The world featherweight champ appeared on the front cover cradling his baby daughter in the style of an Athena poster
On the cover of the Observer Magazine of 15 June 1986, the boxer Barry McGuigan is holding a baby, in the style of the then recent Athena poster, L’Enfant (Man and Baby), showing the family man’s softer side (‘The champ with kid gloves’). There is a poignancy to this image because the baby was his daughter Danika, who became an accomplished actor, and who died in 2019.
McGuigan was defending his world featherweight title against the Texan fighter Steve Cruz in Las Vegas the following week, and Stuart Cosgrove and Sean O’Hagan met him at home in the ‘rural tranquillity’ of County Monaghan. This ‘man of warring opposites’, they wrote, was ‘an aggressive boxer who fights under the flag of peace, a fierce competitor whose life outside the ring revolves around the traditional family values, an Irish hero with a British passport…’