National Post (National Edition)
Life and death in the ring
BRAIN TRAUMA DOESN’T CARE WHAT SPORT YOU PLAYED
The biggest story in boxing last week was not about a boxer. Ultimate Fighting Championship star Conor McGregor agreed to an August fight against Floyd Mayweather, who is one of the best boxers of all time. It will be an absurdly lucrative affair. It also has no business happening. For all his abilities in the UFC octagon, McGregor, in trying to match a world-class boxer, might as well be wrestling a bear. But, put enough money at stake, and authorities will allow such a match to happen. At the opposite end of the boxing-spectacle scale is the event that took place in Edmonton on Friday, when Tim Hague, a former UFC fighter himself, took a severe beating in the ring and later died. All the right questions are being asked, except the larger one. Why do people still box?
The biggest story in boxing last week, which was the biggest story to hit in boxing in several years, was not about a boxer.
UFC star Conor McGregor agreed to an August fight against Floyd Mayweather, who is considered one of the best boxers of all time. It will be an absurdly lucrative affair, the rare boxing match that crosses into mainstream sports appeal, and it will be hyped like none other.
It also has no business happening. For all his abilities in the UFC octagon, McGregor, in trying to match a world-class boxer, might as well be wrestling a bear.
But put enough money at stake and authorities will allow such a match to happen. McGregor-Mayweather is James J. Braddock against Max Baer, but updated for this century.
At the opposite end of the boxing spectacle scale is the event that took place in Edmonton on Friday, a card in which Tim Hague, a former UFC fighter, took a severe beating in the ring and later died. Hague, 34, a school teacher who had been out of UFC for several years, was knocked out by Adam Braidwood, a one-time member of the Edmonton Eskimos who became a boxer when his CFL career was over.
All the questions that are being asked after Hague’s death on Sunday should be asked. Were the proper safety procedures followed? Was Hague’s medical history — he had acknowledged concussion issues when leaving UFC — overlooked? Did the referee allow the fight, in which Hague went repeatedly to the canvas, to go on too long?
Aside from those specific questions, there’s the larger one that will be asked. Why do people still box, anyway? While it’s easy, after such a tragedy, to say that such contests should be banned, the reality is that any number of sports put their athletes at considerable physical risk for the benefit of paying customers. It’s just that in boxing, the trade-off seems so much more obvious.
The biggest sport of them all on this continent, the National Football League, just last week started to pay out claims relating to the billion-dollar settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by former players relating to head trauma and dementia.
The NFL also has been sued by former players who allege team doctors and coaches used painkillers improperly and indiscriminately in an effort to get them back out on the field and able to make plays. The allegations in either of those lawsuits make for sobering reading — players charge that for years their safety was barely an afterthought to coaches and staffs that cared primarily about winning games. Concussionrelated lawsuits against the Canadian Football League are also before the courts, as is an action against the National Hockey League that was filed in a Minnesota court that involves hundreds of former players.
A common theme in the allegations across all leagues is that teams knew more about head injuries and the risks they posed than they disclosed, allowing players to unwittingly put themselves at risk of dangers they did not fully understand.
No one would say that about today’s players, though. While much is still unknown about the risk of head trauma and its associations with contact sports, those connections are much clearer and better understood than they were five or 10 years ago. The NFL’s own research acknowledged that almost 30 per cent of former players could develop Alzheimer’s disease or moderate dementia as a result of brain injuries suffered while playing. Still, the pipeline of athletes wanting to play these sports at their highest levels has not been noticeably slowed, or even at the lower levels. Anyone who attended minor-hockey tryouts in a dense community in this country would know it’s practically a blood sport just to get kids placed on the right teams.
Team sports, where there’s pressure to keep sacrificing for the greater good, are one type of risk, but it’s something else entirely that sees other athletes put themselves in harm’s way: race car drivers, downhill skiers, even niche sports like ski jumping or luge.
It’s not like we haven’t seen ample evidence that auto racing is dangerous to drivers, and yet people are still willing to take that chance and many more are quite willing to pay to watch them do it. The fact a particular event is stupid and potentially deadly is rarely seen as a negative for ticket sales. Floyd Mayweather isn’t known as a power puncher, but if he was, there would just be that much more interest in seeing whether he would cause McGregor serious harm. As for McGregor, he might have been more reluctant to take on Mayweather if he thought he was at risk of getting his head caved in, but I doubt it. There are too many reasons to throw caution aside.
Maybe that is the lesson of Friday’s tragedy: From the biggest stage to the smallest, there will be athletes who choose to put themselves at serious personal risk and it’s not just those under the biggest spotlights who sometimes need to be protected from themselves.