Of Wee Sweetie Mice and Men

Dan Starkey has signed on to cover the heavy-weight title fight between the Irish national champion, Fat Boy McMaster, and Iron Mike Tyson. McMaster is a far cry from Evander Holyfield - he's not even shouting distance from blubbery Buster Douglas - but despite the hundred-to-one odds against them, the St. Patrick's Day fight promises to be a monstrous payday for the entire Irish contingent: Fat Boy himself, his wife (the only Catholic in the whole bunch), his doddering trainer, his small-time manager, and his childhood chum turned recently unemployed terrorist. And Starkey himself, who is more desperate than even this ragged bunch for a relaxing sojourn away from the bloody conflict of his homeland - and of his home itself, where his marriage is dissolving as quickly as the ceasefire. But when the stakes are this high, the Big Apple has more to dish out than fat paychecks and peaceful vacations. At his prefight press conference, McMaster sets off racial and political mayhem when he makes a few ill-advised remarks about the preponderance of black people in New York City (to the eyes of a born-and-bred Irishman), incurring the immediate enmity of a Black Muslim paramilitary group. And despite everyone's best efforts to turn the fight into a feel-good Irish version of Rocky v. Apollo Creed, in a city where more residents claim Irish ancestry than there are Irishmen in Ireland, the politics of a Northern Irish Protestant boxer fighting on St. Patrick's Day prove to be as dangerous as they might have been at home in Belfast. As Starkey's quiet holiday crumbles, his loser sports chronicle morphs into a quick-paced thriller complete with kidnappings, inner-city commando operations, and an elaborately sinister whale-watching cruise - none of which is enough to stem the flow of Starkey's crackling repartee. It turns out his sidesplittingly funny gallows humor is only that much more inspired when Starkey himself is barely dodging the hangman's noose.