Barry says outside of boxing, he is a "dull" person who just loves hanging out with his children. Photo / Natalie Slade
Would I like to talk to the boxing trainer, Kevin Barry? asked the boxing promoter, Dean Lonergan. Yes, but I wasn't at all sure he was talking to me. He was pretty grumpy with me after I talked to David Tua - in 2005, after they famously fell out over money and ended up in court. He has been beyond grumpy with the Herald at various times. I felt pretty sure Barry wasn't talking to Lonergan. They had a right ding dong in public, through the media, mere months ago.
So, given that a good percentage of people who would be involved in the transaction quite possibly weren't speaking to each other, I couldn't see how this was going to happen. Silly me. This is the boxing world, which is quite mad and mostly about theatre.
We were to meet at the hotel where he's staying while he trains the American boxer Brian Minto for tonight's Fight for Life bout with Shane Cameron. I thought: He's no doubt had his arm twisted and been told to turn up for publicity purposes. I wasn't expecting him to be particularly enthusiastic, which proves once and for all that I know nothing about the boxing world.
Not speaking to Lonergan? They're the greatest of mates and are always shouting at each other and slagging each other off in the media. Barry said: "You know, there is a certain element of promotion to the game of boxing."
When he arrived he was all smiles (and his is not a smiley sort of face) and gave me a peck on the cheek and a photograph of him and his latest boxing protege, Joseph Parker. He said: "I don't know if you collect these." Perhaps he thinks everyone has a wall of signed photographs of boxers at home. Why not? He does. They had both signed mine. He had written, in silver pen: "Tough Times Don't Last, Tough People Do."
He looks just the same. I last saw him 13 years ago, in an Auckland penthouse, and the interview took place with an almost life-sized cardboard cut-out of Tua standing behind his right shoulder. He was intense and emphatic and he spoke with near-evangelical passion about his boxer.
His face has that slightly battered-about-the-edges look former boxers have (he won a silver medal, in contentious circumstances, at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; he stuck it in a drawer as soon as he came home; now it lives in another drawer in another home, in Vegas.) He is older, of course, and the battering is not just from the boxing but from life and, I fancied, the bitterness and disappointment of broken dreams.
That really is too fanciful. I should have paid greater attention to that inscription. Tough buggers like him do last. He is an optimist. You'd have to be, to be a survivor in the boxing world. I thought he had a short fuse. He has always come out swinging and in those golden, olden days when he and Tua were inseparable, if you doubted Tua, you doubted Barry and you'd get a serve.
He said: "I've got Irish blood but, no, I don't have a bad temper. I used to be far more aggressive. I'm an aggressive guy by nature. I'm very competitive ... I was very confrontational for David Tua. I was so defensive all the time. I'm not going to be like that with Joseph."
I thought that might be like expecting a tiger to turn into a kitten. Was he sure? "Yeah but also, within myself, I'm far more at ease within myself. There are a lot of people who used to annoy me, okay?" he said, "that don't now." He was looking at me in a way which suggested I wasn't annoying him just at that moment, but also that it might be a good idea not to chance it.
I chanced it. I thought asking him whether he had been crooked would have earned me the verbal equivalent of a bloodied nose, but it didn't. So I'll take his word for his rebirth as a kitten. Let's not forget that even the cutest kittens have sharp little teeth and claws - a qualification which he will no doubt be gratified to have included. He may have mellowed but he hasn't, God forbid, gone soft.
Anyway, he is "embracing a new chapter of my life and I think I'm changing". He hadn't taken up meditation or something like that, had he? "No, I haven't taken up meditation," he said, sounding more amazed by the very idea than annoyed. He is, he says, "100 per cent comfortable with myself. When I say I made mistakes, I made personal mistakes. I also made a lot of financial mistakes. I felt like I let my family down, for a lot of reasons".
What did earn me the old unblinking, croc-eyed Barry glare of old was asking whether he'd cried over the end of the Tua/Barry dream. They were family, and ended up in that nightmare of a court battle, the aftermath of which was much bitterness, a confidential settlement, and the lawyers' pockets nicely lined.
His reputation took a proper battering. He minded that, of course. I read him an excerpt from a piece about the court case in which he, and former business partner Martin Pugh, were described as turning up to court wearing "gold medallions, winkle-picker brogues with white socks ... [looking like] wily, slimy creatures that had crawled out from beneath boxing's nasty underbelly". That can't have helped. He said: "Well, I don't know. I wore a suit several times. I actually wore some of my Vegas suits, which were pin-striped, and purple shirts." Dear oh dear. So he looked like a gangster! He looked at me as though I was the mad one. "You know, I don't think that really had an influence on anything!"
But what I thought he must have minded most was the end of his relationship with Tua. They lived together, Tua was godfather to Barry's twin sons. They loved each other. It was sad. He might have cried. That was what got me the look. "No. No. No. I don't cry." He's so tough. "Yeah. No, I am. I'm really frigging tough."
I hadn't meant to go on about Tua quite so much, or not quite so early. He says he's not defined by him, and that's fair enough, if hopeful. He still has pictures of the two of them on the walls of his office at home in Vegas. Tua is, in many ways, still always standing just behind his right shoulder, whether either of them like it or not. He said: "What I created worked against me."
And there is this: Having built up one young fighter and sold him to all of us as an icon, a superstar, a genuine all-round nice guy, loved by everyone from grans to kids, he's at it again. He said: "Mark my words. Joseph Parker is going to be a superstar! He's going to win a world title.
"Joseph Parker is the real deal!"
I could have gone back to that 2000 interview and changed the details of the location and the name of the boxer from Tua to Parker and cut and pasted pretty much all of the rest.
There are the cardboard cut-outs again - of Joseph Parker, in supermarkets. And guess where he lives? In Vegas, with Barry and Barry's long-suffering wife, Tanya, the former Olympic gymnast. She must really love him and she obviously does. You take a swipe at him at your peril.
Somebody wrote something on his Facebook page recently about how Duco Events (and therefore the aforementioned Dean Lonergan) had saved his career. Then he started getting messages: "Have you seen what Tanya's written on Facebook?" She'd set the record straight all right. He phoned her and said "Tan, please, please, don't ever do that. Anything negative, you don't respond to. And the very next day, I click on it again, and she's answered another thing!"
Vegas is home and always will be now. It's the home of shiny things and showbiz and fortunes made and lost. It's all glitter and bling but his bling days are over. He used to wear gold chains and those Vegas suits. Now he wears jeans and a T-shirt and a ridiculously heavy watch, a Nixon, which he loves because one of his sons gave it to him. They have a nice house, 15 minutes from the strip, in a nice gated community, where he has had a huge patio built, of slate, with an outdoor bar with a beer fridge which holds 100 bottles of beer, and a 42-inch flat screen TV, outdoor speakers and a barbecue with infra-red burners.
They have a good, comfortable, if not rolling in it life. He has plenty of work, training corporate types - his good friend, the gynaecologist, for a while the top boob job doctor in Vegas - and boxers. He doesn't gamble in the casinos. He says his life is enough of a gamble.
He said that outside boxing he is "quite a dull person. I don't play golf and I love hanging out with my kids". He had an email from Tanya, listing the kids' achievements, in case I asked. Daughter Jordy, the "academic athlete of the family", is about to graduate with a double degree, majoring in political science and economics and is a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, "for students with superior academic achievements". The twins, Mitch and Taylor, have both played American football for their universities, and for the Nevada Spartans. He's proud as punch, of course.
He had a thought. He did, after all, have a hobby: gardening. He has a gardener, so his idea of gardening is going out every morning and picking up any debris and removing every single dead leaf. "I keep my yard very, very tidy. I have this ritual in the morning and Joseph has become part of this ritual."
That's a nice image: the big Samoan boxer wandering about, amid the flowers, in a garden in Vegas. He is, as we know, very good at selling boxers as people loved by everyone from grans to kids.
His kids love Joseph Parker. He's part of the family. He said: "Can you imagine what I went through with my wife before we did that?" I could have a pretty good guess. She said: "Do you really want to put yourself through this with another Samoan boy?"
She had said what everyone must be thinking."Well, I'm just a passionate person. Everything I do, I do all out. I don't do anything half-cocked. I'm all in." Yes, that might be the problem. "I said: 'Look, I'm going to detach myself from the emotional connection'." He knew that wasn't possible; Tanya knew it wasn't possible; everyone who's ever met him would know that wasn't possible.
He had said, the last time I talked to him, that Tua was "another opportunity for me to live my experience, and to correct it". I simply cut and pasted that. After all, and after all that went before, it still seems entirely apt.
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