The wind blows off Red Rock Canyon in a seductive whisper. Native Americans believed that they could hear the voice of the Great Spirit in the wind and the native Irishman, sat alone on the edge of the ring in the garage of his Las Vegas home, seems to be listening to more than the soft-spoken breeze.

Wayne McCullough finds peace here, on the edge of the boxing ring. Sparring has ceased, the television and sound system are turned off, everyone has gone — trainer Kenny Croom, sparring partner Brian Clements, a reporter and production crew from one of the Las Vegas television channels who have been filming for the evening news — but the fighter remains, alone with his thoughts, surrounded by fight posters and silence.

“I like to come here,” he says, “either to sit down after training or just to walk through that door from the family room and look at the posters and think. The serenity brings me here, peace and quiet. A lot of people don’t stop to listen to the quiet. I sit here and think and it’s beautiful. It really is.”

He is 32 now and has much to contemplate after 10 years of fighting for money and majesty. That journey began on February 23 1993. Against a 19-year-old California-based Mexican, Alfonso Zamora, he walked to the ring in the Reseda Country Club in Los Angeles, to U2’s (Pride) In The Name Of Love. At 39 seconds of round four, referee Rudy Jordan stepped in to save Zamora from any more suffering. McCullough was on his way in the game he loves, the game he loved from the moment he stepped into the Albert Foundry Gym at the top of Belfast’s Shankill Road and first laced on a pair of gloves as a reticent, slightly built eight-year-old taken there by his older brothers.

He boxed in the Olympic final at bantamweight in 1992 in Barcelona, losing to the Cuban, Joel Casamayor, but three years later in Nagoya, Japan, was crowned world bantamweight champion, victory secured on points over the local man, Yasuei Yakushiji. Boxing News put his picture on the cover under the headline Shankill Samurai. He had dreamed of this day as a boy looking out towards the Harland and Wolff shipyard from the doorstep of his home on Belfast’s Highfield Estate. He was where he wanted to be. His life was happy.

But, in 1997, in Boston against Daniel Zaragoza, it began to go wrong. Defeat by a controversial split decision in a challenge for the WBC super-bantamweight title was his first setback. Then he lost to WBO featherweight champion Naseem Hamed before problems with promoter Mat Tinley degenerated from tedious to terminal.

None of these setbacks could compare, however, with the blow he sustained on an October evening in 2000 when he was told three days before he was due to fight in the Ulster Hall that one more punch to the head could kill him.

A cyst on his skull had been detected in a routine MRI scan and the British Boxing Board of Control denied him a licence to box. For six months he was lost, “here but not here”. The dog — the term used by his trainer, Croom, to describe the fight in a man — was gone.

The posters on the wall of his gym tell this story. Poignant thoughts are bound to be evoked by one that reads Return Of The Mac from that abortive Belfast show. But the pain of three years ago has been eased by his “second chance”, his clearance by neurosurgical experts in Britain and in America to resume his career. “Sometimes Cheryl (his wife of 10 years and also now his manager) will walk through that door, see me sitting here and say that I’m crazy. She might be right,” he announces before looking into the large mirror opposite and adding, more to himself than to me, “just a crazy Irishman”.

The door opens and four-year-old Wynona runs into the arms of her daddy. She understands to a surprising degree the business of her fighting father. She has something to say. “Excuse me, Brian Doogan. Daddy has a fight in a couple of months and he’s going to knock out Scott Harrison in his own backyard.”

IT IS 7AM and a fighting father has just risen from his bed at the Holiday Inn in Belfast. His wife and daughter sleep on in the bed as Wayne McCullough begins the day, as he begins and ends every day, by dropping to his knees to pray.

Two months have elapsed since we ran together through Cottonwood Canyon near his Vegas home and the warm desert air has been replaced by a colder cousin as we turn left off Ormeau Avenue into Botanic Avenue and on past Queen’s University. “Back to where it all began,” he reflects, his breathing remaining even, his motion smoothly economic.

The previous day we sat and watched a documentary made by his friend, Dermot Lavery, Down The Street Of Dreams, a portrayal of the 22-year-old Belfast boxer who left home to pursue his dream in the city of dreams. McCullough was fresh-faced then as he looked into Lavery’s camera while sat in the apartment he and Cheryl first lived in, just off the Strip, and announced his ambition to be a world champion and declared his intention to be retired by the time he reached 30.