It was at the moment the camera panned to Jennifer Dooley, Ricky Hatton’s long-term partner, that the question, familiar enough to be almost hackneyed, started nagging once again. The question that all boxing fans must resolve each time they – we – are confronted by the dreadful consequences of the sport. Is it worth the human cost?
The bout was a mini classic. Manny Pacquiao proved that he is not just the greatest pound-for-pound boxer in the world today, he is also one of the greatest to have laced a pair of gloves. His counter-punching was sharper than a scalpel and his knockout blow, delivered only a few milliseconds after he had shipped a punch, carried eloquent testimony to the dynamite he carries in those small, compact fists.
Hatton’s body surrendered instantly at that dreadful moment of impact, his legs sagging, his arms lolloping and the back of his head hitting the canvas with such abandon as to suggest temporary coma. His eyelids opened an instant later, but behind them was a glassy void that will have chilled the blood of his army of supporters tuning in on television and, indeed, any other viewer possessed of human feeling.
And it was at that moment that we were treated – if that is the right word – to the shot of Dooley, her head craning to get a sight of her boyfriend amid a scramble of cornermen and medics, her body shaking uncontrollably, her face betraying all the confusion and panic of a woman in momentary fear that her man may never get up. Related Links
* Hatton ducks questions about his future
Multimedia
* Boxing Debate: should Hatton retire?
Is it worth the human cost?
The irony is that Hatton would have got up and carried on had he remained in volitional control of his ragdoll body. He would have climbed from the canvas and bulled forward, even in the foreknowledge that his skills were never going to be sufficient to test a boxer of Pacquiao’s class. He would have fought on even at the risk of permanent brain damage; after all, that is the possibility every pugilist accepts each time he ventures through the ropes.
The essential problem for any boxer is not a lack of courage, but too much of it. The problem is when he can silence the fear and greet the pain with equanimity. The problem is when he is able, by whatever trick of wiring between brain and body, to avoid what Norman Mailer called ?the precious inrush of confusion known as coma?.
We should be thankful, then, that Hatton’s senses were so scrambled that he had no option but to lay back, his pale lips twitching, as the medics rushed in.
Hatton was given the all-clear after a brain scan at hospital in Las Vegas and his fans and the rest of the boxing world will take comfort from that. But can we legitimately fail to acknowledge that things could have been so very different? That Hatton might have joined the ever-growing list of champions and former champions to have left the ring with irretrievable damage to the brain?
I made a deal with myself when I fell in love with boxing after watching Sugar Ray Leonard defeat Tommy Hearns in their momentous welterweight unification bout in 1981. I took out a subscription to The Ring magazine and permitted myself to buy countless films of the great boxers of the age, but on the strict condition that I would only take pleasure in the poetry and never in the pain; that I would revel in the skills of the top boxers but never in the damage wreaked.
It was a deal that was hopelessly suspect. A few years later I went to my first live bout ringside at York Hall in Bethnal Green, East London, and was introduced to the particular sound of a gloved fist making accurate connection with a jaw, the thud of a comatose boxer hitting the canvas and, perhaps most sickening of all, the clamour for the next contest to begin just minutes after the prostrate boxer was carried from the ring. I realised then that violence is as central to the meaning of boxing as the orgasm is to sex.
Even a boxer with the poetic skills of Muhammad Ali is measured by the damage inflicted on willing opponents. Without that essential violence, without rocking his challengers, without testing the resilience of their jaws, he would have been a ballet dancer, not a pugilist. As Charlie Powell, one of Ali’s opponents, put it: ?When he first hit me I thought to myself, ‘I can take two of those to get in one of my own.’ But in a little while, I found out I was getting dizzier and dizzier every time he hit me, and he hurt. Clay throws punches so easily you don’t realise how much they shock you until it’s too late.?
And the very mention of Ali raises the question once again: is it worth the human cost?
There is, of course, little mileage in calling for prohibition; what consenting adults get up to in a 24-foot ring is no more a matter for the statute book than the question of what adults get up to in the bedroom. But the moral question – the question of personal conscience; the question of whether to condone the sport, to subsidise it through the gate or a pay-per-view subscription; to enjoy the spectacle of men seeking to render each other unconscious – how to answer that?
I have always stood in boxing’s corner, drawn to the grandeur of the most primal of sports and the balletic grace of its greatest practitioners. My life would have been incomparably duller without witnessing the likes of Ali, Leonard and Floyd Mayweather Jr. But then I watch as Hatton falls, helplessly, to the ground, I experience the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach at the possibility of his permanent incapacitation; and I question how, in a civilised society, one can condone such a spectacle.
Hugh McIlvanney, one of the sport’s most articulate apologists, wrote: ?Any supporter of boxing who does not admit to some residual ambivalence about its values, who has not wondered, in its crueller moments, if it is worth the candle, must be suspect.? I, for one, continue to wonder.
