February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Jay Mwamba
YONKERS — Featherweight Bernard Dunne, one half of Ireland’s Olympic team to the Sydney Games this fall, is in New York mulling a professional career after October, under the Irish owned Rockall Promotions.
Dunne, who’s 20 and ranked 10th in the world, was a special guest at last weekend’s inaugural Rockall show at Yonkers Raceway.
He liked what he saw and said should he decide to join the paid ranks after the Olympics, it will be in the United States.
"I was very impressed, and if I get offers to turn pro, I’ll come to the States. The States is the only place for professional boxing," the confident Dunne said.
Rockall Promotions, whose kingpins Eddie McLoughlin and Martin Somers, invited Dunne to watch the Yonkers show, seem to have the inside track on Dunne’s future plans.
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"Martin and Eddie invited me over with the possibility of me joining them after turning pro," Dunne said.
But of immediate concern for the young Dubliner, who along with light middleweight Michael Roach will be the only boxers from Ireland at the Olympics, is striking gold in Sydney.
"If I get off to a good run, I could get a medal," he said. "I’ve fought all the best fighters in the world."
A member of the CIE Boxing Club in Dublin, Dunne has lost only 11 of 130 bouts in his amateur career. "And I’ve never been beaten at home in national or international bouts," said the son of the former amateur great Brendan Dunne, who represented Ireland in the light flyweight division in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.