"I was waiting for him up there because at the time Emanuel Steward was doing a speaking tour in England and said he'd come over and meet me. He missed his flight though and I was waiting and waiting, thinking I had come up for nothing and the entire ordeal was a waste of time. Next thing Emanuel comes through the arrivals gate and with him is seventime world champion Thomas 'The Hit Man' Hearns. It was surreal and Emanuel walks up to me grabs my hand and announced to the place, 'Andy Lee, I am going to make you a big star.'" He wasn't lying. Three years on and Lee is set for his first professional fight in Ireland on Bernard Dunne's undercard on Saturday, having already amassed seven knockouts, a perfect record of 10 wins and a reputation as the most talented of the current crop of Irish professional boxers. At the minute he's in training in Pennsylvania along with welterweight champion Kermit Cintron, heavyweight challenger Samuel Peters and most importantly, world middleweight champion Jermain Taylor, with whom he has held his own while sparring.

"It's been amazing. Like Jermain is set to move up in weight after his next fight and whoever takes that belt will be in my sights according to Emanuel. He has been right about everything so far and has said I'll be middleweight champion of the world towards the end of 2008. It's all happened so fast though. Like I'm living with him at the minute and we are getting on really well. The house is in Detroit, a place called Rosedale Park. What happened was to be mayor or police chief of Detroit you had to live in the city so these people built this suburb so it's a nice place to start. And some of the stuff we are doing, when I tell people they think I'm bragging. It's like jumping on a plane to Las Vegas for a day, then head off to LA and so on. Oscar De La Hoya will say 'Hey Andy, ' and then I think 'this is Oscar De La Hoya saying hello to me?'

"Even the other week was surreal. Emanuel has this Rolls Royce and he had left it in the shop to get some work done and get a paint job. We went and picked it up and said we'd take it for a ride and one of the tires blew out and we hit the separation wall at 50 miles per hour. It shook me up, but we were okay. What made it worse was he had taken collision damage off his insurance while the car was being done up and forgot to put it back on. But he didn't mind, it was a small price to pay but these things go through my mind at night. I have to pinch myself and ask 'did I crash a Rolls Royce with Emmanuel Stewart in Detroit today?'" It's a long way from the boy that started boxing because of his brothers in a smoky gym in London's East End. Both his parents were Irish and would later move back to Castleconnell in Limerick when he was 14, but for now Bow was his home.

On the night of his first fight he was looking around to see who his opponent was but he heard him first.

"Who are you fighting?"

"Some joker called A Lee, " came the reply.

The guy was big and Lee was nervous and as he sat in his stool at the end of the first round he asked for a bucket and proceeded to throw up into it. The pressure had got to him. His brother Thomas won his first 28 fights. His brother Ned won his first 10. But Lee managed to win that fight and one thing led to another.

"I was more nervous before that fight than I was at the Olympics. I just had to puke up the nerves and it was the start of great things for me until I went to Athens.

After losing in the last 16 there, it took me a long time to realise what had happened because it was such a great opportunity and I had such high hopes. In fact I still haven't watched the video and I don't know if I ever will. Maybe if I was middleweight champion of the world I could sit back and say it was meant to be."