Charity and boxing don’t mix

Charity boxing matches with amateur and untrained fighters must stop. Like all combat sports, if you’re willing to think of them as a sport, violence is not a byproduct but the entire product. The death of father of three Kain Parsons, 37, in Christchurch Hospital on Wednesday from injuries sustained in a charity boxing event is a reminder of why in most circumstances violence against another person is a crime.

It’s treated that way because when you hit someone, with or without boxing gloves, the risk of that person being grievously injured or killed is unacceptably high.

Do what boxers do to other boxers outside a ring and you go to jail.

Sadly, what happened to Parsons, and the grief his family have been thrown into, is not an anomaly.

Hamilton man Neville Knight, 49, died in a charity boxing match in 2016 after collapsing on to the ropes. In August this year, Auckland boxer Lucy Brown, 31, died days after receiving a head injury during a routine sparring session.

Wikipedia even features a page listing the professional boxers who have died from injuries sustained in the ring since 1884, when the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were introduced. The list is far from complete.

That something so dangerous is currently an accepted and popular vehicle for charities to raise money is a collective failure in judgment.

Because this is not just an argument about safety but also one of appropriateness.

Even if the fighters trained for a year, as some have recommended, or referees exercised greater caution, what remains would still be two people actively trying to hurt each other.

It is the ultimate perversion of what a charity stands for that it should link itself to something so destructive.

The problem seems to be that they were an easy sell. The fight nights appealed to a yearning in the deepest darkest part of our brains for violence and so we were willing to pay money to watch, even pay to be part of. But we are better than such primitive behaviour now and we can stop it if we want.

It would not be the end of all the hypocrisies in our society if we withdrew our acceptance of such violent entertainment, but it would be the end of one of the most glaringly obvious of them. Parsons’ tragic and unnecessary death makes it possible that charity boxing matches will trickle to a stop.

However, massive changes in the acceptability of violence as entertainment will have to take place before professional boxing ever ends. And that looks absolutely unlikely.

The diminutive fighter Floyd Mayweather, arguably the most famous boxer of the decade, has generated US$1.6 billion in pay-per-view sales from just 16 televised fights.

That’s the sort of money even the All Blacks can only dream of generating.

Editorial

‘‘Do what boxers do to other boxers outside a ring and you go to jail.’’