All work and no play in western world as Murray's journey nears destination

Small town, big fight. Put yourself in the boxer's boots. So you pack up, kiss Annette and the kids goodbye and leave the sheltered streets of Cavan Town. Off to camp; mad for road. First, a quick succession of hamlets and towns. Ballinagh, Killydoon, Ballymahon, Edgeworthstown, Granard and Longford. Take a right in Athlone, you're on the open road and you'll start to see the stone walls, the patchy grass, the brilliantly-Irish place-names. The lone sparrow hawks gliding silently along the motorway, watching for the road-kill. Into the west you go. Van full of boxing gloves and humming with fighting chat, you watch the signposts. On the edge of Galway, veer for Clifden and, suddenly, the path narrows and begins to wind. Onwards. "Fáilte go Maigh Cuilinn" reads the notice as you hit the Gaeltacht. The pretty village of Oughterard, the rippling river and flower beds, is next, halfway between city and deepest country. You take a left at Maam Cross and down a narrow, twisting boreen. A filthy black ram looks on derisively, chewing his cud as the little flagstones on the left-hand verge list out the otherwise-indistinguishable townlands. An Gort Mór, Inbhear, Turlach, Ros Dubh, An Tamhnaigh Bhig, Snámh Bó. This is different. And, at last, here's Ros Muc. A school and a gym and you feel that familiar tingle. Home, for six weeks at least. Perched on the shores of a ring-shaped lake, a puddle in the endless miles of bare, open country, ten days out from the fight of his life, Andy Murray rests for a while, furrows his brow and lets the talk flow. His voice is low and serious but friendly too. "Maybe if I was walking around Cavan I'd be stopping down the road telling the same story 20 times," he smiles. "There's no harm, people are meaning all the best but you know yourself, the last couple of weeks, getting close to your weight, you're fighting fit but you do get a wee bit agitated. "You're chomping at the bit to get it at it. You're just anxious. Your weight's down and you like to be left alone, to have peace and down here you can't get any better... We locked ourselves away in the middle of nowhere but we've been totally focused on our training and the job in hand. We've kept working hard, every morning, every evening and the strength and conditioning is an added bonus in Galway. The main thing is the rest and recovery and staying away from distractions." The last part isn't a problem out here. Ros Muc is the most remote part of a wilderness. The up-and-down, guttural yet lilting language fills the air where people gather - the school, the tiny chapel, the boxing club, the football field delved from the rock, small homes from where the light shines sideways across the stones. Here on the edge of Europe, the ancient tongue is more alive, according to the census, than anywhere else on this island. Not that it's loud; far from it. The longest time of the day is the evening. The company is good (sparring partner Peter McDonagh, a brash Cockney with Connemara roots who, says Brian McKeown, "is one of these lads who never lost a fight", will keep you talking) but rest is vital. After the storm, the calm. "I was talking with Brian Peters and he said 'I want you to be totally focused on this, this is the big chance and I want you to make the most of it. I don't want you travelling up and down to Belfast like you've been doing, I want you to be totally relaxed between each session'... Brian said to me, 'Jaysus Andrew it's very remote' but I knew that, I was told that and that's what I want. " Calling this training "a session" is like dismissing World War Two as a skirmish. Murray's the hardest-working boxer ever sent out from Cavan, the first man into the gym and the last to leave. Eight-time Irish champion Mick Dowling has described Andy as "fanatical about his fitness" and it shows in his physique; Murray thrives on hard toil and glows with the vitality it brings. "I get up just after six, I go for my run," he says matter-of-factly, "we go different tracks on different days, John [Breen, trainer] likes us to vary the runs from half an hour to 40 minutes. You go at a steady pace. You'd time it and try to improve it every day. You'd only do half an hour to 36 minutes, that's all he wants you doing because there's no point... I'm not a marathon runner. "He wants you to push yourself because you're working hard the whole time. In a fight, you're not going to be working completely flat out for three minutes but you have that in reserve. You're more or less conditioning your body. "Come back here, a bit of breakfast, come back to bed, which is nice. We'd either go back to the gym at two, or later, it depends. Some days I'd be after being in Galway doing strength and conditioning work or working on my legs and overall strength. "I have been doing that three days a week, this week cut down to two, next week one. It's just more or less passing time in the evenings, I don't find it too bad. You come in, have your dinner, watch TV. I'd be in bed at half nine or ten o'clock anyway. Ring home, get the newspaper, you just get through it. It'd be worse if you were in prison, but it's alright." The afternoon training Murray glosses over is the toughest of all. On the day we spoke, the penultimate in his programme, he went three rounds with McDonagh, a stone heavier at welterweight ("Andy can win this fight, no problem," the likeable "Connemara Kid" confided afterwards, adding with typical modesty "and I'll win Prizefighter on June 7 too") before going three more with Phil Gill, a tigerish 10-0 prospect from London brought in to mirror opponent Gavin Rees' style. The fighting is intense and the sit-ups, shadow-boxing and neck exercises which follow are exhausting. Andy moves well, coach John Breen watching the clock and throwing in just the odd word of encouragement. McKeown gazes on intently, intermittently instructing Murray to land the "third punch! third punch!" in his combinations. He drops the game Gill with a crisp left hook, but the fledgling pro bounces back up, touches gloves and goes at it again. There are no cheap shots, just as there are no short cuts. Murray has never trained as hard before; he has never endured such pre-fight isolation, where being cut off from family and friends not only limits distractions but increases motivation. Murray is a fighting man, but he's a family man, and being away from them hurts. "At the end of the day this is all for them," he says quietly. "Short term pain for long term gain. I'll be with them next week and that's it, it's only a couple of weeks away but at the end of the day, it's all for them. "That's it, everything I'm doing now is for my kids and my missus so... Boxing is something I've been doing all my life, win or lose... Losing, I'm not afraid of that. I'll just get stuck in and this camp has put me in a good position where I can pull it off." McKeown, godfather to Murray's daughter, is more or less family too. He's been there all the way, from Murray's days in the vest, in the ramshackle National Stadium, in Poland, France and the UK, when they trained in the shabby old O'Rahilly Hall in Ballinagh, through to the O2 Arena and the MEN in Manchester. An ever-present in the corner, bearded, growling and helping. Murray, he said, was a kid who "constantly surprised him", and he grew to be one of the best amateurs in the country before turning over. He was always slick and stylish but, behind it, hard as a coffin nail. McKeown tells a good story by way of illustration. "We had travelled over to London, the basic idea was to go to two or three of the pro gyms and see what interest we could create. Andy was training for the Ulster and Irish Seniors and we were thinking of a pro career if he hadn't won those. We landed over and made a few contacts and sparred the first day against boys who were pretty basic, they were just journeymen, but the big one was the second night. We went over to the Dale Youth Club where both [James] DeGale and [George] Groves came through and yer man said, 'You're going to the other place'. "So we walked round the corner, just nearly opposite Queen Park Rangers' football ground, down two or three streets, and we went into this place, it was a lock-up garage. They pulled the door up, and standing around inside were seven or eight different hard-cases, faces in boxing. Gangsters. Straight away, you knew you were in the real world. "Andy went to spar with a fella, a southpaw, who was the ABA champion, called Lee Beavis. The small gloves were put on, no head guards, six three-minute rounds. Basically a pro fight. We went in that night, it was an excellent spar, Beavis was a top kid, very, very tough but in all honesty Andrew really dominated and boxed the ears off him. "They came out after six threes and we went into the changing room to get showered and this fella was getting changed and he turned around and says to Andrew "fair play, Paddy, I never thought I'd see anyone do that to Beavis in his own gym" and that summed it up. "As we left there, several managers were interested. Not long after, we heard that Lee Beavis was involved in an assault and was given a lengthy jail sentence. That's the way it goes." The grizzled coach's story resonates here in this western world as the now 28-year-old rattles the speed bag; there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed, as Synge wrote of this place. While Andrew Murray, a fresh-faced lad of 21 with a big rep and a tight haircut, was making his way and his name in the paid game, learning the ropes and how to stay off them around the London gyms, Beavis, his English counterpart, paced his cell during three years' porridge for his part in an assault which led to the death of a teenager in Ealing in the west of the big city. The diverging paths of nascent stars... Skip a few miles and a few years more down that road less travelled of Murray's, and Andy found himself back in England this past March on the undercard to Paul McCloskey (and John Breen's) crack at WBA 147-pound king Amir Khan. The Cavanman's record now 23-0, he worked hard in training, lit the fuse, but failed to ignite on fight night, labouring to an unimpressive five rounds to three win over gritty Yorkshireman Graeme Higginson. The message board warriors were quick to dismiss Murray's title chances, but deeper inspection showed that, with this title fight as good as signed, the fighter billed by Peters as the Quiet Man (the movie partly shot at obscure little Maam, incidentally) had a reason for holding back. Why show your hand, or risk your 0, by taking unnecessary chances? "I was fighting on the other side of the water against a Hatton fighter on a Hatton show," recalls Murray, hinting at the darker side of the sweet science. "You just can't give too much away there, there were a few rounds that they had closer than I thought they would have been and I was just glad to get through it. I kept plenty in reserve, I just boxed comfortably enough, he never really pushed me too much so I just got the rounds in. As John said, approach it as part of your training for this, which it was. I only had a couple of days off, I was fit, I'd done an eight-rounder [before coming into camp for the Rees fight] so I've been going at this for a long time now." The amateur experience built up over a decade and more with Cavan BC and various national teams has given Murray a pedigree few in the pro ranks, domestically at least, can match. Fighting in drab eastern European towns against robotic foreigners, with hostile crowds and partisan officials, as a teenage boy is preparation for much of what the sport has to throw at him as a man. "I've done it before and I think that's why I'm probably so relaxed about it because at the end of the day, you have to do it in the ring because that's where all the action takes place. You could lose a fight going in there but I don't look at it that way, I have to hit him more times than he hits me. "As an amateur coming up, I never thought that I would be an Irish senior champion. I was Irish senior champion three times, I defended it twice. I think I was more or less going on to see how far I could go in this sport. I was a good trainer, good listener and I was improving all the time. I took well to the professional game and I started making a few waves over in London, a lot of people were talking about me..." A lot of people still are. Over 100 will travel from Cavan Town and environs to the Welsh capital this weekend, while almost 500 made the trek to Breaffy House to see Murray stretch his record to 23-0 against Brazilian banger Claudenei Lacerda last November. "I heard it's been picking up the last couple of weeks. Being down here, I haven't been picking up too much of it, which is good because I want to just go into the ring and be totally relaxed and focused. "It [the support] helps you sometimes, it keeps you going. Being away too, they're going to have to be in good voice to keep me going. It's not that I mind, I'm still going to have to do it anyway. I've often thought that if I win a title, I'm going to have to go away, so... so be it. I'm not the first man to go away to win a title and I won't be the last. It's a tough job in hand but it has to be done." That job of work sounds dangerously-straightforward; stand on a 20x20 feet square of canvas and trade blows with a stranger, a Welshman, for 36 minutes. Hit him more than he hits you, as Murray says. Someone's waist will be strapped with the spoils of war by closing time, someone else will be beaten up. That's the terrible beauty of the hardest game. A good start, says Andy, is everything, and you sense he means it. A good start... "I can't let Gavin Rees dictate the pace at any stage," he says, emphasising "can't" as his eyes tighten. "I have to get into a rhythm early, not let the crowd get behind him and give him confidence. Keep it tight in the early rounds and hopefully my conditioning will keep me there. I've always done that, got better and better as a fight goes on. I can't give him any easy rounds, let him get some confidence because then it's an uphill struggle. "I'm expecting him to be totally fit, you can't really look at his last performance and I don't want to. I expect the best Gavin Rees on the night and I just have to better on the night. I'll stick to my game plan. That last performance of Rees', when he won the British title against John Watson seven months ago, saw him fade halfway through before pulling it out in the penultimate round, revealing, perhaps, a hidden weakness which Murray can expose. "I'm going to have to get a good start, stay in the fight early and I'm going to have to answer a few questions in the later rounds when it's going to get tough. I haven't had as many tough fights as him so hopefully I'll be fresher, younger, hungrier than him and it'll see me through in the end." In Connemara, Murray has worked so hard, he didn't know the colour of the sky. As you read, the agony is over, the dog days, of camp and career, have bled and sweated into one and are complete. Welcome to the waiting game. Saturday will come, though. The Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff, via the little grey Ros Muc boxing haven, a converted handball alley along the side of a tiny road in a deserted parish, hands wrapped, gloves laced, an arm raised, a belt won. Lives changed. And we have reached our destination.