Unbeaten Callum Walsh steps up in front of home crowd, scores crushing second-round KO of Przemyslaw Runowski

The elite athletes have this sort of sixth sense of when it's time to step up. They raise their games to the highest level when the stakes are most significant.

In the biggest bout of his fledgling boxing career, 'King' Callum Walsh did the same on Friday in his bout before a sold-out hometown crowd of 5,000 at 3Arena in Dublin, Ireland, against Przemyslaw Runowski. Walsh entered the fight with an 11-0 record and 9 KOs, and a target of sorts on his back because he was being pushed heavily by UFC CEO Dana White.

Runowski was by far the biggest name on Walsh's resume, with a 22-2-1 record entering the bout.

It was all Walsh from the get-go, however, and he didn't waste much time. A powerful left hand dropped Runowski and he couldn't beat the count. Runowski went 10 rounds with Josh Kelly in 2019 and with Michael McKinson in 2021, two fights before McKinson took on Vergil Ortiz.

Walsh left Ireland during COVID in 2020 to come to the U.S. to train. He was still an amateur and wound up walking into trainer Freddie Roach's WildCard Gym in Hollywood, Calif., on sparring day. Roach was duly impressed and took Walsh on as a client.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Walsh since White championed his cause, but he's lived up to the billing. On Friday, though, he took it to another level. 

The crowd was roaring from the first preliminary but switched to a fever pitch as Walsh made his way to the ring.

"There were 5,000 people in there, but it sounded like 10,000 or 15,000," Tom Loeffler of 360 Promotions said. "The crowd was electric."

Against that backdrop of high expectations, Walsh came through. He was well aware of the circumstances and knew the situation called for something special.

"The Irish crowd definitely elevated my performance," Walsh told KevinIole.com by telephone from Dublin. "It was just the atmosphere and the fighting spirit that was there tonight. I felt like I really embraced that and took it on. It helped with my performance."

White urged Loeffler to bring Walsh to Boston, to New York for St. Patrick's Day and then to Dublin. Loeffler has promoted mega-fighters like Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko and Gennadiy Golovkin, but had never done a show in Ireland before.

He was thinking it might be too soon, but White was adamant. Given White's success creating stars, Loeffler went along with it and said it all came together on Friday.

"To be honest, the whole reason Dana took a liking to Callum was because he saw the success of Conor McGregor and he saw through the eyes of Callum and Freddie Roach what could be in this situation," Loeffler said. "Dana and Freddie go back to the Boston days. This is the vision Dana had, and he saw it before I saw it. But this is what Dana saw when he gave Callum the opportunity to fight on UFC Fight Pass.

"He always talked about going to Ireland and fighting over here. I personally thought it was a year too early to bring him back here, but after seeing this tonight, Dana was spot on. Dana is rarely wrong about anything and he was 100 percent right about this year. The crowd was electric. It couldn't have been any louder in that arena."

White, too, was pleased by what he saw. He went over with high expectations but returned to Las Vegas blown away by the poise, savvy and killer instinct Walsh showed.

"Very [impressed]," White said of Walsh. "I love watching Callum fight. He’s exciting and explosive and fights in Ireland are such an incredible experience!"