View from the Green Room: My father, The Boy Murphy, the first Olympian
W.J. Boy Murphy who was a boxer on the Irish Olympic team in Paris in 1924.
RTE’s flagship Radio 1 programme Sunday Miscellany is my favourite radio programme. There’s a touch of Hamlet’s caviar to the general about it because it’s a magazine programme that features a mixture of aspirant and professional writers with musical linkage to new writings of story and poetry.
So… imagine my delight when I discovered that my old musical society friend, Maura Murphy, who I performed numerous shows with during the eighties and nineties is one of today’s authors. Maura has been writing with Tramore Writers since retiring from Revenue a few years ago and clearly loves the challenge.
Maura’s topic – “Paris Olympics Then and Now” – couldn’t be better timed. As we all celebrate the heroics of today’s heroes, Maura casts her eye back a century to the Olympics of 1924 when her father boxed for Ireland in Paris.
It was “the first year Ireland participated as an independent nation and my father, W.J. ”Boy” Murphy as he was known, was a member of the boxing team”. So much to be proud of and pride oozes from the sentiment of the words.
He served in the new Irish National Army when he first boxed.
“He was given the opportunity to turn professional,” explains Maura but his father counselled against it. He never regretted it. In real life, clear-eyed realism beats blind optimism every time. Instead he won many national titles at Middle and Cruiser Weights and boxed successfully on international tours.
There’s an intimacy here in this storyline that Irish people have in buckets. Maura moves seamlessly between two stories – her father’s boxing career and her relationship with him as an only child moving towards her own journey in life.
The Boy Murphy was 52 when Maura was born and passed away when Maura was only 23. But her relationship with this gentle-spoken man was special. The piece is written with love and suffused with a deep feeling for family and nation.
Boxing memories of his Olympics in Paris ’24 and Amsterdam ’28 were only really shared when RTÉ televised the Olympics in the sixties when they both sat down together and watched the fuzzy screen with its barely audible sound.
Maura’s point of view shifts effortlessly to The Boy in her description of her father when “his shoulders would twitch and sway to every punch thrown and shared the hurt of those received. The more the punch hurts you, the less you show it” was the mantra of a working-class hero who encounters the sublime.
Teenager Maura emerges with all the honesty of an older sage judging herself as she looks back on those golden years when she simply wanted to enjoy the Beatles and the Bee Gees.
That’s the beauty of Maura’s writing here: past and present, love and loss, life and passing are all here frozen in “old newsprint… fading, yellowed and fragile that frame a father as a youngster of 20”.
She shares his Olympic journey when he lost controversially to a Canadian boxer called Black. Maura points out the importance of these humble heroes: “No medals were won but certainly the path was laid for what has become our most successful sport.”
Like all great sportspeople, explains Maura, he was incredibly generous towards other sport stars. He would have been thrilled with Kellie Harrington and all the medals won in swimming, rowing and gymnastics.
As Maura looks back, she “can think of so many questions she should have asked him.” However, The Boy left a legacy that could never be spent… or bought.
A special box of newspaper articles and photos that he knew a daughter would value beyond wealth… the pride in having an Olympian as a father.
“If I had a chance now to hear more about his own experience, I would hang on his every word. I’m so proud that my father was part of the team that held the Tricolour aloft when Ireland took its place among the nations for the very first time.”
You just can’t beat good writing.
Maura Murphy’s article “Paris Olympics Then and Now” is available on: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/sunday-miscellany/2024/0811/1464455-sunday-miscellany-sunday-11-august-2024/
