Nick Blackwell's struggle to recover after his fight last week against Chris Eubank Jnr has once again highlighted the fateful unpredictability of what can happen to any boxer climbing into a ring. Much more predictable has been the reaction to his plight.
The fight game polarises opinion anyway but what has happened to Blackwell has seen arguments reheated on both sides of the boxing divide regarding its legitimacy as a sport and long-term future.
There has been little new on either side of the debate simply because there’s little new to be said. Instead familiar bullet-points about gore versus glory and barbarism versus freedom of choice get sprayed across an ethical no man’s land, points often notable solely for the vehemence of the certainty behind them.
The one singularly unifying element is concern for Blackwell himself. Vague theoretical arguments always sound hollow when placed against individual realities.
Acknowledging that, however, shouldn’t prevent examination of how boxing slots into actually a much wider debate about contact sports and their potential for injury, and brain injury in particular. Because on the science front, it’s obvious: if, as has been argued, three-quarters of professional fighters emerge at the end of their careers with brain damage of some kind or another, then logically it’s an open-and-shut case.
It is nearly 35 years since the British Medical Association came out and unequivocally stated boxing should be banned. Many other scientific and medical organisations which have examined the issue since have followed suit.
Where befuddled ex-boxers were once breezily dismissed as “punchy”, now there is masses of medical evidence to explain the how and the why about concussion and brain trauma and its long-term implications. No one can claim blissful ignorance anymore.
That there’s no actual curative element to the science means any organisation with any competent lawyer on their payroll is automatically not going to leave its ethical and legal backside uncovered by erring on the side of adventure.
So the only real stand-up-in-court ‘cure’ is simply not to get banged on the head, a neat, black-and-white statement that just happens to undercut the foundations of any number of sports and not just boxing.
It’s the sort of ‘cure’ which logically makes rugby a no-no too, and riding horses, not to mention going skiing, or even heading a football, and which takes little account of the very nature of these activities and why people enjoy them.
Magic sponge
That this is as extreme a position on one side as relying on the good old magic sponge and running it off attitude is on the other doesn’t disguise how our relationship with contact sports, with its nightmare ‘what if’ scenarios, is coming under ever greater scrutiny.
The current fixation is on concussion but it is unlikely to remain an isolated issue since the one thing that has changed in all of this is information.
Sport is coming down with awareness of the potential dangers of physical contact. The question is, what are people supposed to do with all of it, not institutionally, but you and me, ordinary people, parents in particular: do we ignore this stuff and carry on regardless, or, as is likely, simply continue to make intermediate judgment calls which ultimately boil down to little more than gut-instinct?
The long-term future of many sports is tied up in the application of this information by parents already frazzled by reams of other information about how they’re doing everything wrong and damaging their kids by whatever they do or don’t do, whenever they do it or don’t do it.
If science professionals paid to scrawl their names at the bottom of official documents invariably reach for the backside-covering option, then it can be no surprise if parents in charge of the next generation of boxers, rugby players, hurlers and footballers of all description opt to do the same.
As old as humanity
There is certainly no straightforward ‘cure’ for boxing which caters to a violent instinct as old as humanity itself. It’s not a particularly edifying instinct, and it’s certainly a dangerous one, but it isn’t evolving away either. The continuous rise of MMA alone is evidence of that.
Prohibiting boxing might satisfy theorists but in practise will provoke little but the same sort of counter-productive underground results that most prohibitions do, becoming little more than an exercise in optics.
Ultimately it comes down to individual judgment calls influenced by individual tastes and prejudices, the gut instincts which for instance would make many of us happier to see kids clamber into a boxing ring one-on-one than allow them gallop onto a rugby field with 29 others and into situations where they are painfully vulnerable to behaviour they have no control over.
The much bigger question persists though about the future of contact sports which by their nature are about the sort of contact which science increasingly tells us is actively dangerous for our long-term health.
Parse that down to its logical conclusion and there is an obvious quandary here since the safest option of all is to do nothing, reduce everything to a risk-totting exercise which invariably results in erring on the side of caution.
Certain sports aren’t safe, and can’t be made so without turning them meaningless. So it comes down to what each of us is comfortable enough to risk, both for ourselves, but in particular, in the long term, for our children.
And good luck with that because there’s nothing clean, neat, or scientifically black and white about it.
