The Boxing Coach
A former professional boxer, Gary Lockett is now a trainer. He was in the corner of British fighter Nick Blackwell, who suffered a bleed on the brain and was placed in a medically induced coma in 2016 after a fight with Chris Eubank Jr
I don’t think young boxers and amateurs are aware of the risks. I wasn’t: I started boxing when I was eight. I had close to 100 amateur fights and 32 pro fights.
I was involved as a coach and manager – before the incident with Nick – in probably about 300 fights. I’d never realised the extent of the devastation it can cause.
Now that Nick is some way towards well, we can look back on it with some perspective. It was a very scary prospect. I told him that not only should he never fight again, he should never head a football again. Unfortunately, he got involved with some people and sparred with some big cruiserweight and ended up back in the situation where he was with another injury. In my opinion, anyone who puts a boxer in a ring when they’ve had a brain injury doesn’t deserve banning, they deserve prison time.
If a kid gets knocked down in the gym, wobbles or is on rubbery legs, that is some kind of concussion. I take the boxer out of the ring and don’t let them spar again for about three weeks. I take it very seriously.
But how do you make the sport safer than it already is? The British Board of Boxing Control is, I believe, the most safety-conscious board in the world. You have annual brain scans, annual medicals. If there’s a single thing wrong, you have to see specialists. If you’re knocked out and concussed, your licence is taken away from you. I don’t think there’s anything else you can do.
In my mind, I’m never trying to damage someone – I’m trying to defeat them. I never want the other person to be permanently hurt. If the referee judges that person to be OK to carry on, that’s just the rules of the sport; the nature of the sport.
medicine at ISEH and the chief medical officer for GB Boxing. He believes that, on balance, boxing is good for you. “There are obviously inherent dangers with taking blows to the head,” he says. (The objective in boxing is, after all, to inflict a traumatic brain injury on your opponent.) “However, those dangers have been known about for approaching 100 years, and the sport has been regulated very heavily. In boxing, you need to be fit. It gets people to control their weight. Boxers tend not to smoke, or take drugs.”
It’s not a safe sport, but then neither is scuba diving, or horse riding, or rock climbing, or off-piste skiing. We all take risks, and the benefits of contact sports should be weighed with the dangers. Willie Stewart’s research into Scottish footballers may have found an increased risk of dementia, but it also found a decreased risk of cancer and heart disease. And which is riskier: playing football with your mates every weekend or sitting at home watching it with a four-pack?
Making Headway
Ultimately, once you understand the dangers, whether you decide to play or not comes down to a personal risk-benefit assessment. A young professional player with a potentially lucrative career ahead of them may be willing to risk a lot more than a father of two in his late thirties who works full-time and whose kids watch him play rugby for the seniors every Saturday.
Either way, all experts agree that you should read and understand the concussion protocols tailored to your sport, because following them is the best way to offset your risk of long-term brain damage. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to concussion-proof your body, though there is some evidence that stronger neck muscles can protect players against concussions, possibly because their head doesn’t jolt so much upon impact.
If you find yourself on your backside in the mud, your head ringing and vision blurred, get yourself off the field. Only 10% of concussions involve a loss of consciousness, so don’t be tempted to stay on just because the lights didn’t go out. If your coach asks if you can play on, tell them you can’t. Likewise, don’t argue if they tell you they’re taking you off as a precautionary measure.
Stewart recommends referring yourself to a dedicated concussion clinic if you’ve had more than three concussions. “There are studies that suggest if you’ve had more than three, your chance of long-term problems is much higher,” he says. “It’s muddled by things like people remembering how many times they have been concussed in the past, so I think it’s something that needs specialist, one-to-one attention.”
Consider stepping back if the frequency of your concussions seems to be rising. If you used to get one every couple of seasons but now you’re getting one or two in each campaign, that should ring alarm bells. The same is true if the severity of the blow needed to knock you down is getting lighter.
“If it used to be that only a big blow from a prop at speed would drop you, but now the passing scrum-half is causing problems, then that should be a red flag,” Stewart says.
Stewart does not expect a shortage of brains to study any time soon. He warns that sports that have been too slow to react to the evidence face an unstoppable wave of brain damage. “The longer that football goes on as it is and doesn’t change, and the longer that rugby goes on and doesn’t reduce the number of injuries, the more players will be exposed,” he says.
“And once exposure has taken place, there is nothing you can do to get it back to how it was. Players are accumulating brain damage that they won’t be able to undo. We’re going to see that in 40 years’ time.
“My hope is that we will see a change, and that 2021 will be a momentous year for head injuries in sport globally – when sports will finally start to get serious about this.”
“The longer that football goes on as it is, the more players will be exposed to it”