Life, death and boxing

Banning boxing would be as effective as outlawing sex work has been for stopping people from paying and being paid for sex.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

SIX boxers’ names feature on the poster for a bill presented at Westridge Tennis Stadium in Durban on June 14, 1988. Four are still alive.

One of the other two, Simon Skosana, sunk low enough in his later years to have to sell his South African bantamweight title belt. So far, so boxing. But, unusually for a fighter, he died of natural causes in hospital.

He was 51, and he lived almost twice as long as the other dead man on that poster, who was poleaxed by a right to the neck in the 10th and last round of his super-lightweight fight against Kenny Vice.

A doctor was called to the ring but couldn’t stop the fighter from dwindling into a coma. Three days later the machines suspending him between life and death were turned off.

He came with a superb pugilistic pedigree — his father, uncle and cousin were all South African champions — and was one of the most arrestingly exciting fighters around. So his sluggish performance that night surprised many.

It emerged that he had been in a car accident four days earlier, a consequence of fiddling with the tape deck while driving to the weigh-in, and had hit his head on the windscreen. Reports said he had been rendered unconscious by the impact. The Sunday Times reported that he had ducked through the ropes despite not having medical clearance.

His name still haunts South African boxing circles: Brian Baronet.

He is far from alone. In 1995 it was estimated that 500 men had died because of injuries they had suffered in rings around the world, 22 in 1953 alone. And that was only since 1884, when the Marquis of Queensbury rules were adopted to rescue boxing from a fate worse than bear-baiting.

Baronet’s death was followed by 27 more by the time heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder said in May this year: “This is not a gentleman’s sport. This is the only sport where you can kill a man and get paid for it at the same time — it’s legal. So why not use my right to do so?” Two answers to that chilling question were delivered in less than a week in July. Maxim “Mad Max” Dadashev left the ring on a stretcher, blood flooding his brain, after his trainer, Buddy McGirt, threw in the towel 11 rounds into his junior-welterweight bout against Subriel Matias in National Harbour, Maryland on July 19. Four days later Dadashev was dead, like Baronet, at 28. He had reeled off 13 consecutive victories, 12 of them inside the distance, before his fateful 14th fight.

“It just makes you realise what type of sport we’re in, man,” McGirt told ESPN. “He did everything right in training, no problems, no nothing.

“My mind is like really running crazy right now. Like, what could I have done differently? But at the end of the day, everything was fine [in training]. He seemed OK, he was ready, but it’s the sport that we’re in. It just takes one punch, man.”

The day after what became Dadashev’s last fight, Hugo Alfredo “Dinamita” Santillan earned a split draw after 10 rounds against Eduardo Javier Abreu in Buenos Aires. He collapsed as the result was read out.

“Upon admission to the hospital he had successive kidney failure and he did not come out of his coma,” Dr Graciela Olocco of Hospital Agudos San Felipe said. “He had swelling of his brain and he never recovered consciousness. The swelling continued to worsen and it affected the functioning of the rest of his organs.”

At 12.35am on the second day after he was admitted, in the wake of surgery for a blood clot on the brain, Santillan’s heart could no longer keep him alive. He was 23.

Enough already. We get it. Boxing kills. Not as wantonly as war, smoking or drunk driving, but more than often enough to question how, in 2019, it could be accepted as a sport fit for civilisation.

A powerful argument for why that should change bobs and weaves between the results of a research article by Matthew R Potter, Ashley J Snyder and Gary A Smith, all of them attached to the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, published in the April 2011 edition of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

“An estimated 165 602 individuals sustained boxing injuries that resulted in a visit to a US hospital emergency department from 1990 through 2008. An average of 8 716 injuries occurred annually, and there was a statistically significant increase in the annual number of injuries during the 19-year study period [from 1990 to 2008]. The rate of injury was 12.7 per 1 000 participants. Those injured were predominately male (90.9%). The most common diagnosis was fracture (27.5%), and the most common body regions injured were the hand (33.0%) and head and neck (22.5%). Punching bag–related injuries accounted for 36.8% of boxing injuries. The percentage of injuries that were concussions/closed head injuries in the group aged 12–17 years (8.9%) was similar to that in the group aged 18–24 years (8.1%) and the group aged 25–34 years (8.5%).”

Despite all that, and plenty of other, similarly damning evidence, boxing will not be banned. Doing so would be as effective at rooting it out as outlawing sex work has been for stopping people from paying and being paid for sex.

Besides, as former heavyweight champion Larry Holmes said, “All fighters are prostitutes and all promoters are pimps.” Where there are boxers there are people who make a living out of exploiting them. And there is much to exploit. The May 2015 welterweight showdown between Floyd Mayweather Junior, the serial woman abuser who has made a career out of not being hit, and Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino senator who inflicts defeat by a thousand pitty-patty punches, generated US$600-million, US$430-million of it in pay-per-view revenue. No single event in world sport can touch those numbers.

The paradox is that no sport rivals boxing as the most viable legal avenue out of poverty for those who are too black, in social and economic terms, for even football to better their lot. Holmes also said: “It’s hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once — when I was poor.”

That makes boxing real and relevant enough to arrest the most creative minds. Pablo Picasso was an ardent fan who was photographed squaring up with his son, Claude, and who painted boxers and even a self-portrait in a puncher’s pose. Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer jabbed their pencils in peons to pugilism, while AJ Liebling combined being a bona fide gourmand with his passion for boxing well enough to cover both for no less than the New Yorker, and to produce “The Sweet Science”, perhaps the best book on sport yet written.

And it’s not all about men. Joyce Carol Oates gets it better than most, regardless of gender, and has the perspicacity to say why: “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is routinely held up as the No. 1 contender for boxing’s title as the world champion of combat sports. MMA is indeed uglier and it may well be more popular currently. But it will never win this fight, not least because, since its most high profile event, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was founded in November 1993, no-one has been killed in its cause.

One reason is that MMA uses four-ounce gloves that are smaller and less padded than those boxers wear. So more punches will fly in the octagon than in the ring, but they will cause less damage on opponents because MMA fighters would break their own hands if they unleashed their blows with boxers’ power.

“How can you enjoy so brutal a sport, people sometimes ask me,” Oates wrote.

“Or pointedly don’t ask.

“And it’s too complex to answer. In any case I don’t ‘enjoy’ boxing in the usual sense of the word, and never have; boxing isn’t invariably ‘brutal’; and I don’t think of it as a ‘sport’.”

Damn straight, and an unassailable counter-argument to Liverpool’s beloved Bill Shankly holding that: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”

All good. Except that boxing really is about life and death alarmingly often.

Even when it isn’t, it needs injury to decide winners and losers. Boxing doesn’t need death, but it doesn’t mind it.

First published by New Frame.