Boxing Legalized Barbarism
An “Irish kiss” is the swift application of one’s forehead to another’s nose bone. For such an egregious smooch, an English soccer player has been sentenced to three months in jail. His kiss was no kiss. It was a crime.
Much the same assault was done in the United States recently when boxer Ray Mercer ran his forehead into the cheek of Evander Holyfield. The resulting cut caused Holyfield’s face to take on the appearance of a tomato losing its juice.
Unlike the English kisser, Mercer stood not to be punished but to move near great rewards. Had the fight been stopped and Mercer declared the winner, a multimillion-dollar title fight might be in his future. That possibility existed because assaults are legal in the United States if they occur in a boxing ring where, after all, homicide is the standard of perfection.
A fighter’s goal is a knockout. That’s a concussion. That’s an injury suffered by the brain when it is caused to slap up against the bone of the skull. The brain is traumatized; in shock it cannot function. Done with enough force, injury to a fighter’s brain goes beyond bruising. The very best fighters deliver blows that cause the brain to slap the skullbone so hard as to rip the brain’s tissue and its blood vessels. In which case the brain becomes a bleeding tomato.
What we see on Holyfield’s face is what we don’t see inside a man’s skull. As Holyfield’s face became a river of blood, so did Jimmy Garcia’s brain. Only the latest fighter to die, Jimmy Garcia, a Mexican fighter of small renown, won’t be the last. His death recently will be forgotten as “one of those things that happen” when, the truth is, he put his life at risk for the entertainment of barbarians.
Instead of that truth, we will hear Garcia’s death prostituted by people who would have us believe his work in the ring was a symbol of man’s courage and perseverance in rising above his life’s barren beginnings.
Once upon a time, I wrote such blather. But, to quote Roberto Duran, no mas. No more. No sale here. Take your barbaric yappings somewhere else. The terrible truth is that anyone who steps into a boxing ring is a symbol of helplessness compounded by hopelessness. They are men with no way out of their lives except to give them up to a sport that wants nothing more than to kill them.
The late Howard Cosell once did television commentary on a Larry Holmes-Tex Cobb fight in which the champion all but butchered Cobb. The fight should have been stopped. “Doesn’t that referee know,” Cosell shouted, “that he is constructing an advertisement for the abolition of the very sport he is involved in?”
Cosell never worked another fight. He had done his crusading on the air. He had testified before the U.S. Congress about the need to regulate boxing for the protection of the men who fight. Nothing came of Cosell’s pleadings. The people who run boxing know safety doesn’t pay the bills. A boxing commissioner recently argued against headgear by saying, “This is the hurt business.” It’s the hurt that sells tickets.
Not that headgear is the answer, anyway. Headgear increases the impact of a punch by spreading it around the skull; headgear also gives a fighter a false sense of security that leads him to accept punches. When George Foreman advocates headgear, he reaffirms the obvious: He has been hit in the head so many times he has destroyed the brain cells that determine common sense.
At a memorial service for Cosell the other day, Muhammad Ali looked hale and prosperous in a creamcolored suit. Looks deceive. To be in Ali’s company is to cry out for an end to boxing. The most beautiful athlete we’ll ever see is now a shuffling, silent shell. Boxing did it.
The diagnosis of Ali’s condition is Parkinson’s syndrome secondary to pugilistic syndrome. That means he suffers symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: tremors of the limbs, a shuffling gait, a masked face, slurred speech. It further means the symptoms are not the result of disease but of brain injuries suffered as a fighter.
To those of us fascinated by Ali, he seemed to be an artist who made the mean game palatable with his speed and grace. He was about magic, not brutality. We blathered on about Ali’s footwork and defensive tactics. Blather it was, for in the end the cruelest game can be about only one thing: ripping apart the other guy’s brain, or, to quote the child burglar who became an adult rapist, Mike Tyson: “I deliver punches with murderous intentions. I want to drive a man’s nose bone into his brain.”
Irish featherweight Barry McGuigan lost the championship on a 100-degree day in Las Vegas. “You know,” he once said, “I lost brain cells in that fight.” He whispered the confession out of his wife’s hearing, maybe the only fighter ever able to say those words. “I’ve heard about this my whole life,” he said. “Now I know what it is.”
He had killed a man in the ring, a Nigerian named Young Ali. “Both our wives were pregnant at the time,” McGuigan said. “He never knew it, but he had a son, too. I still see that wee man in my dreams.”
As long as nothing is done to increase safety - bigger gloves, shorter rounds, shorter fights, rigorous physical standards, mandatory retirements - the simple answer is to make boxing illegal. Just get rid of it.
The usual argument against the abolition of boxing is that they’ll do it illegally. Well, OK, go ahead. Let them take their fights onto cruise ships in international waters. Let them fight in underground rooms hidden from our sight. We can not legislate away the bloodlust of human beings. Just don’t bring boxing into our living rooms on television. Don’t pretend it has a place in civilized life. It is beneath contempt.
This sport is no sport.
It is murder for hire.