Kevin Barry: King of the Strip

Photo: Lawrence Smith

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY: Boxing coach and promoter Kevin Barry walks along The Strip in Las Vegas, a city he now calls home.

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KEVIN BARRY'S shirt is as brash and bright as the lights on the Las Vegas Strip. "I love this place. I love this town," he declares. "I love the energy." A permanent resident of the desert oasis for six years, Barry is never coming home. He says the opportunities in America for his three teenage children are boundless, and all he misses of New Zealand is the sea. And he's also aware that public opinion remains quite firmly divided about Kevin Barry. For a time, he was cautious on trips home of passing Samoan men of a certain age, knowing that most would quite fancy taking a shot.

Hunter S Thompson, who rather knew about these things, once opined: "For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth." Barry surely couldn't disagree. After his irrevocable split with David Tua, he moved back to the town where the pair had their best times, but like Zsa Zsa Gabor, found being poor much tougher than being rich. His career earnings frozen by the high court and his body damaged by years of training, he was forced to borrow from his father-in-law. They were, he says, "ugly" times.

Six years on, and Barry is a made man. He has a world champion fighter (even if it isn't Tua), and corporate clients paying hundreds of dollars for an hour of his time. He's promoting shows, he's on television. Most importantly, for him, he knows people in this town.

Barry's Las Vegas isn't the one seen by the tubby tourist from Iowa, clutching their iridescent 30-ounce plastic cup of pina colada. When we take him for a reluctant stroll down the strip for our photoshoot, he jams his hands in his pockets, tells us to watch our wallets, and says he'd only ever come here in a cab. Barry's kinda town is all about money: exclusive clubs, restaurants and casinos packed with plastic surgeons, financiers and a cabal of slick-suited Gordon Gekkos. He's comped into the prize fights, the clubs, the bars, the restaurants.

"There is nothing you can't get here," he considers. "You get the best entertainers, best music, the best sport, the greatest fights, you've got a playground that's second to none. It's hard to give up. I get escorted in [to clubs], I get tables, booze, security, private bathrooms. If I was younger, I'd say: this is a really cool.

"I know a lot of good people. I am very well hooked up in this town now." BUT THAT'S not where the story starts. It begins in 2004, when a dejected Barry leaves Auckland and his long-held dream of winning a heavyweight world title with Tua. He signs some corporate clients, picks up two promising heavyweights. The UFC – cage-fighting rebranded – is on the rise and he finds work as their boxing coach and is promised a slot on their reality TV show.

He has a 14-0 Nigerian, Teche Oruh, who can beat anyone in the gym, but turns out, says Barry, gesturing, "to have a heart this big". This big is the size of a hamster's heart. The other is an 11-0 Palestinian, Omran Nawadi, in whom Barry immediately sees the post 9-11 marketing potential. "Shit, it was a no-brainer: this big, muscular good-looking guy ... his fight name was the Arabian Night. He was perfect. We coulda taken him into Dubai". The Nigerian, lined up for a $75,000 shot at Chris Arreola on HBO, tanks, twice, in points decisions. The Palestinian, whose day job is installing those giant advertising signs which bestride the Nevada desert, drives into a ditch on a desert track and breaks both his shoulders. But not before his head breaks Barry's wrist (again) in a sparring accident. Barry returns to New Zealand for his sixth operation: a plate in, a plate out and it's permanently fused. Still doesn't flex more than 10 degrees. His shoulder is also buggered.

"I am not a brain surgeon, I am a f------ boxing coach: I needed my hands." So he can't train, can't appear on the TV show, has two busted fighters. He's at home in his six-bedroom house learning New Zealand law and living off his father-in-law Cliff Moss' money.

"Those first two years were rough years. It was probably the ugliest time of my life. I was just scraping by. All my money was frozen." He says that without Moss, who stays at the Barry house six months a year, he would have been "stuffed ... he more or less carried me on his back for a long time".

SO BARRY, who reckons he pioneered the corporate boxing concept in New Zealand, decided to turn back to the suits. One of his best personal training clients was nightclub owner Greg Costello, who became such an enthusiast he wanted an amateur fight. Barry promoted a sold-out corporate fight night at the Hard Rock Casino which pitted together nightclub hosts and doormen. He's about to put on his third such card, and now trains 20 senior staff at the casino, while his other clients include celebrity plastic surgeon Frank Stile, who has his own documentary show (featuring Barry), and banker Richard Moriarty, whose Union Gaming Group funds casino purchases, who flew Barry to Colombia for a week's holiday.

Last year, along came Beibut Chumenov, a Kazahk middleweight with big ambitions who Barry twice rebuffed before becoming his trainer – and only at the behest of his wife, Tanya, who had suffered years of Barry's over-enthusiastic approach to his boxing proteges.

"I thought `why do I want to go and train fighters'?" he says. "So I said to Tanya `I don't want to do this', and she said `you have to do this'. I thought she would be aghast at the idea. She always said `let them fight, let's not take over their life'."

Chumenov, unlike the others, has stayed out of Barry's house and delivered him, at last, a world championship belt and he says there's no prospect of their "marvellous relationship" becoming over-complicated. It's the model trainer-boxer relationship he never had, for Barry has long lamented that he should have taken on other fighters instead of lavishing all his attentions on Tua.

"I spoiled the shit out of David for years, and I will never ever do that again, ever," Barry says vehemently. "For a couple of years, we treated him like a god, it was stupid. Ridiculous."

This time, he's also training Muay Thai and kickbox champions and plans to take on a group of Kazakh and Uzbek fighters from Chumenov's stable. However, this this may be the moment to note the contradiction that the Palestinian with the bung shoulders is living with Barry, still, and contemplating a comeback; he goes on to merrily describe Nawadi as a "brother to me, the greatest guy, I love him to bits".

ANOTHER REGULAR visitor to the Barry abode is the infamous Martin Pugh, the man most credit with destroying the Tua-Barry relationship. Pugh is holidaying in Vegas next month.

"I always stood by Marty because I knew what he did: I knew what he did for our company, I knew the money he made for us," he says. "I look back now at where the three of us would've been: we would have had a structure in place to bring fighters from the Pacific Islands, I think we would have been bringing football players over for the NFL, we would have been blowing up. We had worked really hard to get it right and build credibility and we would have been reaping rewards."

There are a few such moments of remisniscent wondering, but Barry is mostly relentlessly optimistic and positive, even if he does later say quietly: "Life is a funny thing; you work hard, and it's taken away from you."

He says it was Pugh who wanted to carry on fighting their labyrinthine court case against Tua, and had to be convinced to settle. Pugh was always more gung-ho: loved throwing insults at Tua and his lawyers, loved the legal side alleys. Barry seems relieved it's done, and says "a sack of coal has been lifted off my shoulders".

The settlement is confidential, but Barry says they would have got nothing had the case lasted another 12 months, and a third of what they could have had in 2003. He notes ruefully that while "other people" were buying and renovating property (part of the court battle centred on a house Pugh bought on the North Shore) he was still living at the same modest Green Bay address he'd owned for 10 years when the case began and Tua's career earnings were locked. But if he blames anyone for the entire dispute, it's Tua's wife Robina. He still dislikes her enough to call her present management of Tua's fight career "stupid" and suggest it could cost Tua any chance of a return to the US.

There isn't any schadenfreude in that. Barry seems to genuinely hold no hatred for Tua. This, however, is his complete answer about the likelihood of a rapprochement with Tua: "We're both stubborn. I know what he's done, and he thinks he knows what I've done." But he also says that now the settlement is done, he no longer "thinks about the bad memories. Some of the experiences that Tua and me had together, no one can take away. We had some amazing times, and did some things people said we could never do and had some fun doing it. Those experiences are priceless. They are why he is how he is today, and why I am how I am."

Then he considers the settlement, Chumenov's world title belt, and the conclusion of a five-year battle with the United States Immigration Department which has ended in his favour with green cards all round and like a good Catholic boy, reaches for the parable of Job (inappropriate as that may be in the lounge bar of a Las Vegas casino).

"It's like God was testing me," he says. `OK, you survived the test, you get your life back'. I am in a very good place, enjoying myself."

Steve Kilgallon flew to Las Vegas courtesy of Duco Promotions.

- © Fairfax NZ News