Ex-Boxer Switches Gears, Keeps Head Above Water
Edward Guthmann, Special to The Chronicle
Sean Collins an East Bay Plumber who is the former boxing champion if Ireland, works on a faucet assembly in an Oakland Hills home. Jan. 20, 2010 Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle
In his native Ireland, Sean Collins became the boxing champion of County Kerry at 17. The son of a dairy farmer, reared on the picturesque Dingle Peninsula, he immigrated to the United States in 1984 when his boxing dreams didn’t pan out.
Collins, 43, lived briefly in Springfield, Mass., and New York City before moving to the Bay Area in 1985. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Rose, who is Irish and handles the administrative end of their business, Collins Plumbing. They have two daughters, ages 16 and 11, and a son, 13.
I wanted to be a professional boxer. That was pretty much all I thought about. I trained and sparred all the time. When I became county champion, I went on to the provincial championships and I got beaten in the finals.
I actually had the flu the day of the fight and I always kind of felt, “If I hadn’t had the flu, maybe I’d have done better.” But if I’d won that fight, I might never have come to America.
When I came to the States, I really hadn’t made my mind up that I wanted to be a plumber. In Springfield, I met this guy from the same county I was from. He was a retired plumber, and he was only 42, which made an impression on me. He had bought a bunch of apartment buildings, and he and his brother and I maintained those buildings. That was the first exposure I had to plumbing.
My wife and I started our own business in ’94. We were doing 24-hour emergency service at the time. We slept with a pager. If it went off at 2 o’clock in the morning, I went out. If we were at a dinner party and the pager went, I would leave the party. We built up a pretty good clientele after two or three years. A lot of those customers that we got 15 years ago, we still have them today.
I heard an expression recently, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” It’s true: I don’t even really think of this as work a lot of the time. Nearly every part of it I like.
The things that other people would consider the nasty parts about plumbing, like being around bad smells or stuff like that, don’t bother me one iota. Coming from a farming background, we were exposed to cleaning out cowsheds and everything like that from the time we were little kids.
Many people would think underneath the house where it’s cold and damp is an uninviting environment. But a lot of times that’s the nicest environment of all. It’s nice and cool in the summertime. It’s calm. I get under there, and give me some pipe and some fittings and some tools, and I’m the happiest man in the world.
I’m mechanically minded. I was always pretty good at eye-hand coordination, and I like to figure out why things work the way they do. I’ve always been fascinated by things like old ships and the pulleys that take up the sails. Wind-up clocks and all that kind of stuff.
There’s an incredible variety of things I do compared to any other job. I get to work on water lines, gas lines, waste lines. I get to install all kinds of fixtures. If you do service and repair, you get to interact with people a lot more than most trades do. You talk to them, walk around their house, try to figure problems out.
If you’re doing commercial work, you’ll go to a restaurant and they’ll feed you while you’re there. You get to have the whole experience. Then you’ll go somewhere else, maybe to a school or a doctor’s office. I basically spend my day talking to people. I find it a very entertaining way to spend your life.
You have to be in decent shape to do this work. You have to be flexible, agile. For many years I’ve done Bikram yoga. A friend talked me into doing a triathlon two or three years ago, and I loved it even though I finished last in the swim. So I’ve been training the past several months with an Olympian swimmer from Lithuania.