cinderella Man. The pity is that the pro game so rarely appears on the public radar these days, that Cacace’s achievement went largely unnoticed – and Saudi’s increased influence on the fight game is hardly going to arrest the decline in public interest.
But that doesn’t matter to Cacace, who is finally sitting at the summit after a career of broken promises and cancelled fights. ‘It’s mad, life has been completely surreal in the last few weeks, but in a good way,’ says a boxer who proves that sometimes the best things come to those who wait.
‘HUNDREDS OF TIMES I THOUGHT OF HANGING UP THE GLOVES’