Family, boxers and bikies farewell a champion who never threw in the towel
By Roy Masters
September 7, 2005


'I've lived 100 years' ... members of the Rebels motorcycle gang form a guard of honour at the funeral of boxing trainer Joel Shirley yesterday.
Photo: Kate Geraghty

Has there been a braver sportsman to walk this Earth, or one more devoted to his friends?

Joel Shirley, a cystic fibrosis sufferer who received a double lung transplant which allowed him to train boxers, died last week aged 25.

Former WBF super-middleweight world champion Shannon Taylor, who was at Shirley's bedside at St Vincent's Hospital, said: "He was the toughest, bravest kid I ever saw in my life. He's tougher than any boxing champion I ever met."

Shirley died two days before one of his boxers, Joel Bourke, defended his IBF Pan Pacific super-middleweight title in Newcastle on Friday night.

"He looked after me," Bourke said. "He helped me out all the time. He trained me up for the fight when I won the title in December. He even drove me to Newcastle for the fight."

Shirley's story is inspiring and ennobling. Only once over the past five weeks, when his body staged a battle between anti-rejection medication and treatment for lymphoma, did his confidence crack.

"Why does God hate me so much?" he asked his mother Margaret.

How do you answer a question like that? Point to all the good he is leaving on Earth? Or talk about the strange vectors and currents that rule the universe, no matter how good we try to be? After all, there are enough comforting coincidences to link him forever with his charges.

Advertisement
AdvertisementTaylor said: "On the day of my comeback fight - July 19, 2002, on the Gold Coast - I wanted him desperately up there with me.

"He told me he couldn't leave Sydney because he was on the transplant list. He said there was a one in a million chance he'd get new lungs that day but he still couldn't go. He got the lungs."

Before yesterday's funeral at St Raphael's Church, South Hurstville, Bourke said: "I turn 30 tomorrow, the day of the funeral." Bourke lost his rematch to Daniel "Porky" Lovett on a TKO in the sixth round.

"I was up in Newcastle preparing for the fight when he died," he said. "I heard going to the weigh-in. It took my mind off everything, off my fight plan. Instead of boxing, I tried to get him. I went back to my old tricks ... had no sleep."

Shirley was surrounded by family, boxers and bikies when he died. The bikies belong to the Central Coast chapter of the Rebels and carried the casket to and from the church and hosted the wake at their Bringelly headquarters.

The Rebels awarded Shirley their colours before he died and he was dressed in them.

Margaret has thought long about the link with the bikies. "Joel idolised his father, who died seven years ago," she said. "He raced bikes at Sydney Showground when he was the same age, and Joel liked the brotherhood of the bikies, being ordered around and bossed, like his father did.

"He never got over it. He was always looking for dad."

Stan Shirley, who died in 1998, was also a prominent powerboat racer, winning the prestigious Fred Hawkins memorial race run by St George Motor Boat Club.

"Joel was born with cystic fibrosis, a disease he inherited from a gene from both parents," Margaret said.

"When he got the transplant, he blossomed and packed everything into the two good years he had."

Joel never told the Rebels of his medical problems, and the boxers, a breed with an in-built radar alerting them to any weakness, were slow to realise.

Taylor said: "I knew him 10 years and only knew the last five he was sick. He'd open the gym in the morning and be last to leave at night. But he'd disappear. I'd try to ring him and wouldn't see him for months.

"'Where is he,' I would ask people, and eventually I found out he was off getting treatment. About 18 months ago, after he had the transplant, he boxed me three rounds. We'd run along Wollongong beach. I'd do five kilometres and he'd do three kilometres."

Bourke said: "He'd get in the ring with the pads and we'd do six rounds.

"I'd say, 'They're only three minutes' and he'd say, 'Yeah, yeah'. Then I'd check the timer and they were five minutes. He wouldn't let me rest."

Margaret said: "The last five weeks he went through hell. The day the doctor agreed to re-transplant him, a biopsy revealed the lymphoma. He was too frail to breathe properly and wrote on a Magna Doodle board, 'no transplant'. Then he erased it and wrote, 'sedation'. A couple of hours later he died."

When Margaret arrived home and switched on her mobile phone, there was a text message: "Don't worry mum. After what I've been through in the last 2 years, I've lived 100 years."