I?m sorry about what happened to Benny. I?m sorry I?m a boxer. But I will fight again.??Emile Griffith
I began watched boxing when I was four years old in the mid-1950s. Born and raised in Philadelphia, a great fight town, my maternal grandfather, who was the gentlest man I have ever known, was crazy about the fights. His kid brother, whose nom de guerre was Whitey Burke, (his actual surname was Berke, changed from Belerberkovsky in hopes of assimilating) fought professionally as a bantamweight in the 1920s, and his brother Irv (my grandfather) had a special connection to the sport. I spent countless nights by his side, avidly watching the action year after year in blurry black and white on a clunky console with an oval screen. Because I was just a kid with a limited vocabulary and an even more limited understanding of the world, I couldn?t put into words precisely what I was experiencing, but there was one thing I grasped intuitively: Boxing was as exciting as all get-out, infinitely more exciting than any other sport, or anything else for that matter, in my constricted little boy?s life.
An enduringly vivid boxing memory occurred on March 24, 1962. I was 11 at the time and my 12th birthday was five days away. My grandfather and I were watching the Calvacade of Sports Fight of the Week broadcast live from New York?s Madison Square Garden. It was between the reigning and defending champion welterweight champion Emile Griffith and his challenger Benny Kid Paret. The fight was their third, the rubber match, and it was a brutal affair that Paret did not survive. I watched as intently as I have ever watched any fight before or since. I could not look away. I was a sensitive kid, still in the process of building defenses to protect myself from the bullying of teachers and my peers, and it was my first experience of a death in the ring, or death of any sort, in fact, and I remember how I felt, the pit of nausea in my stomach, and how this miasma of distress, uncertainty, and emptiness persisted for what felt like an eternity.
Last night at the Wintrust Arena in Chicago, on the undercard of the fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Chazz Witherspoon, 27-year-old Patrick Day (17-4-1,6 KOs) was beaten to within an inch of his life by 21-year-old Charles Conwell (11-0, 8 KOs), who knocked him out in the 10th round.
Because I can no longer watch four, five, six fights or more in a single sitting, I decided to cover just the main and co-main events and did not see Conwell vs. Day, for which I am grateful. It took me weeks to shake the feeling that I was complicit in the death of Maxim Dadashev four months ago, even though I was 700 miles away.
Because I?m not a glutton for punishment, I have no intention of searching for and watching the fight I?m thankful to have missed. But as a result, I can only report on what others have written, which is that Patrick Day is in critical condition, after undergoing emergency brain surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and lay comatose and fighting for his life. That Day?s head bounced off the canvas might have exacerbated his already grave condition, but the cause of his injuries lay elsewhere.
I?m not a ?thoughts and prayers? kind of guy, per se, any more than I?m a ?thank you for your service? kind of guy, since both often feel less heartfelt than rote and insincere. But the distress, uncertainty, and emptiness I felt as an 11-year-old lingers like a phantom?s eternal recurrence, as if its haunting is never done.
