Former boxing champion turned promoter and manager Barry McGuigan is one of the 10 famous faces who have just entered the I’m A Celebrity jungle.
Born in Clones, Co Monaghan, Mr McGuigan earned the nickname The Clones Cyclone due to his success in the boxing ring and was credited with uniting both Catholic and Protestant fans in support at the height of the Troubles.
During his boxing career, Mr McGuigan held the WBA and lineal featherweight titles from 1985 (when he famously beat Eusebio Pedroza) to 1986. He also held the British and European featherweight titles between 1983 and 1985.
In 2005, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
The 63-year-old, who currently works as a boxing pundit for Sky TV, entered the jungle (via kayak) on Sunday night.
On joining this year’s troupe, Mr McGuigan said: “It can be physically arduous, but it’s the psychological part of it that I want to conquer before I get too old.
“I’m 63 now. I’d like to think I’m a young 63, but that doesn’t mean it’ll make any of these challenges easy. I’d rather do it when I’m 63 than 73, put it that way.”
Mr McGuigan’s jungle experience has gotten off to an emotional start having opened up to his campmates about the death of his daughter, who died five weeks after being diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2019.
His daughter, Danika ‘Nika’ McGuigan died at the age of 33. The Dublin-based actress, who played Danielle in BBC Three comedy Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, originally overcame leukaemia after two years of treatment when she was 11.
He told his jungle campmates: “I used to go to church a lot but after my daughter… you know, not so much.
“She had leukaemia, when I was making The Boxing [film] with Daniel Day Lewis, three weeks from the end I had to leave because she’d been diagnosed with leukaemia,” he said.
“They thought she wasn’t going to get better, but she fought back, and she won it. She had two years of chemo, she was good, she came back.”
Emotions were compounded when campmates Alan Halsall and Danny Jones failed to win Mr McGuigan’s luxury item at the ‘Jungle delivery centre’.
The pair had to answer a multiple-choice question about each celebrity in order to save their luxury items from ‘the shredder’.
Despite answering eight questions correctly they got the former boxer’s wrong as well as one about Loose Women panellist Jane Moore which meant they had to forego their parcels from home.
However, this sparked an outcry on social media with many expressing their upset that Mr McGuigan didn’t get his item.
One user said, “Barry being the most supportive person even though he doesn’t have his gift. we must protect this man #ImACeleb.” Suggesting he could be a fan favourite this series.
