What is required to be successful in sport? Naturally gifted physical attributes? Sure. Technical abilities to set you apart from the competition? Definitely. But one thing that is common across the most successful athletes, regardless of sport, is an elite mentality.
On the path to greatness, there will be endless roadblocks. Injuries, other athletes, and everything else that life can throw at you. Technical ability will see you through some of these things. But a lot of the resilience required to overcome these obstacles comes from an athlete's mental strength.
It is a fact that is not lost on Emmet Brennan.
Emmet is a son of Dublin’s north inner city and found boxing from a young age. Rising the ranks, he reached the pinnacle of amateur boxing in the Summer of 2021 when he represented his country in the Olympics. However, it was not a smooth path of non-stop winning that some boxers experience. Emmet faced many challenges along the way, and he explains just how he overcame those challenges and made it all the way from St. Saviour’s boxing club on Dorset St to Tokyo.
St. Saviour's Boxing Club. Credit: National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
Q: How did you get involved in boxing?
A: I started when I was 10 years old. I was shy and didn’t have much confidence. I played team sports and I did enjoy them. I couldn’t really defend myself, so I got brought to the boxing club. A friend of fathers was the coach in St. Saviours on Dorset St. which was only about ten minutes from the house.
I instantly fell in love with boxing and the club. It was a really old school club. You could smell the sweat. It was full of kids my own age. Not only was I in a boxing club, but I was also communicating and socialising with kids my own age. The thing that got me hooked was, even though I was part of a club, I was on my own in the ring. When I played soccer, I was depending on others if we won or not. In boxing, once you’re in the ring you’re on your own. That’s what got me hooked. I was dependent on myself and no one else.
In terms of idols, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by top-class athletes. I boxed for St. Saviours and at the time we were one of the best clubs in Ireland. We had Darren Sutherland, who went on to be an Olympian. We had Dean Murphy, Keith Boyle, Karl Brabazon. They were all elite champions at the time. I was a 10-year-old looking up to some of the best boxers in Ireland. I didn’t want to be a Muhammad Ali or a Sugar Ray Leonard. I wanted to be a Darren Sutherland or a Dean Murphy. I had my own idols in front of me.
The late Darren Sutherland. Credit: Independent
Q: At what age did you think you could make something out of boxing?
A: Weirdly enough it wasn’t until I was 25. My story is something of resilience. I didn’t win my first All-Ireland title until I was 20 years old. I’ve been beaten in maybe six or seven All-Ireland finals. I think all those defeats made me want to win that little bit more. The more I tasted defeat, the harder that I wanted to train. That’s something that stuck with me. I always wanted to be an Irish champion. I didn’t want to leave the sport until I became an Irish champion. It just happened to take 10 years to do it, which is a very long time. If you’ve boxed for 10 years and haven’t won a title, the likelihood is you’d leave the sport.
It wasn’t for another five years after that I really started to knuckle down and get set on becoming an Olympian. I really started to live the life and did whatever it took to become an Olympian. You don’t really make a living out of it. There’s not a whole lot of money in the sport. But I wasn’t going to the Olympics for the finances. It was more of a personal goal. It’s a goal I had when I walked into that club as a 10-year-old. As I said, my idols were amateurs. The pinnacle for amateur sport is the Olympics.
Emmet after qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics. Credit: RTÉ
Q: Would you agree your mentality is one of your strongest traits?
A: I think it is my strongest trait. I was lucky enough to work with Bernard Dunne, who was the Performance Director for the Olympic Team. I had a chat with him two weeks ago, going over the whole Olympic cycle. He’s worked with All-Ireland football champions, he’s been at the top of boxing, he’s worked with the elite of the elite in terms of sport. And he said he didn’t think he had worked with an athlete that has the same mindset as me. He said, 'you’ve had every barrier in front of you, but you weren’t going the let them get in the way of being an Olympian. You were injured, you couldn’t train and you still became an Olympian'.
I wasn’t always like this. I didn’t always have this mentality. Something switched inside my brain at 25. I realised I was going to go after the dream and that meant ticking all the boxes, not just training. Technical and physical training, you’re probably only talking about 10 to 15 hours a week. There’s a lot more time left in the week where you have to be staying strong mentally. When I turned 25, I changed my mindset from entering competitions to competing to entering competitions to win. And these other fighters had to look out for me, not the other way around. That’s something that’s had a huge, positive influence on my career in the last five years. I surrounded myself with good influences. They’re not sports psychologists but they all offered something positive to the mental side of my boxing and to my lifestyle.
Former Irish boxer, Bernard Dunne. Credit: Irish Mirror
Q: Do you examine your mental health closely?
A: I’ve suffered with mental health issues in the past. In terms of boxing, it’s probably something that isn’t talked about enough. It’s an individual sport. Everything you do affects you yourself, positive or negative. There are weight cuts involved, from an early age too. To have negative views of food and trying to make weight plays a role in your mental health. I’ve spoken about this before; I would say every boxer suffers from mental health issues. In boxing, there’s a winner and a loser in every fight. When you do lose you have to analyse your preparation and whether or not you did everything you could. I would say a lot of fighters suffer mentally but they don’t talk about it openly. That’s ok. They could be seeing a psychologist or dealing it with it privately. There has been a trend of people trying to benefit off of talking about mental health too.
If you’re going through something, sometimes the best thing to do is go through it privately. You don’t want everything out there in the open.
Q: What do you do on bad mental health days?
A: Bad days are going to happen if you’re in sport or not. No matter what we’re all going to have bad days. Bad days are bad days. They’re not bad weeks or bad months. I normally start each morning with five or ten minutes of mobility. I do it for two reasons. One is to improve my mobility, obviously. Two is to start a new day. All the problems you had yesterday, are yesterday’s problems. It’s a fresh start. The sun is going to rise and set. You can leave some of your problems in yesterday. That’s something that’s worked really well for me. It’s easy to carry burdens but time is a healer. What might be a big problem might be less of a problem tomorrow, and less again the day after.
Fresh air and exercise help with mental health for me. I like to get out in the sun as soon as I can, first thing in the morning. I know we don’t get a lot of sun in Ireland but when we do I think it’s good to expose yourself to that.
Q: How would you advise kids starting out from a mental point of view?
A: You’re going to lose. It’s a part of the sport. People shy away from losing because there’s such a negative view of losing, especially in Ireland. But losing is where you learn. I’ve seen boxers, my whole life, who have won early on, been technically stronger than people in their weight. They’ve won from 11 to 17 and then they become men and fight against men and they never experienced losing before. Then they lose at 18 or 19 and they walk away from the sport. Don’t be afraid of losing. You grow through defeat. You have to adapt to it. It builds resilience. For me, I won my first fight and lost my next three. After that, it was win-lose win-lose. I lost so many times as a young fella and I’m still losing now as an adult, but I use them as opportunities to grow. You learn a lot mentally. I listened to a podcast recently with Tony Griffin. He’s a sports psychologist. He was asked what fear is. And he said, 'fear is an opportunity to grow'. I thought that was a brilliant line. You can do two things with fear. You can either face it or run from it. If you run from it, more than likely you’ll taste defeat. But if you push through it, anything is possible. You can grow so much as a person through fear. Most of the successful people in the world will have had to grow through defeat, losing, learning their lessons and then trying again. There’s a lot of growing in defeat.
Emmet at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Credit: Independent.
Emmet did end up tasting defeat in his Olympic outing but he captured the hearts and minds of the Irish public when he gave an emotional interview to RTÉ in the aftermath.
But as he has proved before, he has used the loss only as fuel to motivate him further in his boxing journey. He is now pursuing a career in professional boxing which, at the age of 30, some may not have given much thought to.
And ambition is not something he will lack in his professional career. He has already enlisted the help of Irish actor Barry Keoghan to grab the attention of promoter Eddie Hearn. Hearn represents Emmet’s compatriot Katie Taylor and Emmet is hopeful of scoring a place on the undercard of Taylor’s title fight against Amanda Serrano in the famous Madison Square Garden arena in New York City.
Time will tell how successful Emmet can be in the professional game. His goals are ambitious. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that he has the mental strength to achieve those goals, and maybe more.
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