In the end, I watched The Big Fight between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk and quickly wished I hadn’t bothered. Yet another sport commandeered and paid for by the misogynists and homophobes of Saudi Arabia, sportswashing of the highest, or maybe it’s the lowest, order. That Usyk, the pride of war torn Ukraine, defeated self-styled Gypsy King was of zero consequence to me. In the end, it was the spectacle and, yes, the hype that drew me in.
For some weird reason, boxing is known as the ‘sweet science’, although quite how a sport where the whole point is to render the opponent unconscious can be described as both sweet and science is rather beyond my level of understanding.
Sky and TNT had been on air for something like seven hours by the time the ring walk started. Usyk a model of studied calm, Fury a dancing colossus. A terrible rapper performed, and indeed mimed, in what appeared to be a perspex cage above the ring and eventually we got to the announcements.
Everyone, including the legendary announcer Michael Buffer, were in full cap-doffing mode towards the head-chopping hosts, the referee gave his instructions and eventually, way past my normal bed time, the fight was underway.
To a non boxing aficionado like me, it was hard to see who was winning each round. Usyk moving forward throughout, Fury backing off and hitting on the break (I am not good with boxing terms) until the ninth round when Usyk unloaded a fierce volley of punches that all but rendered his opponent unconscious. It was at this point when I remembered why I shouldn’t really be watching.
Fury’s “amazing powers of recovery” came to his rescue and he saw out the fight quite comfortably, but I had long lost interest. The brain is a delicate object and does not recover from the blows of 16 and 18 stone athletes. I read about Fury’s post fight press conference, how he believed he had won and how he would be back, but at what cost?
I remember the Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier fights of the 1970s. They were, and are, regarded as legendary fights, yet look what happened to the boxers. Both were horribly damaged by boxing, although predictably the medical no nothings claim that Ali’s Parkinson’s and likely Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) would have happened anyway, regardless of all the head punches he took, particularly later in his career. The same people would tell you that Gerald McClennan’s catastrophic brain injuries had nothing to do with his 1995 fight with Nigel Benn and that Johnny Owen wasn’t really punched into a coma by Lupe Pintor way back in 1980. With boxing, this is what it always comes back to. And it’s why something in me clicks when I am watching it.
We will have this ludicrous hype again later this year, in a re-match, again in Saudi Arabia, if the hosts can fit it in between executing people in public and treating women as third class citizens. It’s fine because anyway, prize-fighting is all about the money.
As for the result, well who cares? My social media is full of inexpert verdicts and schadenfreude, mainly directed at Fury, which somehow fits in very well with the sheer nonsense of professional boxing, which bears a close resemblance these days to WWE wrestling, but with more brain damage. And come the rematch, we will all be back again. I just hope I show more restraint and do something more useful, like having an early night.
