How do you get back on your feet again after life has delivered the ultimate punch?
Barry McGuigan, former featherweight champion of the world, could answer the question like a boxer, talking about things like resilience, mental attitude and physical strength. Yet he doesn’t.
He tells me that when he flew home from the celebrity jungle this week, he climbed the stairs to bed, physically and mentally exhausted – ‘don’t let anyone tell you that show isn’t a real test of endurance’– then went to pull the bedcovers back.
‘And do you know what was in there? Snakes and spiders – toy ones, but realistic! The grandchildren had sneaked up to our bedroom and put them under the covers. The little brats! I got them on the WhatsApp later. I said “Who did this? You’ve frightened the life out of me”. They were laughing their heads off.’
As is Barry, now, which is a joy to witness because he has also cried copiously during this interview, his first since flying home from the I’m A Celebrity camp.
A sense of humour is in the McGuigan blood, he says.
‘Our daughter Nika would have been laughing her head off at the sight of me in the jungle, too. Her brothers have that same sense of humour, and I can see it coming through in the grandchildren.’
All hail the grandchildren in these cruel circumstances, it seems.
‘They have saved us,’ nods Barry. ‘We have seven of them now. When we lost Nika, her older brother Blain and his wife moved in with us, bringing their three kids, too. Having grandkids makes you get up in the morning, even if you don’t want to.
‘When you reach the stage of thinking “What is the point?”, you think of the responsibility to them, so you get up. They don’t give you a choice.’
All seven of Barry McGuigan’s grandchildren were born to his three sons, who have followed him into the boxing industry. His only daughter, his beloved Danika, would have loved to have been a mother, but she never got the chance.
Barry and his wife Sandra are heartbroken after losing their daughter Nika
Barry and daughter Nika on a night out in London in 2011
Actress Nika, ‘who was on track to be a superstar’, says her dad, died five years ago, aged just 33, from colon cancer.
The timescale involved is still hard for Barry and his wife Sandra – who is at his side today, as she has been his whole life – to comprehend.
‘It was Stage 4 when they picked it up,’ Sandra says. ‘And from there until we lost her, it was only five weeks, no time at all. When Nika passed, we were still at the stage of ricocheting off the walls.’
To lose a child is the worst sort of loss. Yet over the past few weeks, Barry’s grief has been played out in front of millions. The sporting legend was always going to be a popular addition to the I’m A Celebrity camp, and as the oldest contestant his position as ‘camp dad’ was assured.
But no one could have predicted that the ‘tough aul boy’, as he describes himself, would provide one of the most moving moments in the show’s entire history.
Asked by a fellow contestant about the tattoo of a ‘pretty girl’ on his arm, he sobbed openly about Nika’s death. Rarely has a father’s grief been laid so bare. Sandra admits that this was exactly what she had feared might happen.
‘It was the one thing I worried about – how he would react if the subject of Nika came up. We had cried about it, obviously. We’ve been crying for five years, really, but we’ve done it at home.
‘If I’m being honest, we’ve hibernated for five years. I was worried about Barry being out in public. I knew if he broke down, he could really break down.’ He did break down – and it seems that viewers only saw a small part of it.
‘Afterwards, the producers brought in the show’s psychologist to talk to me, and I have to say I just bawled with her. They asked me if I wanted to call it a day, and go home, but I said no.’
Why? He says the very public process helped him accept that tears are simply a part of him now. He has no time for the viewers who expressed surprise that he wept openly, or saw it as a weakness.
If younger generations will remember him for being the man who cried in the jungle, rather than a hardman boxer, then he will take that. ‘I don’t think it makes me less manly because I cry when I think about my daughter,’ he says. ‘I don’t give a f*** about all that s***. Excuse my vulgarity, but I really don’t care.
‘She meant everything to me, to us. Her brothers can’t even talk about it now. I couldn’t for a long time. I still find it so hard, but I’ve accepted that when I talk about her, I am going to cry.’
So much about Barry McGuigan is old-school. There has been no formal grief counselling here – ‘no offence to these people, but they couldn’t help me because they can’t bring her back’ – but he seems utterly shocked, and touched, at the unofficial grief therapy that came in the camp, via his celebrity ‘family’.
As soon as he started to cry, everyone moved towards him, rather than away. ‘I was stunned, watching,’ says Sandra. ‘People can recoil from grief. They can not know what to say, feel uncomfortable. But these guys hugged Barry, and you could see they were upset for him, but also there for him.’
It made for genuinely emotive – and revealing – TV, as each of the contestants opened up about their own losses. Coleen Rooney spoke about the death of her sister. Danny Jones (the eventual winner) spoke about being estranged from his dad.
Today, Barry couldn’t speak more highly about both of them, even suggesting they were surrogate children, in that jungle, and will be ‘friends for life’.
‘Danny is the same age as my boys, and reminded me so much of them. Coleen is a similar age to Nika too, and she looked after me like a daughter would. In the morning I’d go to brush my teeth and get back and she’d have made my bed for me. She’s a great lassie, the sort of person who doesn’t say much, but just gets on with it. She’s a great mother, and just a kind, genuine person.’
Outside the jungle, as the (real life) families gathered, other friendships were being forged.
‘All the families fly out, and I got really close to Coleen’s mum and Danny’s mum,’ reveals Sandra. ‘The others called us Zig, Zag and Zog, or the Golden Girls. Colette (Coleen’s mum) and I joked about how Barry and her husband could have been twins. Obviously, she’d lost a daughter too, so she understood.’
Then there was celebrity vicar Rev Richard Coles. Barry and he had long chats about faith.
Before, Barry was a regular churchgoer who, during his playing days, would visit a particular order of nuns to pray before every fight. He no longer prays. When he talks of God today, it is not with reverence, but anger. ‘I am angry, yes. Richard said “He’s still there for you”, but I just can’t come to terms with the fact that someone I prayed to so much, someone I went to with… hopelessness, could allow my daughter to die in such circumstances.
‘How can there be a God that can allow that to happen? She was such a great kid. She was so kind and funny and generous. And she had so much living still to do.’
Sandra touches his arm. ‘She also had a great life, love. She met wonderful people, she did what she really loved…’
He shakes his head.
‘I know that, Sandra. But she’s no longer here, is she?’
Barry and Sandra celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary today. They have never not been together, really. Childhood sweethearts, they grew up together in the small Irish border town of Clones.
‘We lived literally across the road from each other so it was never a case of “When we met”,’ says Sandra.
When Barry was seven years old, he asked her to marry him, ‘and presented me with this ring he’d found in the garden’. Barry smiles across the sofa. ‘She still has it.’
Their love story was – and is – extraordinary, the stuff of films, with an epic backdrop. In Ulster, their respective religions (he is a Catholic; she is a Protestant) mattered, but they very publicly made the point that it should not, and that – as Barry puts it – ‘the message should be about tolerance and love, not about what side you belonged to’.
What nifty footwork it took to unite the two communities behind him. Barry famously rejected the idea of fighting under either the British or Irish flag, and opted for the neutral colours of the UN flag, and refused to allow either the British or Irish national anthems to be played.
He always entered the ring to the strains of Danny Boy. When ‘The Clones Cyclone’ took on – and beat – the then world champion Eusebio Pedroza, 18.9million TV viewers tuned in.
The couple with their children Jake, Blain, Shane and Nika when they were growing up
He’s proud that he played a part in uniting a community that seemed beyond unity.
‘Those from both sides travelled to see me. Even if that peace only lasted while I was in the ring, it was something.’
Of course, The Troubles touched them. Sandra talks movingly today about the death of her cousin, in one of the most incomprehensible terrorist attacks. Kathryn Eakin was just eight when she became the youngest victim of an IRA bomb in Claudy in 1972. Sandra had spent the week on holiday with her before it happened.
‘And then I saw how the death of a child rips a family apart, how it is never the same again, because my aunt Merle (Kathryn’s mother) never recovered. I thought I understood, then, but it wasn’t until we lost Nika that I really understood what it is to lose a child. Does it get easier? No, I don’t think it does.’
Nika, the McGuigans’ second child, arrived in 1986. There were early worries about her health. As a baby she suffered convulsions, and at 11 she was diagnosed with leukaemia. At the time, Barry was in Dublin, training the actor Daniel Day-Lewis to fight for the movie The Boxer. He left the set immediately.
‘Daniel said to me, “Get out of here, Barry, go home”. Jim Sheridan (the film’s director) was amazing, too. They’ve remained great friends.
‘Actually when Nika passed, Daniel came straight over. He stayed with us for three days, and just put his arms around us. It’s amazing really, a busy fella like that.’
Nika was desperately ill during that first cancer fight, but ‘she came through it’, says Barry.
When she got the all-clear, she threw herself into life with gusto. ‘She thought we’d mollycoddled her so insisted on going to boarding school for a few years,’ recalls Sandra.
She went on to pursue an acting career, training at drama school in Dublin. Her parents were thrilled when she secured roles in the film Philomena and in a low budget, but acclaimed movie called Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope. It was her role in Wildfire which won her a best supporting actress award in the Irish Film and TV Awards, though. Tragically, it was awarded posthumously.
‘What I find hard is that some of her friends have gone on to have great success,’ says Barry. ‘Two of them (Sarah Greene and Seana Kerslake) are in Bad Sisters now. Lovely girls. I’m so pleased for them, but I find it hard to watch them.
‘Barry Keoghan, who she worked with a couple of times, is a superstar. I’m not exaggerating when I say she was on track to be a superstar, too.’
Barry hugs Coleen in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. He said: ‘Coleen is a similar age to Nika, and she looked after me like a daughter would’
The second – fatal – cancer diagnosis floored everyone. Nika, then living in London but returning to the family home in Kent most weekends, had been complaining of stomach pains, hence a raft of tests. Her parents were in the room with her when the doctors told her she had Stage 4 colon cancer. They still can’t compute it.
‘It made no sense. She was only 33. She had a healthy diet, barely drank, didn’t smoke. She was disciplined, too – we used to work out together in the gym. She had that mentality of wanting to be the best she could be,’ says Barry.
They don’t want to go into the awful detail of what happened in those five weeks. The only thing to say is that they were together, as a family, until the last moment.
‘When she went into hospital, we basically decamped there. All her brothers came with us to every single appointment with the consultant,’ says Sandra.
As a parent, how do you stop yourself, falling apart?
‘You don’t,’ she says. ‘You are just in a constant panic, trying to cope with it, and with us the timescale was so short…’
Barry blows his nose. ‘The boys were destroyed. They can’t talk about her.’
Did Nika know she wasn’t going to make it? ‘I think that’s one of the saddest things,’ says Barry. ‘She knew at the end that she wasn’t going to make it, but for so long she had hope. She had the most hope of anyone.’
In the early stages of his grief, Barry decided he needed to get Nika’s face permanently etched on his arm, even though he ‘was never a tattoo person’.
Nika had a tattoo, too, they tell me. It was of her mother’s face and it was just below her heart. ‘They were inseparable,’ says Barry.
As are these two, clearly. Their combined strength has held this family together.
‘It breaks some couples,’ admits Sandra. ‘But others become stronger. You kind of drag each other along. You drag, you pull, you push, and then you get up the next day, and you do it all again.’
One of the ‘saving graces’ they agree, is that Nika was a devoted auntie. She had a particularly close relationship with their first grandson, ‘who now talks endlessly about her, which means all the grandchildren know her,’ says Sandra.
‘Every single one of them – even the four who have been born since she passed – know Nika. The grandchildren have kept us going, but they have also kept Nika’s memory alive.’