LockerRoom: Remember boxing? There was a time when boxing didn't just matter; it reflected the innocence and the aspirations of the age. From Damon Runyon through to AJ Liebling and on to the late Jimmy Cannon, boxing mattered, and the men who wrote so sweetly about it mattered too.

Liebling had the best of it. At least he wrote better than the best of them, and sometimes if you read him and sense that his great stomach could not take the violence, you know that his big heart and keen mind were fascinated by the men who inflicted and suffered the blows.

I was reading Liebling the other day when news came through on the teletext about Floyd Paterson having died. It was an odd, poignant week for boxiana. Prince Naseem Hamed contracted a 15-month stretch in chokey and the names of the two fighters restored boxing briefly to the headlines and made one wonder what Liebling would have made of them both.

Liebling wrote fondly of our own hero Dan Donnelly, "never beaten but who fell dead in his own bar after drinking forty-seven whiskey punches with wellwishers. His epitaph read: O'ertrown by Punch Unharmed by Fist He Died Unbeaten Pugilist."

A few years ago I took a bunch of kids into the Hideout in Kilcullen hoping to spook them with the sight of Dan Donnelly's arm in the glass case there. It was said that Donnelly's arm was long enough to enable him to fasten his knee britches without bending down. The few times I saw it, it certainly seemed that way.

Alas, the limb was gone. Flogged to an American. It seemed a metaphor for boxing. All the quirkiness and wonder that might have entertained us through a glass screen is gone.

I never saw Floyd Paterson fight. Prince Naseem I saw box several times and met on a couple of occasions in Brendan Ingle's gym in Wincobank, Sheffield, back when he and Brendan were still in cahoots.

The last couple of bouts I saw him fight were in America. In Atlantic City in 1998 he beat Wayne McCullough and had just sundered his relationship with Brendan Ingle, who had coached him since childhood. ( He had, like Herol Graham before him, the Ingle trademark of wonderful defence. You couldn't, as Brendan would say, "hit him with a handful of rice".) Brendan walked up and down on the boardwalk that week, alone and cut off from his pupil. Sad.

I saw Naz a year later in Detroit fighting Cesar Soto on the night that Wayne McCullough lost to Erik Morales. Hamed was still young, still unbeaten and still thinking that he would somehow take America by storm . He had a good deal with a cable company and looked like a man who was going to make an obscene amount of money from America.

Naseem managed to become less likeable the more successful he got, though. The showmanship and the theatre of his ring entrances often had a sneering feel to them, and his character if not his boxing at this stage was suggesting a broad, nasty streak.

He had an arrogance which seemed to remove him from the deep comradeship that lies beneath the braggadocio of boxing. He asked, as was his right, for respect for his Islamic beliefs but reciprocated with none of the decency or humility a devout man might show.

That night in Detroit he boxed well enough to take the WBC featherweight title. In the press conference afterwards he talked it up and told various contenders he was going to smack them like he was their daddy.

He had only four pro fights left though, the second-last being a defeat in Las Vegas to Marco Antonio Barrera .

In May of last year he was driving his £320,000 worth of Mercedes McClaren when he overtook on an unbroken white line and rammed into a Volkswagen Golf coming in the opposite direction. The other driver broke every bone in his body.

Naseem had four similar offences on his record, a detail which said much about his respect for the world.

Before he went off to jail he had been talking about a comeback. They always do.

Naseem was a prodigy, a world champion at 21 years and seven months.

Floyd Paterson became world heavyweight champion at the same age and, like Naseem, came from what writers like to call humble beginnings. Everything he became as a person was different from Naseem though.

Floyd was one of 11 children born into poverty in Waco, North Carolina. He was a loner was Paterson, an introvert, a dodger of school lessons and a small-time criminal.

By the age of 10 he was in reform school, where they taught him how to box.

Not that he liked reform school. He spent much of his life fleeing and hiding in subway tunnels.

He won Olympic gold in Helsinki in 1952, and although too small really to be a heavyweight, he pushed his way into the pro ranks with his odd style, which involved springing forward in order to land a punch.

He's remembered in boxing for having taken the title when it was vacated by Rocky Marciano, for his epic bouts with Ingemar Johansson and for his suffering at the hands of Sonny Liston.

For anyone who loves writing - great journalistic writing, that is - he is remembered also for being the centrepiece in Gay Talese's magnificent profile The Loser.

Talese was a genius of the trade but seldom has any sportsperson, let alone a boxer, opened himself so thoroughly. The Loser isn't just a portrait of a boxer; it's about simply being a man and the terrible fear that involves every single day.

Floyd's mentor, his Brendan Ingle, was Cus D'Amato, who would do the same thing for Mike Tyson decades later. As with Naseem, Tyson would lose his way when he had nobody to steer him but plenty of passengers to ride on his back.

Paterson, though, had his awesome talent for introspection and honesty to save him. He made a point to Talese which is crassly contradicted by all the eyeballing and strutting that passes for bravery in modern boxing. He couldn't look in the eye of any man he was going to hit.

"At the Liston weigh-in, the sportswriters noticed this, and said I was afraid. But that's not it. I can never look any fighter in the eye because . . . well because we're going to fight, which isn't a nice thing."

He once looked a fighter in the eye and the fighter smiled back, so Floyd smiled at him in return and noted that he had a nice face.

"When a guy can look at another guy like that and smile like that, I don't think they have any business fighting."

By the third time Paterson fought Johansson he was a national hero but so shameful did he find the prospect of losing he travelled to the fight in Miami beach with a false wig and moustache in his gear.

"You must wonder what it is that makes a man do things like this," he said to Talese. "Well I wonder too, and the answer is . . . I don't know . . . but I think within me, within every human being there is a certain weakness . . . I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do and cannot seem to conquer that one word - myself - is because . . . I am a coward."

And he spoke with a sad and beautiful eloquence about being afraid, about being a coward, in the ring and in life. He spoke about his suspicion that perhaps he was the only coward.

He wasn't. He was a braver, greater man than he knew himself to be. He never made himself bigger by standing on the chests of men he had beaten. He never sold himself as anything he wasn't.

Naseem Hamed with his fast cars and his young, ruined life took up more space this week than poor, noble Floyd Paterson.

That's boxing though. Self-awareness isn't at a premium. That's boxing: what it has become and what we've become.