Luke Keeler sits back and relaxes in his home in Drumcondra. It is the night before the middleweight boxer will leave the cold and grey of Dublin for the sunshine of Miami, where he will challenge the unbeaten Demetrius Andrade for his WBO belt. His journey to the airport will take less than 15 minutes, but his path to a world title shot has been long and arduous. For a decade, Keeler juggled professional boxing with his job as an engineer, before he finally decided to go full-time as a fighter two years ago.
“I come from an area in Dublin called Ballyfermot. I loved it and had a brilliant upbringing there, but it tends to get a bad press from some people,” says Keeler. “My parents were keen for me to get a third-level education like my brother, who went to do architecture, and I just went with it. I got the highest leaving certificate marks at school, getting a grant from the Brothers to go to university at Dublin Institute of Technology. I was always good at maths, so I went with engineering at university, eventually graduating with an honours degree.”
Keeler grew up idolising his uncle Stephen, a skilful amateur boxer who trained at the famous St Saviour’s Boxing Club in Dublin, which was once the home of the late Irish Olympic bronze medallist Darren Sutherland. Keeler would watch his uncle in the mirror, replicating his shadowboxing in miniature form. He found his own sporting home a few miles out of the city at St Matthew’s Boxing Club in Ballyfermot.
“I loved competing in amateur boxing, more through the great people that you meet in boxing clubs across the country,” he says. “The thing is, I never really had a desire to go to the Olympics like other Irish kids, instead, my dream was always to go pro because I thought my style would be perfect for it. After graduation, I worked hard as an engineer. When you start a job, you put your head down and that’s it. But the dream never really stopped, and at 26 I made my professional boxing debut while still working hard as an engineer, putting in 50-hour weeks.”
Keeler rarely spoke about his fights while at work, even if occasional cuts acted as unavoidable conversation cues on site. Quietly, he built a respectable professional boxing career, mostly fighting in small hall shows on the outskirts of cities across Ireland and England. He trained before the sun came up and left the building site with a briefcase full of work long after it had gone down. After winning his first seven professional fights, he suffered two defeats to the Welsh boxer Tom Doran that made him reflect on his life.
He was caught between the demands of engineering and his boyhood dream of being a successful boxer. “I often found myself pleasing nobody, including myself. I’d be running from this place to that, getting in trouble for leaving the gym early to get to the site for work, and getting in trouble from work as I had to get to training. Then you also want to look after your family. I was using my career as an engineer as a bit of a crutch to be honest. It made bad performances or losses easier to stomach, thinking that it wasn’t me – it’s just because I juggle boxing with a demanding job. I could always fall back on that and it wasn’t a good place to be.”
Two years ago, Keeler made a decision that changed his life. After more than a decade as an engineer, he had built a strong network of contacts and was poised to set up his own company to take advantage of the city’s latest building boom. The company would have made Keeler extremely comfortable; boxing full-time guaranteed him no financial security whatsoever. Keeler chose to fight.
He remembers driving to the coastal town of Bray for his first training session as a full-time fighter with his new coach Peter Taylor, father of the world champion and Olympic gold medallist Katie. “I couldn’t stop smiling driving to that session,” he says. “I just knew that this is what I wanted to do with my life. There could be no excuses anymore. I was finally able to put everything into this sport that I love and honestly, in these two years, it has been another world.”
Training full-time means he can rest and recover properly, a necessity given Taylor’s gruelling sessions. Fighter and coach connected easily, with Keeler’s analytical brain revelling in the detailed planning Taylor puts into every session and contest. Keeler has made marked improvements in every fight, culminating in a decisive victory against Luis Arias in Belfast last August that put him in contention to fight for Andrade’s world title.
The boxing circuit in Dublin is close-knit and Keeler was vaguely acquainted with a young amateur boxer from the neighbouring Crumlin Boxing Club called Conor McGregor while growing up. He thought nothing of McGregor until he became a global sensation in the UFC. After McGregor assaulted a man in a pub last year because he refused a shot of the fighter’s branded whiskey, Keeler tweeted: “Sad to see @TheNotoriousMMA stoop so low, did the same to a friend of mine couple of years ago and still walking around acting the gangster, I’d be happy to put him in his place if he had the balls to step in a ring again?”
Keeler says he received an angry phone call from McGregor after he had sent the tweet. There was even talk of the pair of them meeting in the ring. “He’s running wild, says Keeler. “I would never call people out – it’s not in my nature – but I felt, in this case, I had to. He’s back training in Crumlin and he’s badmouthing me down there. I’d have no problem fighting him, no problem at all. He’s not well-liked and he’s annoyed me. Over someone refusing a drink? In Dublin, in those pubs, lads have their own chairs and mind their own business. They’re almost like living rooms for some of them.”
Before settling any scores with McGregor, Keeler has to worry about his date in Miami with Andrade, a skilled fighter with an awkward defence and slick southpaw stance that helps him attack at will. “There’s absolutely no pressure on me. Mentally it’s not a problem. I’m coming into this as a big underdog, something like 10-1, and I’m fighting one of the best middleweights there is for a world title. I never find that scary when I think about it, to be honest. It just feels me with excitement. This is what I sacrificed everything for, that buzz you get for these things, walking into the ring and feeling that excitement. You can’t bottle that feeling and I cannot wait until this fight starts to prove people wrong.
“It’s been a new experience for me going into this world title fight. I actually had people stopping me for photos the other day in Dublin for the first time I can remember. The interest has just exploded. I’m against a world-class fighter, one of the best there is, but I think his previous opponents have been there just to survive. I am absolutely in there to take the fight to him and get in his face. I’ll empty the tank over 12 rounds and win. Easier said than done though.”
An engineer by trade and now a fighter by design, Keeler is convinced that, if he puts in 12 rounds of relentless aggression, he can unlock Andrade’s defence and bring the belt back home to Dublin.
