I didn’t watch last night’s prize fight between Anthony Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk. I was never going to pay £27, or for that matter an additional 27p, to watch anything not already covered by the extortionate subscriptions demanded by Sky via my piss poor provider Virgin. And while dodgy and very much illegal streams of the fight were freely available, I simply didn’t think it was worth the effort. Instead, I dipped in and out of Rupert Murdoch’s dire TalkSport radio channel to listen to what was the worst boxing commentary I had ever heard. What followed the fight, when the beaten and broken former champion, the robotic Anthony Joshua, re-entered the ring, throwing championship belts out of the ring and letting forth a volley of obscene language was extraordinary. Not that I am one to talk – I swear as much, if not more than the next woman and man – but here was something ugly and wrong.
I have heard the excuses for Joshua’s outbursts. The emotion had gotten to him. He had worked so hard to get where he was and now the dream was, if not over, then definitely it had turned into a nightmare from which he might never escape. We will never know, because boxing never likes to talk about the damage caused to the brain in a boxing match, but maybe Joshua was concussed, something which would surely have affected his decision-making and taken away any sense of rationality?
Like it or not, the whole point of boxing is to render the opponent unconscious. Why else would the vast majority of punches be aimed at the head? Unlike other parts of the body, the brain does not heal as well, if at all, from head trauma, hence the long line of former footballers and rugby players, and of course boxers, developing dementia and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). If Joshua carries on like this, like with every other sportsperson who gets battered around the head, the possibility is that in future years he will be slurring his way through an interview, as did so many fighters before him.
Boxing is, to me, a kind of guilty pleasure. I say I don’t like it, yet the primitive nature of the sport can draw me in. I know that one or both of the participants could suffer life-changing injuries at any time, by way of a sudden catastrophic injury, like that suffered by Michael Watson and, worse still, Gerald McLellan, or more usually the accumulation of blows to a brain that moves across the skull following contact with the glove. When a fighter is knocked down, the referee makes an instant assessment: is the downed fighter fit to continue? The fighter always says he, or increasingly these days, she, usually says yes, but if this was a professional rugby game the player would be sent for a head injury assessment (HIA). In boxing, the concussed fighter often continues until his ‘head clears’ or he gets knocked unconscious. The TV and radio commentators cheer when the downed fighter ‘recovers’, but does he; does he really?
From what I can tell, Usyk is one of the finest boxers to have ever laced a pair of boxing gloves. Dwarfed by the enormous Joshua, and most other heavyweights he comes across, he uses his great skills to win fights. To many a fight fan, the clever boxer is demeaned as ‘boring’ and the oversized ‘big puncher’ who simply walks through punches as a crowd-pleaser. That’s another way of saying we would rather see a boxer knock someone out than appreciate his silky skills. That’s why Frank Bruno was such a hero: a massive punch and a glass jaw.
I’m glad I didn’t bother to watch the fight last night. I’m not interested in next week’s re-run on Sky’s mainstream subscription channels because it will be last week’s news. But I understand why people do. And I just know that if there’s a halfway decent fight which isn’t on pay per view, if I’m not doing anything better, I might just watch it. In a few years time, I’ll read an article about a former fighter, who is now penniless and can’t string two words together and I’ll be thinking: that was my fault for watching. I’ll feel slightly guilty until the next fight comes along, then the next one. I don’t like boxing but sometimes I just can’t help myself watching. Go figure.
