Jack Doyle - The Gorgeous Gael

Courtesy of Michael Taub and The Lilliput Press, Dublin

One of the highlights of the Jack Doyle centenary weekend will be the talk given by Michael Taub, author of 'Jack Doyle - The Gorgeous Gael,' a biography on the life and times of Cobh's famous son.

The weekend will be part of the gathering, and will be held on the last weekend in August coinciding with the centenary of Jack's birth on the 31st August. This mini-festival will feature a Boxing Tournament, a Gala Dinner/Birthday Bash with guest speaker, Michael Taub, workshops, film screenings, street theatre, markets, classic car displays and commemorative ceremonies.

To give you a snapshot of Jack Doyle's life, Michael Taub has kindly allowed us to reproduce the book's synopsis here....

"JACK DOYLE (1913-1978) was a 6ft 5in Irishman with a giant appetite for life. In 1933 this son of Cobh drew 90,000 to London’s White City to see him fight and was making £600 a week on stage as a singer. He was nineteen. By the age of thirty he had earned and squandered a £250,000 fortune (worth millions today). His motto was, ‘A generous man never went to hell’ and he lived his life like a hellraiser. In his heyday as a heavyweight boxer, singer and playboy, his celebrity rivalled that of the Prince of Wales, and he and his wife – the beautiful Mexican film star and singer Movita, who later married Marlon Brando – were as popular in the thirties as Olivier and Leigh and Burton and Taylor.

Michael Taub’s remarkable biography rescues a glittering period of social and boxing history from obscurity and restores Jack and Movita to their rightful place in the showbiz and sporting pantheon. Jack’s ring presence and personality reached back to the days of the Regency Buck. His friendships with the Royal family, his fist fight with Clark Gable, his life as a film star and gigolo, his throwing of a fight by knocking himself out, and his extraordinary post-war career as an all-in wrestler, are the stuff of legend confirmed here by seven years’ exhaustive research, during which Taub tracked down and interviewed the leading players in Jack’s life."

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the Commodore Hotel during the Jack Doyle Centenary Gathering from Friday, 30 August-Sunday, 1 September.

Courtesy of Michael Taub- Author of the 'Jack Doyle The Gorgeous Gael' (Biography) and Publishers, The Lilliput Press, Dublin.

Watch this space for further excerpts