Contending With Life

"It's the only humanistic thing in the convention center," he goes on. "Either you're dealing with products, or someone's trying to sell you something. Here, you pay some money, get your shoes shined, talk to people. It's a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. And sometimes it's just a shoeshine, you know?"

Thirteen years after McDonagh threw the last punch of a title fight, the drift of his career has taken him far from the world of professional boxing, partly because of alcohol, partly because he hated the sport, mostly because of a bloody cruiserweight bout against Jesse Shelby on June 20, 1991. That night, McDonagh boxed five or six rounds in a blackout, and his white trunks were stained red by the end. Shelby won in a seven-round TKO. McDonagh remembers one thing -- "He head-butted me," he claims -- and the rest is a blur.

He was a wreck the morning after the fight, lying in bed in the Manhattan apartment he shared with a girlfriend. "I got the shit beat out of me," he says. "I had no reason to live. I wanted to kill myself. And the thought that kept me alive was, I swear, 'Oh, my God, now I can drink like I want to.'"

That afternoon, he limped to the Bear Bar on 75th Street -- left arm in a sling, nose broken and bandaged, face full of stitches -- and ordered a draft. McDonagh doesn't know how long the bender lasted. He remembers stumbling down Broadway a few days later and hearing someone call out: Hey, Seamus! Embarrassed, he tried not to look. Seamus! He looked. It was a broadcaster he knew. I'm sorry, Seamus told him. I don't wanna talk to anybody, and he staggered off.

He'd start early and stay through last call. The Bear Bar, McGee's, Irish Pub, Rosie O'Grady's. "Closed every bar I was ever in," he says. "Alcohol anesthetized my fears." He'd forget where he had parked his car -- the same Plymouth Laser -- and he'd spend the next day tracking it down.

In 1992, at age 29, McDonagh moved in with his father. He got a small part in a play at the Irish Arts Center about Bobby Sands, the hunger striker, a futile attempt to recapture the rush of boxing. "No satisfaction," he says. McDonagh gave up on New York, headed for the Bay Area in 1994, but all that changed was the weather and the names of the bars. He tried a program for alcoholics, but could never get a foothold.

Finally, things began to click. He got into transcendental meditation, doing it twice a day for maybe 20 minutes. He learned to catalog his fears as they pop up, to grab a pen and start scribbling -- "taking inventory," McDonagh calls it. He started buying his pens in big packs. And one day seven years ago, he downed a straight vodka and that was it. "I learned how to quell the disturbance in my head," says McDonagh, who regularly meets with recovered and recovering alcoholics. "I have less fear -- fewer worries, concerns, or dread about anything." (He's normally loose and funny -- even his bad jokes have a jab-jab-punch sense of timing -- but he talks in stiff mantras when the subject turns to his alcoholism: I have fear; fear is not real; reality is now. He's not simply parroting someone else's self-help manual, though; it's something he has absorbed and now repeats, the way other people quote dads or Dylan songs.)

Still, he's not satisfied. He looks for other work. Every few weeks, McDonagh heads to Los Angeles and trolls for small parts in commercials (a friend's girlfriend got him into the business; he now has a casting agent). He was an extra in the Visa spot with Charlie and Martin Sheen, though his scene hasn't been used, and he thinks his arm made a cameo in a recent Red Lobster ad.

Neil Ferrara, McDonagh's old trainer, recently suggested he return to New York and work with a few fighters, maybe teach them that sledgehammer left. "[I told him] he could be a pretty good trainer," Ferrara says. "He said, 'I'm 40 years old.' ... But it's still constructive, what he's doing now. This is a country where you can get knocked down, shovel shit, and still come out on top."

For a while, McDonagh flirted with the idea of opening up a boxing gym in his small studio, just around the corner from Susie's apartment. He even got a phone number with the last five digits spelling BOXER. But then he and Susie broke up, and McDonagh moved out of her place and back into his. "So I'm not gonna open a gym," he says. "Never really wanted to do that. I don't even like training people. I have one client. That's all I want."