The Great Dublin Robbery

The McTigues and their cousins, the Rynnes and the Murphys, were stars in the Gaelic Athletic Association, a chapter of which was formed in Kilnamona in 1884. "They were big, fine-looking fellows," says Joe Breen, a nephew of Mike McTigue. "Regarding sportsmanship, they could not be surpassed." They were in any sport that was national—hurling, cross-country running, cycling, fishing, hunting—national meaning Irish, or any sport not invented by the English.

"We coursed hares," says Tom McTigue, Mike's younger brother, a ruddy-cheeked, square-shouldered man whose care with his recollections makes you think of a judge delivering an opinion. "You got half a crown for a hare and one and sixpence for a rabbit. There were lots of hares in those days, but in that rolling country it wasn't easy to get at them. As soon as you loosed the dogs, the hares would go for the tops of the hills, and once they were there they were gone; the dogs couldn't get to them. Mike didn't care much for the dogs. He liked to hunt, shooting wild ducks and wild geese and fishing in the lakes and up the river."

George Gardner, who held the world light-heavyweight championship for five months in 1903, until he lost it to Bob Fitzsimmons, was born in Lisdoonvarna, a few miles from Kilnamona, but Mike McTigue apparently had no interest in professional fighting. Did he have any fights at all?

"When the British ruled Ireland," Tom McTigue begins, "and when the people couldn't pay the rent, the British would set up sentry boxes in front of the farms. The lads would harass the sentries, and that was a cause of a lot of trouble. One of the reasons Mike had to leave Ireland was that he hit one of the sentries with a rock. He had to appear in court in Limerick city because of it. And there it was that a friend of his, Pat Haggerty, was shot at. And Mike was in a fight because of that. It was with a fellow by the name of...the fellow that fired the shot. But I can't remember his name."

He pauses for a full minute. "No, I can't remember it. But Mike went to England in 1910, and then to New York in 1912. He got a job in a packinghouse, lifting sides of beef. It was heavy work. I did that too, later on. Mike got into fighting on that job. He had a fight with a man at the packing plant, a big man, and Mike put him away. Someone saw that fight and said to Mike, 'You should be in the ring.' "

Siki was born Sept. 16, 1897, in a fishing village outside of St. Louis, the capital of Senegal. At 10, he was one of the boys who dived for coins tossed by passengers on the ships in the harbor. He was a good diver and a show-off; people remembered him.

Then Siki suddenly turned up in a villa on the French Riviera, adopted, according to one legend, by a French actress and singer. One story is that the actress took him from Senegal to France, where she dressed him up in a little green uniform and kept him in her service. Another story is that he signed on as a seaman, jumped ship and was stranded in Marseilles. In any case, he had lived on the Riviera, and learned to read and write. He had been adopted and given the legal name of Louis Phal.

When the actress died, so the one story goes, Siki worked as a busboy in resort hotels, and then began fighting in a fair that went from one small town to another.

Richard West, a writer for the London Spectator, recently found a new source of information about Siki in Roland Diagne of St. Louis, who had known Siki in his own childhood. Unlike other blacks in French Africa, the Senegalese were French citizens. Blaise Diagne, Roland's father, was the first African elected to the French Chamber of Deputies. At the start of World War I, Blaise Diagne led a drive to recruit Senegalese residing in France into the French Army. Siki was one of these recruits, and Diagne became his friend and benefactor.

Siki became a war hero: he was wounded, and won both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire. He also participated in some army boxing matches. After the war, he was a street sweeper in Paris until a chance to fight professionally came along. Siki's odd, plunging style, his exotic background, his heroic war record and his recklessness made him a sensation and the darling of the intellectuals.