“The fight everyone is talking about,” I read somewhere or other in cyberspace yesterday, in a reference to the return heavyweight boxing match between the champion Oleksandr Usyk and the challenger ‘Gypsy King’ Tyson Fury. Perhaps, it’s the circles in which I inhabit, but I have come across literally no one who has talked about it in any way, shape or form. Maybe everyone else, outside my limited social group is talking about it, but as ever I have mixed feelings about it.
Much as I dislike boxing, because of the permanent brain damage caused by being hit on the head, I still find myself strangely, perversely even, drawn to watch it from time to time. I find the sport to be the very opposite of the ‘sweet science’ some claim it to be, yet I’ll find myself in front of the crystal bucket, admiring the courage, and perhaps the stupidity, of men and women who risk their brains and their lives in the ring.
Just last weekend, I watched a bill on a satellite channel so closely that I could not name a single one of the participants, let along remember the results, but one competitor made me sit up and think, “This really shouldn’t be happening.”
A women’s match ended with one contestant being hit full on the jaw while clearly already concussed and unable to defend herself. She crashed to the floor and of course the commentator did his usual, “Let’s hope she’s all right,” routine, followed by, “I’m glad to say she’s fine, fully recovered”. Well, let’s hope she had fully recovered, although those battered brain cells never will. Did I really want to watch this legally sanctioned brutality? No, but I still watched the next fight, a one-sided battering between two ‘brave’ men.
To watch boxing at all requires, I feel, the viewer to suspend your suspicions that these people are going to get damaged and we may not know the extent of the damage until the fighters are much older. Which boxing fan hasn’t winced when the remnants of Thomas ‘Hit Man’ Hearns are wheeled out to slur a few incomprehensible sentences to a public gathering? Some pretend these brain-damaged fighters always talked like that. Even Muhammad Ali’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) didn’t convince the doubters and the cynics, who asserted that Ali’s decline was down to Parkinson’s Disease. “It could have happened to anyone.” We all know really, don’t we?
Just like every smoker knows of a 96 year old who smoked 100 a day all his life and didn’t even get so much as a cough, we find excuses. Smoking isn’t bad for you, so boxing isn’t bad for you. Society has decided to make it more difficult and expensive to smoke. Boxing changes its rules from time to time to make the sport ‘safer’ but how do you make a sport where the object of the exercise is to render the opponent unconscious safer? We fool ourselves. Possibly some primeval instinct that human evolution has not quite removed.
But I remember the death of Johnny Owen and the catastrophic injuries suffered by Gerald McClellan against Nigel Benn in 1995. These and more shown live on TV. We muse and say how terrible, how tragic it all was but – and you will always hear this one – a fighter knows the dangers as soon as s/he walks into the ring, so that’s all right then. Until next time.
Usyk, 38 next month, and Tyson 36, are no juniors. Maybe not in decline yet, but time has an unfortunate way of making a fighter appear very old and very quickly. I hope this doesn’t happen to either man on Saturday night, not least because, one way or another, I might decide to watch it after all. Everyone is talking about it, aren’t they? Another tragedy will come along soon enough. I just hope I’m not watching when it does.
