It may be brutal but banning boxing would be a mistake
Dignified sport is a force for good
AS Nick Blackwell lies in an induced coma the boxing abolitionists are in full cry. This is the default response whenever a prizefighter suffers serious injury.
Understandably, these protests tend to have the support of the medical profession. Inevitably, those voices become the more strident when a fight ends in a fatality.
Hopefully, the hospital bulletins suggesting this will not be the tragic outcome for Blackwell are accurate. Nevertheless, this challenges those of us drawn to the spectacle of the ring, the sense of danger, the excitement, the tensions in the crowd and the skill and bravery of the combatants to justify our fascination.
This case is at its most awkward to make when pitched against that part of the inherent nature of boxing which is to inflict violent blows to the head with the intent of rendering an opponent unconscious.
Yet it is often argued most vehemently by those who have been hurt grievously themselves. Muhammad Ali not only absolved boxing from any blame for his Parkinson’s disease but thanked the sport for enhancing his life.
If and when Blackwell regains his full faculties after the beating he took from Chris Eubank Jnr on Saturday which lost him his British middleweight title, his main regret will be that, at 25, his career will be over.
That his recovery is expected to be more complete than that made by Michael Watson after he was sent into a coma by Eubank’s father indicates how profoundly the medical precautions have been improved in the intervening 25 years.
We who witnessed from ringside the chaos in treating Watson and the delay in taking him to hospital were alarmed and outraged.
It took 40 days in his coma and six brain operations to save Watson’s life. It took many years for Watson to recover sufficiently to complete a London marathon, albeit that feat took him several days.
Chris Eubank Snr accompanied him every step of the way and the extent to which he is still haunted by those events was evident as he begged for his son’s beating of Blackwell to be stopped earlier.
The British Boxing Board of Control were almost bankrupted by the compensation paid to Watson for the inadequacy of their medical standards in 1991, having to sell their London HQ and move to cheaper premises in Wales.
Now the regulations to protect boxers in the UK are among the most stringent in the world. As the Board’s general secretary Robert Smith says: ‘Boxing is not a sport we can ever make perfectly safe but we do our very best.’
Since records began over a century ago, there has been an average of less than one death every two years in the thousands of fights which take place around the world.
The majority of those fatalities occurred before the introduction of reforms such as the bringing forward of weigh-ins to the day before fights to prevent dehydration around the brain.
There was no call for Formula One to be abolished when Ayrton Senna was killed, even though exactly as many drivers have died at the wheel since 1952 as boxers have lost their lives in more than a hundred years.
Rugby is trying to come to terms with concussion, while constant heading of a football is being examined as a probable cause of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Prohibition is rarely, if ever, a solution.
Ban boxing and it will be driven underground. There is already bare-knuckle fighting in traveller encampments and white- collar boxing is becoming increasingly fashionable. Safer by far to keep this sport licensed and regulated.
Boxing, in reality, does more good than harm by offering youngsters an escape from street life and, increasingly, a lucrative income.
Anthony Joshua, who fights for a world heavyweight title at London’s O2 Arena next Saturday, has admitted: ‘I would have been in drugs, gangs and then in prison but for boxing.’
Boxers are a breed apart, which makes it hard for the wider population to comprehend how much they enjoy being part of so brutal a business. They are defined by their courage and an honest dignity which can be an uncomfortable reminder that our society is not as civilised as we would like to pretend.
It comes down to freedom of choice and boxers, who are well aware of the risks they take, are as entitled to that as any of us.