Ireland’s McKenna Brothers are Poised to Make Big Waves in the Squared Circle

McKenna is a common surname in County Monaghan in the Ulster province of Ireland. Four members of the McKenna tribe – Mr. and Mrs. Fergal McKenna and their two adult sons — are currently ensconced in Las Vegas, but they are not here on a holiday. The sons, Stephen, 27, and Aaron, 24, are professional boxers and they have come here to hone their craft.

Boxers from around the world come to Las Vegas to get better sparring than what is available in the gyms of their hometown. In any sport, one improves by testing his mettle against others who are more well-schooled. The fighting McKenna brothers (that’s Stephen on the left) have been here before. This is their third visit.

“If you want to do well in the boxing business, you have to fight the best,” says the boys’ father and trainer Fergal McKenna. “Las Vegas is a golden land for boxers,” he says as he surveys the scene at the Top Rank Gym. “You can smell boxing in the air here.”

Fergal, a carpenter by trade who supplemented his income working weekends as a nightclub bouncer, was a good athlete in his own right. He boxed some as an amateur, but made his mark in karate. In 2000, he represented Ireland in the World Karate Championships at the Tokyo Dome.

Transitioning into a karate coach, he figured that his sons would follow in his footsteps. “They didn’t like it,” he says, “and you can’t push people into something they don’t like.” But the boys, he discovered, enjoyed hitting people inside a boxing ring and had a natural talent for it. And so, Fergal transitioned once more, from a karate coach to a boxing coach. And the club he ran cranked out so many medal winners that he was asked to help coach the Irish National Team.

To foster his sons’ development, Fergal and his late father – the boys’ grandfather – built a boxing gym in the backyard garden of the family home. The McKenna home is in a rural area of the county in the village of Smithborough, home to a few hundred souls.

The shed, as the gym is simply and proudly called, is quite a shed as sheds go. It sits on a larger plot of ground than the house. It was finished in drips and drabs: “I kept running out of money,” says Fergel who estimates that he spent perhaps a hundred thousand in today’s euros for the building materials and all the furnishings. The ring, which had fallen into disuse, has some history to it. Lore has it that Rinty Monaghan, a post-war Irish boxing hero, had trod its canvas and the great Barry McGuigan from down the road in the County Monaghan town of Clones, spent many hours shadowboxing and sparring inside its ropes.

The brothers had hundreds of bouts as amateurs before turning pro, winning prestigious tournaments in far-flung places. At various times, both captained the Irish National Team, as did their older brother Gary who left the sport without turning pro and is now a schoolteacher.

As amateurs, Aaron was considered to have the bigger upside. Courted by U.S. promoters, he signed with Golden Boy and made his professional debut at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas at age 18. What followed were nine fights in Southern California before Aaron, his career stalled by Covid, returned to the British Isles and signed with promoter Mick Hennessy who was previously involved with Carl Froch and Tyson Fury, among others.

Stephen eventually joined his younger brother in California and the two of them with their dad behind the wheel made the rounds from their base in Woodland Hills to all the area’s top boxing gyms in search of good sparring, even venturing as far south as Tijuana.

While still an amateur, Stephen sparred with the likes of Vasyl Lomachenko and Ryan Garcia. The session with Garcia, says Stephen, was agreed-upon for six rounds, but KingRy bailed out after four. “He couldn’t handle my style of fighting,” says Stephen, who recalls that during one exchange he buckled Garcia’s knees. (KingRy dissents; he and Stephen McKenna have exchanged spiteful tweets.) More recently — just the other day – Stephen sparred with none other than Terence Crawford. They went four 4-minute rounds.

Aaron McKenna, currently 18-0 (9 KOs), will fight next in Osaka, Japan, on July 15. A middleweight with the frame to grow into a super middleweight, he is matched against Jeovanny Estela, a 23-year-old Floridian of Puerto Rican descent who sports a record of 15-0 (4). This is the quarterfinal round of a new 8-man Prizefighter tournament co-promoted by Matchroom which is making its first incursion into Japan. The purse for the winner is a cool million dollars and the contestants can enhance their earnings with bonuses for knockouts.

Stephen started his pro career later and has had four fewer fights, but he is also undefeated and his record (14-0, 13 KOs) is more eye-catching. A junior middleweight, he competes in the same weight class as another Irish boxer of note, Callum Walsh, a fighter from Cork who has found a home in Southern California and is on the same career path. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could fight someday in Dublin,” says Stephen. Barring any slip-ups along the way, that match-up would be a very big story in the Emerald Isle where the top boxers, amateur and pro, are far more well-known than in the United States.

“One thing I noted when I was in karate,” says Fergel, “is that the best competitors had the best dads. They weren’t necessarily the most talented, but they were the most disciplined.”

Fergel has had no trouble installing discipline in his sons. They embrace the spartan life of a prizefighter.

Las Vegas with its electric dance music scene has trended younger in recent years. Virtually every hotel on the Strip has a club where a DJ (some so famous they have their face on billboards) entertains a garishly-dressed crowd of mostly 20-something revelers who party until dawn. When we asked Stephen and Aaron, neither of whom is married, whether they planned to check out one of these establishments before they left the city, they gave us a look that plainly said “of course not; what a stupid question.”

It isn’t as if the brothers are caught in a time warp. They are big fans of Kendrick Lamar and it’s a mutual admiration society. They met in an LA-area boxing gym and the hip hop superstar not only turned up at Aaron’s sixth pro fight, but came into the dressing room before the bout to wish him well.

If Kendrick Lamar were performing a late show in Las Vegas tonight, however, it’s a safe bet that the brothers wouldn’t be there. In Las Vegas, it’s all business all the time and, oh, by the way, these two guys can really fight.

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