What happens next after a fatality in the boxing ring?

PEOPLE TAKING sport too seriously are often met with the rejoinder that it’s not a matter of life or death. Clearly it’s intended as a reminder that some things are more important, but there’s another more chilling side to that coin.

The sad reality is that, in certain instances - thankfully rare - an individual has lost his or her life in the sphere of sporting endeavour.

As a fervent boxing enthusiast, Elliot Worsell was in the process of tackling this very subject in the sport he loves when he received a chilling reminder of the risks taken by fighters at very close quarters.

He was working as the press officer for the promoter in 2016 when former British champion Nick Blackwell was left in a coma after a title fight with Chris Eubank Jnr.

As a result, he was at ringside and in the Wembley dressing-rooms on that fateful night, witnessing at first hand the panic that unfolded as someone he regarded as a friend fought for his life.

Blackwell thankfully survived, only to return to the sport too soon for a sparring session eight months later and end up in another coma, requiring emergency surgery to remove part of his skull to reduce swelling on his brain.

While it seems trite to mention it, he was still one of the lucky ones compared to the deceased boxers remembered in Worsell’s book, a gripping read in spite of the grim content.

In ‘Dog Rounds - Death And Life In The

Boxing Ring’, he talks to various fighters whose opponents lost their lives, outlining their personal demons and how, unsurprisingly, they were never the same again, either inside or outside the ring.

Most regressed as fighters, purely because when an opponent was there for the taking, they lacked the killer instinct to really go for it as they were afraid of a repeat occurrence.

Guilt was naturally an over-riding emotion, and it wasn’t just felt by the surviving boxers, as two referees in bouts featuring a fatality went on to die by suicide.

Interestingly, one of the few fighters to prosper after such a trauma was our own Barry McGuigan. The Clones Cyclone is incorrectly referred to as a Belfast man at one point by the author, but that’s only a small gripe.

The interview with him comes in a chapter titled ‘The Anomaly’, because McGuigan is probably the only professional boxer who went on to greater things after an opponent died in the ring.

In June of 1982, a Nigerian fighter named Asymin Mustapha, but who performed under the catchy moniker of Young Ali, suffered a fatal injury from a McGuigan punch.

He was kept alive on a respirator for six months until passing away twelve days before Christmas.

Three years later, when McGuigan beat Eusebio Pedroza from Panama in Q.P.R’s Loftus Road grounds to become world featherwight champion, he choked up with emotion in the immediate aftermath when he dedicated his win to Young Ali.

The gutsy Monaghan man was undoubtedly the exception to the rule, because practically every other boxer interviewed for this book in his shoes ended up with serious personal issues.

One subject felt he should return to the ring as soon as possible afterwards since he deserved to be punished for what happened in his eyes. And the best way to get what was coming to him, he thought, was to allow himself to take a pummelling from fellow unafflicted fighters with a sharper focus.

Worsell questions everything about the fight game in this excellent book which is thought-provoking and upsetting in equal measure. The subject matter is dark, but the writing is compelling. ALAN AHERNE

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