REVERBERATING PUNCHES
Safety should be the only concern of boxing commissioners as the death of Tim Hague continues to send shock waves through the sport
The email landed in Sonny Wong’s inbox just a few days after heavyweight Tim Hague died in an Edmonton hospital.
It was an apology, 12 years overdue; an acknowledgment that a decision Wong made as a referee in a boxing ring at the 2005 Canadian Championships in Saint-Hyacinthe, Que. might have saved a life.
“It was from the heart,” said Joey LaClare, a former middleweight who was so shaken by Hague’s death on June 18 — two days after he was knocked out by Adam Braidwood in Edmonton — that LaClare felt compelled to reach out.
Wong refereed a Jan. 20, 2005, fight between Joey Smart of Newfoundland and LaClare, who took a hard shot to the temple in the first round, but didn’t go down. He was wearing headgear, as all amateurs did, but he couldn’t find his balance during a mandated standing-eight count, so Wong waved off the fight.
“I had been sour over it for a long time, but it faded in the last few years,” said LaClare. “When Tim died, it really hit home. I wanted to reach out and thank Sonny. I’m sure thankful that I never got seriously hurt, that the fight was stopped.”
That he didn’t have to fight the hard-punching Adonis Stevenson the next day with a head injury. That he was able to retire on his own terms in 2007, marry Katie and raise four kids. That he has a thriving career in livestock production and a good life in Edam, Sask.
He knows all that now. But in the ring he pleaded with Wong to let him continue.
“When Sonny circled back to his neutral corner I followed him, basically saying ‘Come on, come on, I’m going to be good here. I’m OK, I’m OK.’ I wasn’t swearing or anything, but I was trying to plead with him that I was OK.”
LaClare was anything but OK. He had sustained an undetected concussion several years earlier during the final round of a bout and, as he said, his bell was more easily rung afterwards. It had certainly been rung in Saint-Hyacinthe and Wong immediately recognized a fighter in trouble. LaClare only realized he’d been hurt when concussion symptoms returned in the days following the bout.
Wong, who has refereed for 36 years and is Boxing Canada’s chief official, said he couldn’t recall the circumstances of the fight, but he remembered LaClare’s name and appreciated the gesture.
“Because you do second-guess yourself. There’s been some that I thought, maybe I should have stopped it a little earlier. Thankfully, nothing happened to that boxer. And then there were some that I thought OK, I stopped it early but that kid is going to be able to fight next week. So I did the right thing.”
Safety isn’t just the right thing, it should be the only thing of concern to the boxing commissions that govern pros and the associations that oversee amateurs. Rules and regulations are in place to ensure athletes are healthy, prepared and evenly matched prior to fights and that they emerge intact after competing.
Record checks and pre-fight medicals act as safeguards; so, too, do ringside physicians, but they are not guarantees against injury.
“You’re really trying as much as you can to minimize risk,” said Scott Brown, who chairs the Athletics Commission of Saskatchewan. “And even with the most thorough of medical practices and evaluations that go on, there is always the risk we might miss something, just like any person on the street would have when they go to see their doctor. It is not a perfect science. There is no 100-per-cent certainty.”
And boxers do die. A website, the Manuel Velazquez Collection, documented 2,036 boxing-related deaths worldwide between 1725 and 2010, including 21 in Canada. The first on Canadian soil occurred in April 1893 in Windsor, and there have been six others in Ontario, five in Quebec, four in Alberta, two in Saskatchewan, and one each in B.C., Manitoba, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It is believed Hague’s is the only boxing-related death in Canada in the last 37 years, the first since Cleveland Denny in Montreal in 1980. Hague’s death is currently under review by an independent third party.
Those numbers require context. According to the U.S.-based Association of Boxing Commissions (ABC), there were 17,298 shows staged by its members in North America between 1993 and 2014, an average of 786 per year. If each card averaged seven bouts, that’s 5,500 annually in North America alone.
“If you really look at the number of individuals in the industry and the number of individuals who actually do have a catastrophic injury, it’s very minimal compared to other sports,” said Mike Mazzulli, president of the ABC.
Research conducted by the North Carolina-based National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research shows football is the most dangerous sport it monitors. Between 1931 and 2016, there were 1,048 reported fatalities directly linked to playing the game at all levels — organized youth, high school, college and the pros — and another 800 deaths linked to illness or injury sustained during conditioning workouts or practice.
The centre does not track catastrophic boxing injuries.
But the risk in the ring is serious. The ABC acknowledges it by posting a sample contract on its website that states “the Boxer understands that by participating in a contest or exhibition of boxing, that the Boxer is engaging in an abnormally dangerous activity. The Boxer further understands that this participation subjects the Boxer to a risk of severe injury or death.”
Boxing fatalities are most often linked to subdural hematoma, a rupturing of veins between brain and skull; and cerebral edema, a buildup of water on the brain. When a boxer takes a punch to the head, his or her brain collides with the front of the skull, then the back of the skull. The punch also can cause rotation of the brain inside its bone casing. There is also the risk of facial and neck injury.
Citing those risks, medical associations around the globe have lobbied for partial, complete or age-related bans on boxing and MMA. The Canadian Medical Association’s call for a complete ban on boxing dates back to 1986, two years after the American Medical Association took the same position.
In 2011, the Canadian Paediatric Society and American Academy of Pediatrics submitted a joint position paper opposing boxing as a sport for children under 18 because of the risk of brain injuries.
“Though amateur boxers wear safety gear, there is no evidence to show that head guards actually reduce the incidence of concussions,” the paper said.
In April 2013, then CMA president Dr. Anna Reid spoke to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights against the passage of Bill S-209. It was an amendment to the Criminal Code to exempt MMA from the federal ban on prizefighting. Later that year it became law.
Reid acknowledged a lack of evidence on the nature and severity of brain injuries resulting from MMA fighting, but cited a 2010 review in the German Medical Journal on the immediate and long-term health implications of boxing. “In boxers with longer careers the consequences of repetitive brain trauma can include Parkinson’s disease, tremor, memory disorders, depression, aggression, addiction and a boxer’s dementia with neurobiological similarities to Alzheimer’s disease.”
In boxing, repetitive brain trauma is caused by punches to the head. Not surprisingly, there is a correlation between punch count and fatality. A 2007 video analysis conducted by Dr. Vincent Miele, then a neurosurgeon at West Virginia University, found punch counts of 26.6 per round by the survivors, 22.9 by the fighters who subsequently died. In a so-called normal fight, the average number of punches landed per fighter per round was 9.4.
The long-term effects of repetitive head trauma — which is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease — are being studied at the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. The Professional Fighters Brain Health Study, begun in 2011 and scheduled to run for eight years, involves a total of 650 participants, mostly active and retired boxers and MMA fighters, as well as a control group. The clinic states the goal is to “determine the relationship between head trauma exposure and changes in brain imaging and neurological and behavioural function over time.”
Some health professionals argue against a ban and in favour of the most stringent safety regulations, fearing combat sports would continue regardless and would be far more dangerous without oversight.
“You’d have many more fatalities in an unregulated sport that isn’t medically supervised than you do when you have physicians involved in it,” said Dr. Shelby Karpman, who was ringside during the Hague/Braidwood bout.
He works for the Edmonton commission, has been a member of the ABC medical committee, and believes the sport has made strides on boxer safety. But there are limits to what medical professionals can accomplish if boxers refuse to admit they have pre-existing health issues from sparring, said Karpman, who would not comment on Hague/ Braidwood bout while it is being reviewed.
“The vast majority of studies ever done on boxing will show that brain injury is directly related to the number of rounds that they spar, not so much the number of fights ... They need to admit to themselves that an injury suffered in training potentially could generate fairly significant injury in a fight if they just sort of sweep it under the rug.”
Boxing Canada is proud of its safety record, said president Pat Fiacco, who credits a single streamlined system, diligent trainers and referees, and attentive family members for safeguarding their amateur fighters.
“It’s one set of rules for the entire country. All our officials are trained in the same manner. It makes it so much easier when it comes to managing the sport, especially on the safety side.”
Complete medicals are mandatory prior to registration and before each bout. Boxers must bring an updated medical history
to every bout, or they don’t fight. If national-team members show up at a training camp more than one kilogram above their weight class, they go home, a safeguard against weight-cutting.
In the ring, novice boxers with less than 10 bouts are matched with similarly inexperienced fighters. There are weight class and age restrictions, too.
If a boxer is stopped in a fight, he or she is suspended for 30, 60 or 90 days, depending on the severity of the stoppage. If a boxer has taken two or three stoppages to the head over the course of a year, “in all likelihood that boxer will be told he cannot box anymore,” said Fiacco, who adds no boxer has been in that position during his tenure.
“We’ve got a saying in our sport at the Olympic level. I’d rather stop 1,000 bouts too soon than stop one bout too late.”