By Peter Carroll

Emotions can run high on the day of weigh-ins, but not in the case of Irish flyweight Neil Seery.

On Friday night, various fighters and teammates scramble through the halls of the Mainport Hotel in robes after coming up from the sauna to sweat out the last few pounds. Meanwhile, Neil ‘2 Tap’ Seery is watching Goodfellas in his boxer shorts.

Team Ryano don’t seem to subscribe to the intensity that is commonly involved with the weight cutting process. After I sit down on the bed beside Seery, former UFC featherweight Paul Redmond opens up a bag full of nuts, chocolate and soft mangos and starts munching away. Seery meekly protests, but ‘Redser’, wearing a mischievous grin, says his previous experiences have forced him to punish his fellow Dubliner as he tackles the scales.

For Redmond’s UFC debut last year, he endured a hellish weight cut of 33 pounds. To ease his pain, Seery placed two cartons of coconut water beside Redmond’s head as he was wrapped in towels, stuck a big smile on his face and took out a camera and snapped a selfie with his struggling teammate.

“We had him wrapped up in the towels in the sauna in Sweden and residents from the hotel were walking in and they were shocked as soon as they saw him,” Keith Duffy remembers. “They came in and they were asking us ‘is this guy ok?’

“He was so gaunt and he was wrapped up in them towels. He looked like ET,” he says as all three men burst into laughter. “Then we told them he was fighting the next day. They got really worried then!”

The following morning we meet again in the hotel room where Seery is getting ready to plunge into his last bath to get the remaining two pounds off his frame, which is bulkier than ever due to his newly installed strength and conditioning regime.

“Let’s go Piglet,” declares head coach Andy Ryan whose blocky frame dwarves that of Seery’s.  When his most celebrated student joins him in the bathroom, Ryan bundles him up in his arms and pretends to put him in the sink.

“He’s only a little fella there’s no point in using the whole bath for him, he could get lost,” booms Ryan as Seery’s face cracks into a giant smile. Ryan checks the water again, adds in some salt and after Seery dunks himself into the water his coach leaves us alone to talk.

“This doesn’t seem to affect me as much as it does with other people,” Seery tells me he wipes away the sweat that begins to flush down from his forehead. “I tend to sweat really easily.”

Seery has never actively courted the media or looked for any attention based on what he does for a living. Yet, since his last fight in Dublin, the stalwart’s stock has increased dramatically.

The handful of video blogs that he produced throughout his Rotterdam camp gained tens of thousands of views. The posts showed Seery in his normal work life mocking his Polish co-worker who he affectionately refers to as “stink bomb” and then brings you into his training sessions where teammates Karl Roche and Stephen Lowry took the majority of whippings from his sharp tongue. The fans lapped it up.

And then there’s the media attention.

Seery likes to do things on his own terms. He’d rather sit down and have a cup of tea and talk to a journalist for two hours than answer quick fire questions. There’s one query in particular that’s been getting under his skin in this camp:

“Do you really think you can beat Kyogi Horiguchi?”

“I just hate thinking about that sh*t,” the conversation gets more serious without his team around him as the water keeps pumping out. “I don’t want to think about what’s next. I just want to get in there and fight. Obsessing over your opponent can let the whole thing creep in on you a bit.

“Like, of course, I think I can beat him. Why would I be in this sport if I didn’t want to fight the best guys out there? What do they want me to say? I have put everything into this. I’ve left no stones unturned. That’s all I can do.”

After exactly ten minutes, as counted on Redmond’s stopwatch, Ryan bounds in, gets his fighter out of the bath and wipes him down to allow more sweat to pour out. Moving inside to the room, Redmond and Duffy prepare the towels to mummify their friend as he lies down on the bed. In a tomb of towels, Seery closes his eyes and smiles as their jeers begin again. There’s a comfort in their chorus.

Ten minutes later he jumps back in the bath and our back and forth gets underway for a second time.

It’s crazy to think that after a lifetime in combat sports, Seery has only recently taken on a cult icon status. That, like everything, comes with its pros and cons for the Finglas native.

“I don’t really want any of that attention,” he says candidly. “Don’t get me wrong, I love all of the support. It means a lot to me that these people are interested in me. That comes with pressure too, though. All these people getting behind me, knowing that they’ll be watching, that definitely adds pressure to the situation. I want to give them people a show. I want to pay them back for their support.

“There’ll always the guys who will say ‘I told you so’ when you lose, but those people are idiots. The fact that they watched the fight proves that they didn’t know sh*t.”

With everything he has going on his life – his four kids, his full-time job, his second career as a fighter, his avid support of Liverpool football club – you could be fooled into thinking that the fight was the great release in tension in his life. He dismisses that and tells me the only time he really unwinds his when he sits down by the canal with a fishing rod and a cup of tea. His young son Ryan has recently taken an interested in catching fish too and that has only added to his own interest, he tells me as he beams proudly.

For Seery, the fight is way more than a release, it’s something that he points his whole life toward once the date is set. Everything school run, every cycle to work, every meal and every breath is dedicated to the task at hand. When that gets taken away, there is in an inevitable crash and Seery is adamant that he is not the only person who suffers with it.

“This is what I live for. Even this weight cut, it’s all part of the buzz of fight week. We all just have a great buzz the week of the fight. We’ve done everything to get ready for the moment and now we just have to enjoy it. It’s so different from your normal life.

“You walk out there for the weigh-in or for the fight and you can feel the energy from the people in the crowd. It’s an amazing feeling. Then you fight and it’s such an adrenaline rush. It’s the most exciting thing in the world. As soon as that bell goes to end the fight, it’s all over. You’re back to your normal life and it honestly feels like nothing has happened. It’s kind of like when people go away on a sun holiday and take two weeks off work. They come back to work and it feels like they were never away. It’s like that, but it’s way worse. Nobody talks about it, but I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way.”

A few hours later the ‘Ole, Ole, Ole’ chants take over the arena as Seery makes his way to the stage. The look of appreciation on his face is unmistakable and after registering his weight he twists his body into a muscle pose to the delight of his audience. It’s just a teaser, though. Tomorrow is the real party for the Irishman, and for the fans too. As he moves in and closes down his opponent in his usual aggressive manner, take comfort in the fact that you’re watching a man that is doing exactly what he wants to do with his life.

Win, lose or draw.