Darren Sutherland RIP

[sarah_lennon]

Darren Sutherland has died!
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/14092009/ ... -dead.html
http://www.rte.ie/sport/boxing/2009/091 ... rland.html


Very sad

[Donny B.]

That's awful, shocking news!

The guy had his whole career in front of him. So sad!

[Sea_point]

Terribly tragic, he took his own life. At 27......

Darren Sutherland's toughest opponent was himself

The Irish would have made the sort of world champion that friends and family could have been proud of

Ireland's Darren John Sutherland in happier times after beating Venezuela's Alfonso Blanco Parra during their 2008 Olympic Games quarterf inal. Photograph: Jaques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images

We might never know what it was that made Darren Sutherland take his own life. To those who knew him professionally as a boxer, the Irishman was bright, friendly and approachable. His manager and promoter, Frank Maloney, was so shocked when he discovered the fighter hanged at his flat in south London yesterday, that he collapsed.

Maloney, who knew him better than most, was confronted with a reality he could not have imagined. How could such a likeable and successful elite athlete be driven to such despair?

There might be a clue in his past. Three years ago Sutherland thought his boxing career was over after suffering a freak eye injury.

He was fighting for Ireland against a Russian B team at the National Stadium in Dublin when his opponent accidentally caught him in the eyeball and fractured the socket in two places.

"I was taken straight to hospital," he recalled last year, "where they saw that the muscle that moves the eye upwards was damaged so I couldn't move the eye. The hospital put like a plate in it and it's still there – it's not made of metal, but another substance to keep the eye strong."

He was so conscious of looking cross-eyed, though, that he refused to leave the house. Contemplating a future without boxing, he fell into a depression, before doctors decided after six months that he was fit to fight again. It turned his life around.

Sutherland got back in the ring and did brilliantly. He was All-Ireland champion three years in a row and went to the Beijing Olympics believing he could win the gold medal. He started well but came up against his long-time British rival, James DeGale, who went on to win gold. A meeting between the two of them as professionals had been taken as a near certainty.

Sutherland, 27, was a fine boxer, with heavy hands and every prospect of fighting for a world title. The odds were, on the evidence of his first four contests as a professional – all early and impressive stoppages – that he would have made the sort of world champion everyone, friends, family and rivals, could be proud of.

[tackle-bag]

Darren Sutherland has died!
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/14092009/ ... -dead.html
http://www.rte.ie/sport/boxing/2009/091 ... rland.html


Very sad

If ever something has deserved its own thread, this does. Absolutely tragic, may he rest in peace.

[suisse]

Absolutely terrible news... RIP Darren. What makes such a fine athlete comtemplate such a thing.

A terrible year for boxing too...

http://www.edgeofsports.com/2009-08-12-444/index.html

[Avenger]

RIP Darren. Very sad loss of life at such a young age.

[Rogocoko]

Very sad... RIP Darren

[sarah_lennon]

His manager was taken to hospital,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/others ... -flat.html

awful situation.

[AidanSloan]

Just heard a replay of an interview he did on Newstalk immediately after winning his Olympic medal. He was in the dressing room and they had his family on the other line. Heart breaking to listen to it.

[Duke Raoul]

R.I.P. Darren.

It's very hard to get your head around this one. He just seemed to have so much going for him. Kevin Mitchell posits an injury/ depression theory in the Guardian. It's an otherwise nice piece but I'm not sure I buy it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/se ... sutherland

[T.C.B.]

From today's Indo:

Boxing: Day the light went out
By Vincent Hogan
Wednesday September 16 2009

It is easy to imagine that any man armed with sufficient fortitude to pursue a career in boxing isn't likely to be daunted by much in the world.

For most of us, the three steps up to a ring apron might as well be a door-way into a burning building. We watch with a mix of awe and trepidation as fighters lean through ropes in crowded halls, propelled to their destiny by the noise of war. The one thing we aren't qualified to feel is empathy.

Boxers, by the simple nature of what they do, radiate a physical security unattainable to most people.

You find a lot of light in sport's dark places. It's as if laughter overrides the multiple worries that must spout, naturally, in a domain where hierarchies are established by swinging fists.

The first time I interviewed Darren Sutherland, he took 10 minutes to answer my opening question. It was like being hit by a geyser of words. Lilting, urgent, confident, sometimes poetic words. And his accent sugared the impact, a sweetly quaint union of Dublin and the Caribbean.

"I love people screaming my name," Darren told me that morning in the National Stadium. It was maybe two months before the Beijing Olympics but, already, he had his future carved in parchment.

Beautiful

He smiled a beautiful smile and guided me through his family history with a storyteller's easy craft. Born in Dublin to a Caribbean father, Anthony, and a Finglas mother, Linda. Spent the first seven years of his life in London, the next four on the island of St Vincent, before the family moved to Dublin.

And he told me this story of walking uninvited into a Tottenham gym, volunteering to fight an exhibition, then walking home proudly "with a little trophy and a nose-bleed."

Linda took one look at her son that evening and told him "That's the end of that!" Darren Sutherland, at the time, was seven.

The memory of it tugged laughter out of him now that started in his eyes. And, for a moment, those eyes could have belonged to a small boy slipping in off a North London street to explore the sport so beloved of his father.

Anthony Sutherland had been hopelessly drawn to 'Friday Fight Night' on TV in the golden British middleweight era of Benn, Eubank and Watson. And his son would exult in the naked showbiz of the ring entrances, the flashing lights, the thudding music, the hooded heroes stepping through clouds of dry ice towards their work-place.

"The thrill and adrenalin of battle," as he put it.

He didn't box again until he was 15, joining St Brigid's gym in Blanchardstown where Gary Keegan would be his first coach. Yet, within six months, he had gone to Sheffield to pursue the flame of the professional game, drawn to Brendan Ingle's gym and the illusion of looming glamour.

"I couldn't resist" he told me. "He (Ingle) had Prince Naseem at the time and, having gone over for a week just before doing my Junior Cert, I decided to move over full-time. I spent three and a half years there and ended up hating boxing."

What Darren did subsequently revealed the manly integrity behind the smile. He came home at 20, enrolling in St Peter's College, Dunboyne, to do his Leaving Cert. It must have been a crushingly difficult thing to wear a school uniform alongside kids three to four years his junior. He told me how he'd bought a little car to save himself "the humiliation of getting on a bus."

Yet, Darren got his Leaving and re-united with Keegan in 2005 under the High Performance umbrella. And, by the time Beijing loomed, he was emphatically the most outgoing and articulate of a formidable five-man Irish team.

Coach, Billy Walsh, would joke that his energy almost wore the others down. Darren trained, you see, with extraordinary zeal. He talked like an evangelist and ate only what nutritionists told him would benefit an athlete's body. Remarkably, he fell into a routine of getting up at four in the morning to eat a bowl of porridge.

And, all the time, he was working towards a life in the professional game. The Olympics would be a stepping stone, he'd say. A shop window open to the money men in the market for smart fighters.

"If I'm totally honest, the Olympics was never part of my dream," he told me. "I was attracted to boxing for the professional game. And my dream is still to be the first black Irishman to become world champion. I'm a power puncher, so I've had to adapt.

"In the amateur game, guys can come at you with these pitter-patter punches and score. So, you have to learn to box to the system. To hit and not get hit. Sometimes, I like to go in and just have a scrap. I like to be the showman."

I could detect an enormous pride in Walsh that evening in China when Sutherland completely out-foxed Venezuela's Alfonso Blanca Parra to guarantee himself at least a bronze medal. Because Darren's calm, thoughtful performance would have been a repudiation of just about every impulse in his body.

Conversely, there was palpable frustration in the Irish camp when he subsequently bowed out meekly to Britain's James Degale, a fighter Darren had beaten in four of five previous meetings.

In a sense, his thoughts already seemed lost to the pro game now. It was as if he had just been seeing out time against Degale. Waiting for the money men.

It can't have been easy stepping away from the support structures of the High Performance programme and moving to England as a professional. Yet, his skills and personality seemed tailor-made for the paid ranks. He won his first four fights, barely working off the interest of his talent. He looked destined for great things.

And then, somehow, a light went out. We may never know what that light represented and to speculate would be offensive.

But what we can say is that death feels utterly incongruous here. It shouldn't have a place in the story of any bright, handsome young athlete who lives their life by the book. Darren's traumatised manager, Frank Maloney, described his death yesterday as "a tragedy for the world of boxing."

It isn't. Boxing has lost a star here, but sport is -- by its nature -- resilient and others will soon materialise. The tragedy is in the loss of a son and brother. Incalculable loss. Everything else is fixable.

Our thoughts and prayers go to the Sutherland family.

[Cianostays]

So sad. Whatever demons may have tormented him............ It doesn't bare thinking about. Condolences to his family and may he rest in peace.