CKNW Editorial
for October 11, 1999

So the lady won the boxing match. And Mohammed Ali’s daughter won her first fight. And somehow the so-called sport of boxing goes on, leaving behind former able-bodied men who shake and drool while racketeers continue to rake in the dough.

Peter Warren is going to hate me and probably want me to put on the gloves but I plead age and other infirmities … but I think boxing should be banned.

Try to remember any great heroes who actually came out of the so-called game with all their marbles and some money in their pockets. Rocky Marciano is the only one I can think of and that’s because no one ever knocked him out meaning he never suffered a concussion in his life.

Maybe Sugar Ray Leonard … certainly not Sugar Ray Robinson who may have had his marbles but certainly no money. Joe Louis didn’t have much in the way of marbles to begin with and he was robbed blind from the day he started by so-called managers.

I know that Peter, with a knowledge of boxing that makes me a featherweight at best, will have a legion of successful pub owners who used to fight to list for me, but surely to make my point I need go no further than Cassius Clay cum Mohammed Ali. Here was, by most accounts, the best heavyweight of all time who has the shakes and can hardly talk.

To begin with, boxing has always been an exploitive business in the United States. Black kids with some athletic ability were taken over by white crooks who used their charges for money machines then tossed them over after they had fought a couple too many fights and were on the ash heap physically and fiscally. It’s a long time ago, I warrant, but the story of Beau Jack, the black kid from Alabama was not untypical. A group of white businessmen took him from his shoe shine box in Alabama and made him into the welterweight champion of the world. Then he began to lose and a few years after he started he was back at his shoeshine stand. When his sponsors were questioned about this the response was "well, we got him a new shoe shine box didn’t we?

Now Peter will argue, with force, that this is all behind us. Perhaps. And perhaps Don King really does care about other things than his pocketbook and weird haircut. But one thing remains as true today as it did when John L Sullivan and Jake Kilrain ruled the bare knuckle brigade – boxing is the only so-called sport where the object is to maim. It’s fencing with real swords.

Knockouts are, by definition, concussions. We know that after one or two concussions doctors are advising football players and hockey players to quit. The doctors know that every subsequent concussion could be fatal or permanently disabling. Even further blows to the head not resulting in unconsciousness will add to the cumulative brain damage. Yet boxing is predicated on causing and aggravating concussions. When a boxer is up against the ropes, his head exposed, does his opponent simply tap him on the chin and say score one for me please referee and scorers? Of course not – he unleashes a mighty blow hoping to knock the poor bugger out. And if he fails and the bell saves the victim, the victim’s handlers do everything to wake him up and send him back into the ring for more punishment.

I was a great fight fan at one time – I was just as bloodthirsty as the next man. I cut my teeth on the Friday night fights from Gillette, first on KIRO radio out of Seattle then on TV. I remember Ruby Goldstein the perpetual referee and Dr Vincent Nardiello, appointed by the New York Boxing Commission to stop fights if necessary. Happily for masochists like me he never seemed to stop any. I remember the greats like Louis, Marciano, Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Tony Zale, Jake Lamotta, Kid Gavilan, Rocky Graziano …the lot of them. So it’s not that I didn’t love the brutality, as well as the grace of the sport – mostly the brutality. I guess I just started to think about it a bit about 20 years ago and realized that here was a sport where injury wasn’t incidental and accidental, it was deliberate. And I decided that for me, it was no longer a sport but a gladiatorial exercise put on to satisfy my natural blood lust … and that bad people made a lot of money encouraging people to maim each other.

And after thinking on it, I say to hell with it. No society should tolerate a so-called sport whose rationale is physical damage unto death. I’m mindful of Macaulay’s famous aphorism that the Puritan hates bear baiting not for the pain it gives the bear but for the pleasure it gives the spectator. But, dammit, if we as a society are going to permit boxing, let’s bring back the duel as the preferred manner of settling matters of honour.

As we try to display to our young the proper way to become a useful member of society we pour more and more violence into their laps through TV, the Internet, hockey games where brutality is rewarded and excessive brutality sometimes mildly admonished – and boxing where the name of the game is brutality.

We have to start somewhere and I say we start with Don King and the so-called manly art of self defence which has nothing to do with self defence and everything to do with bashing people into permanent insensibility and often death.