Cut, hurt and unable to win a single round in the eyes of the judges against Maxi Hughes, the evening of December 14, 2024 on the Mediterranean coast was an unmitigated disaster for "The Diva".

 He did not know it at the time, when he filed through the tuxedos and back into his dressing room, that one of the blows delivered by his opponent had caused an injury most commonly sustained by those involved in car crashes. It would be a moment that nearly cost Cully, with a pregnant partner back home in Ireland, his entire career.

Cully had never even heard of fourth cranial nerve palsy but he was about to learn an awful lot about it, as his resulting double vision started to worry him. A horror cut which opened up during the fight would become the least of his worries. “That night was the first time I’d ever got out of a ring and realised that you can be hurt in a boxing match,” Cully tells The Ring.

 “Because this is just something I’ve always done and I’ve always felt capable of looking after myself. You can win or lose but I thought I would always be fine.

 “But this time I leave the ring with an injury like that and I'm like ‘wow this is no joke.' I realised then that this is a very serious game that I’m playing.”

In medical terms, the injury, which specialists believe came as a result of a punch to the back of the head, causes ‘weakness of the superior oblique muscle’, which essentially affects the movement of the eye ball. And there would be no quick fix for Cully in the aftermath,. “I found out I needed surgery and I spoke to the London Eye Surgery Clinic and had a couple of consultations in Belfast, too,” Cully says.

“I did a lot of research to find out exactly where I wanted to get it done and I was thorough with that. I only eventually got the surgery in October last year. I needed a couple of weeks to recover from that surgery and then I got back to training properly at the back end of 2025.”
 Although he remained ‘tapping away’ in the gym throughout 2025, the injury and resulting surgery meant Cully spent the best part of 12 months unable to engage in full-contact training or sparring. Such a lengthy lay-off provided him with a stark fork in the road.
 Turn left, draw a line under the injury and give his all back to boxing, or right; find a new way to provide for his family, which became one of three in June following the arrival of his baby boy Sonny.

 “That was a difficult time,” he says. “Just to kind of get my head around that; how I'm going to provide and how I'm going to handle the pressures of life. 
“I've got to provide a life, not only for myself and my fiance now, but also for our little boy. And I can't take a fight date because I'm obviously injured. So what am I going to do?

 “There were definitely a couple of times where I did think that maybe I wouldn’t come back and that would be me done. But instead, I just stuck in the gym and always kept that belief that I'm on the right path and I need to just follow it. I just needed to keep showing up.”

 As it happened, once he was back in full training, it was not long before he was offered an opportunity to return. It is now confirmed that Cully will feature at Dublin’s 3Arena on March 14 as part of the card headlined by Jazza Dicken’s world title defence against Anthony Cacace.

 After spending his whole career at lightweight, 30-year-old Cully has now decided to step up to 140 pounds and he will make the move bolstered by a whole new lease of life.
 “The lay off was probably good because it let the body, mind and brain recover after fighting actively for the last 20 years,” Cully adds. “Over the last two or three years I’ve not really enjoyed camps, haven’t enjoyed the process. But when I stepped back I realised I can live my life; I have a family, good friends, a couple of businesses up and running. When I realised I can live a nice life without boxing it was freeing. I had always thought I was boxing because it was the only thing that brought me joy or happiness. “So now I know I do it because I love it, not because I have to. I want to go back for my own goals and my own ambitions because I realised that ’d kick myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t give the next few years a proper go.



“That’s when I realised I had to do it. I’ve just had a baby son and I want him to know that whatever he wants in life will need time and energy put into it. He will have failures and setbacks and if I want to be preaching to him about resilience knowing I’d done the opposite, I’d be a hypocrite.”

 And what of that night in Monte Carlo? Cully had been stunned via a shock stoppage to Jose Felix back in May 2023 but had rebuilt steadily with victories over Reece Mould and Francesco Patera, which had fired him back up the rankings and into that fight with Hughes.
 But things could not have gone much worse for the Naas, Ireland southpaw who knew a victory over Hughes would likely lead to a crack at the world lightweight title. But by the time March 14 comes around, it will have been 15 months out of the ring for Cully and things are very different these days. You won’t find his name in any of the rankings but that ambition remains the same.
 “I don't really identify with that performance,” he says of Monte Carlo. “It just wasn't something that I can be proud of. 

 “I guess that was one of the reasons why I had to come back and give this a proper go because I could never end my career on that performance.
 “Because if you've followed me throughout the years and if you've seen the kind of performances I'm capable of putting in you’ll know that night wasn’t really a Gary Cully staple performance. “So now it’s something that I don't really look back on and identify with and it's not something that I'll probably ever go back and dissect because I don't really feel like it was a performance that I was fully present for.
 “I'm just going to put in the past and forget about it and get on with this next stage of my career. Now I’ve made my decision, I’m all in again.”