In the Ring, It Doesn't Matter How Much Money His Parents Have

New York Times

15-03-2025

Even for hard-core boxing fans, it is difficult to see how Sean O'Bradaigh emerged as a fearsome light heavyweight. His somewhat posh background, with private schooling and vacations in St. Tropez and Greece, is about as far as can be from those of Mike Tyson or Jake LaMotta.
O'Bradaigh's father is a private wealth manager from Ireland, and his mother is a Belgian film and theater producer. He grew up in a doorman building a few blocks from the Hudson River, is a strong skier (he actually prefers Aspen to the Alps), and is fluent in French after attending the Lycée Français on the Upper East Side for 15 years. He enjoys brunch with his mother and the occasional Broadway show. He will graduate from New York University in May with a degree in real estate finance. And he can knock you out flat.
'Someone like me is not supposed to be good at boxing,' O'Bradaigh (pronounced oh-BROAD-ee) said on Wednesday while reclining on a couch in his family's stylish living room. 'To become good, you need to have been punched in the face thousands of times and do a lot difficult stuff that most people with my background aren't willing to do. I could have quit any time, but I didn't.'
O'Bradaigh, who turns 23 in April, will make his professional debut on Sunday at Madison Square Garden, where he watched fights as a boy. It is part of an Irish-themed boxing card, headlined by Callum Walsh vs. Dean Sutherland, on the eve of St. Patrick's Day.
O'Bradaigh will face Jefferson Christian Almeida in the same arena where he won the 2023 Golden Gloves (now the Ring Masters) as a middleweight. He won 25 of 39 bouts as an amateur, won the New York Boxing Tournament as a light heavyweight and twice reached the semifinals of the amateur national championships.
He picked up boxing at 13 after watching Conor McGregor, the polarizing Irish champion, in a mixed martial arts fight. McGregor beat up a cocky opponent that night, and then strutted about in the ring. Thinking it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, O'Bradaigh begged his parents to take him to a gym on Canal Street. He was hooked. At first he was into M.M.A., but when coaches saw his technique and hands, they recommended boxing.
What once seemed like an adolescent phase is about to become a job in a punishing sport that his mother, Nastassja Many, cannot bear to watch. She attends every match, but she keeps her head down, staring at her knees while well-trained and highly motivated opponents try to smash her son's face in. His nose has already been broken twice.
Many, an entrepreneurial former actress who speaks five languages, respects her son's choice, and is happy he discovered his passion. She just wishes he had chosen pro skiing instead.
'The first time I saw him walk into a ring, I was in tears,' she said. 'You see your son walking in under all that light, body to body with some huge guy. I'm concerned about his pretty face and his brain.'
She met Sean's father, Cillian Ò Brádaigh, in Montauk, Long Island, in the late 1990s, and in 2003 they had fraternal twins, Sean and Oscar. Of all the Irish and Irish-descended boxers on Sunday's card at the Garden, O'Bradaigh's ancestry may be the most ardently Irish republican.
His father grew up near Dublin speaking Gaelic as a first language. Sean's great-great-grandfather and his great-grandfather fought in the Irish Republican Army against British rule, and his great-uncle was Ruirí Ò Brádaigh, a former I.R.A. chief of staff and president of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican political party.
Sean's father took another path. A dapper, erudite businessman, Cillian Ò Brádaigh manages personal financial portfolios, attending to wealthy clients in the Hamptons, Manhattan and various locales around the globe. When he picks Sean up at training sessions, other boxers routinely ask Sean about the well-dressed man in the fancy car.
'They call him Trench Coat' Sean said with a laugh, and they assume he is a manager or an agent. He recounted the time he fought in a scruffy gym in the Bronx, and he pleaded with his father not to wear a suit.
'So he shows up in golf clothes,' Sean said with another hearty laugh.
The surface differences between O'Bradaigh and many other boxers can be stark, at least outside the ring. Inside it, every boxer stands alone. O'Bradaigh understands his privileged upbringing is alien to most in the American boxing community, and he neither boasts about it nor tries to hide it. It made him who he is.
But there have been sparring sessions when opponents assumed — at their peril — that he was soft.
'I don't care what they say,' he said with a shrug. 'All that matters is what happens in the ring. Sometimes they are better than me. But usually I make them pay for it.'
O'Bradaigh mixes easily in any milieu, breezing from lunch with a group of N.Y.U. business majors to the gym in Midtown where he slugged it out with a bulldozing heavyweight. While in line at a deli, he simultaneously spoke in French to his mother on the phone, ordered food in Spanish and chatted with a guy waiting with him at the counter in English.
O'Bradaigh's parents always sought to ensure that he and his brother were not spoiled and that they engaged with the world around them.
When the twins were about 8, their parents took them on a volunteer medical mission to Kenya. When Sean was 16, he said, he volunteered at an orphanage on the Senegal-Mauritania border. He and his brother built sheds on the Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico, and in high school Sean volunteered at an L.G.B.T.Q. homeless shelter in the Bronx and translated for Spanish-speaking voters on Election Day.
'We've purposely pushed them out there in the world,' his father said, 'to make them good, solid citizens with a sense of civic responsibility and social obligation.'
O'Bradaigh's parents also insisted that he finish college. His passion, though, is that time in the ring, where a lack of focus during critical, intense and violent milliseconds can mean waking up on the canvas. He nearly had one such moment during a spontaneous sparring session with Conor McGregor himself in New York in September. There was a half-second lapse when he marveled at being in the ring with the former champion, and absorbed two quick punches to the head.
He recovered, though, and fared well. But when McGregor's team posted a video on Instagram showing only that brief moment when McGregor scored, O'Bradaigh responded in the comments that it was an honor facing the champ. He brashly added, 'Let's see the whole footage.'
According to Richard Stephenson, O'Bradaigh's trainer and the former coach of the U.S. national boxing team, he has the attitude, heart, chin and reflexes to be a good pro. But he has work to do on his fundamentals.
'He's been winning, so it's hard for him to fathom going back to the basics,' Stephenson said. 'He's got to grow, and if he doesn't, he won't get too far.'
That probably would not crush his mother, who worries that her baby could get hurt, wind up with cognitive brain impairment, or never find a life partner.
O'Bradaigh is very aware of the risks. He said he wants to own businesses someday.
'I value my brain,' he said. 'If I ever start feeling like I'm losing memory or showing other signs, I'll stop.'