A simple, hypothetical situation. Your seven-year-old son or daughter arrives home from school one afternoon full of youthful enthusiasm. The teachers are trying to encourage participation in sport and have offered the pupils a choice of three activities - football, GAA and boxing - which they can get involved in over the next year. Typically enough, your son or daughter is keen on all of them and the choice is left up to you. What do you decide is best for him or her, paying particular attention to safety and discipline?

There was a time, in the not too distant past, when it would all have seemed fairly straightforward. Boxing would have been the first scored off the list on the grounds that the health dangers would far outweigh any other possible benefits. That would leave soccer or GAA and, more often than not, the decision would be a matter of personal or cultural preference.

But there is disturbing recent evidence to suggest that those old choices are no longer as clear-cut. You can apportion blame as you see fit - increased media coverage, inflated salaries and egos, a collapsing of standards - but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the very fabric and nature of our sports have changed irredeemably. And that change is for the worse.

Events here last weekend bear that out in stark detail. On Saturday afternoon, 25-year-old solicitor Samuel Reid was playing in goal for his team Sporting Lisburn Road. The team of graduates and friends from Queen's University in Belfast were playing their first season in the Dunmurry and District League. The name they chose, with its ironic reference to the famous Portuguese side, shows the extent to which it was all a bit of light-hearted fun for them.

Last Saturday Samuel and the rest of the team made the short journey to the Mallusk playing fields on the outskirts of Belfast where they were due to play a league game against Glanville Stars. The details of what happened during the course of the game remain unclear, but what has been established is that Samuel was left unconscious after an alleged incident with an opposing player. He received medical treatment at the scene but was pronounced dead when he was brought to hospital. A teenager was charged with his murder on Monday morning.

Meanwhile, across Belfast, Crumlin Star from the Ardoyne area of the city were the visitors at the Woodvale playing fields for a cup game against Lower Shankill. Crumlin had asked for the game to be played at a neutral venue because of concerns about sectarian tensions but it went ahead as planned. In the course of at least one on-the-field incident, the crowd encroached on to the pitch and a Crumlin Star player was attacked.

The list goes on and given the heightened and highly charged atmosphere which now surrounds amateur football even at this level, it is quite reasonable to surmise that there are numerous violent incidents which go unreported.

So a game of football may not seem as attractive an option for our young sporting prodigy as it once was. What about Gaelic games then, as an alternative? In the village of Eglish last Sunday the under-16 footballers of Cookstown and Killeshil met in the Tyrone county league final. At some point during the encounter the game was punctuated by a brawl involving not only players but also adult spectators. As a result, two men and a 14-year-old boy received medical treatment for minor injuries at Magherafelt hospital.

There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that this was not an isolated incident, and that the way in which these games at under-age level are being played has been transformed. Whereas in the past, reports of alleged assaults and free-for-alls used to be all but non-existent, they are now becoming a more regular feature of match reports in local papers and on the agendas of county board meetings.

Last weekend may have been unusual in terms of the number and severity of violent incidents which occurred within amateur sport here, but that should not be used to paper over the cracks that have been widening for some time. It seems clear that sport as it is now played at an elevated professional level is contaminating all the versions that are played below it.

This is most noticeable where children are involved, and has produced an atmosphere where it is perfectly acceptable to question decisions by officials. And it has created games where a willingness to engage in intimidating physical contact is regarded as an integral and important part of any young person's sporting make-up. The boundaries that used to separate acceptable and unacceptable conduct have all but disappeared.

If the raising of these concerns appears a little old-fashioned, no apologies are made. There are tough decisions to be made and the choice is between fostering a sporting culture for our children that is safe and rewarding or allowing the situation to tumble further out of control.

All of which leaves boxing. The health concerns are obvious, but if you set any store by the lessons about dignity and humility which sport at its most pure can offer, then the example of one man shone like a beacon over the past week.

Wayne McCullough treated the news of the irregular brain scan and the implication that his career as a professional boxer might well be over with an equanimity and a humanity that was humbling to watch and hear.

Make no mistake, he is a tough, obdurate man as his contests with some of the best boxers in the world have shown. But McCullough was not afraid to break down at a press conference. All that requires a moral courage which has become a rare commodity in modern sport. It is hard to think of a better role model for any seven-year-old. Or any parent.