I didn’t watch last night’s prize fight between Amir Khan and Kell Brook because I wasn’t prepared to spend £20 on top of the already extortionate subscription we already fork out to Sky via Richard Branson’s rip-off Virgin media outlet and because I couldn’t be bothered to find a dodgy internet link and watch it for free. And there was something else. It was a non-title fight between two 35 year old has beens so where was the attraction?
Of course, the main attraction was seeing two men smash the living daylights out of each other, something that appeals to a curious primative part of our human nature, the sweet science of boxing. For all my concerns about the health consequences of boxing, not least the inevitable brain damage caused to even the most successful participants, I cannot pretend I am not dragged along, willingly, to enjoy the spectacle. But not last night.
I am not a boxing aficionado by any stretch of the imagination, although many years ago I did purchase Boxing Weekly and watch all the TV boxing I could. Even then, I was aware that boxing was probably as dangerous a sport as you might find, something which was confirmed when a slurring ex pro, punch drunk and disoriented, was interviewed on TV. And I was watching on ITV when Chris Eubank mangled Michael Watson’s brain and when Nigel Benn’s punches rendered Gerald McLellan blind and nearly deaf after a terrifying night in 1995. But then, a sporting match between two people, the aim of both being to render the other unconscious, can by its very nature injure and, tragically sometimes, kill.
And so it was that I didn’t watch Brook punch Khan into what should be permanent retirement from the sport. We are told that the last thing a fighter loses is his punch, but from what I can tell Khan had lost just about everything else and the referee’s merciful stoppage saved Khan from so much worse. But what of Brook?
His post match interviews indicated that he had his ‘mojo’ back and, more worrying still, that he might box on. This is the illusion of boxing, having suffered a number of bad beatings, the fighter thinks he’s better now, despite the miles on the clock, the effect on the brain of concussive punches and advancing old age. Most experts seem to have predicted that Khan was ‘shot’ long before last night’s fight and although Brook still had a lot left in the tank, nothing lasts forever. In 2020, Brook was destroyed in four rounds by Terence Crawford, believed by many to be the best ‘pound-for-pound’ fighter in the world. Would he really want to go through that again? What has changed? He has shipped more punches and is another year older.
We shouldn’t really watch, should we, because we know how it all ends when a fighter stays in the game too long, but we do. We watch fantastically fit men and women punch each other in the head, knowing their brains are bouncing around in their skulls, getting irreparably damaged, fans cheer and boo and we pay twenty quid for the pleasure. Having worked for a brain injury charity, I suppose I’ve become even more squeamish about boxing, but I know that when there’s a fight on telly, or more likely the internet, that I really want to see, but not pay extra for, I’ll watch it, even if I do wince every time someone gets whacked in the head.
Perhaps, as in rugby, boxers should be subject to head injury assessments if they get hit on the head, the only problem being that each fight would probably last several hours and it would remove the spectacle of a badly concussed fighter perform a sensational comeback. Sweet science, indeed!
