Simon Barnes

The brain-damage game

In most sports, injury is something going horribly wrong. In boxing, it’s something going horribly right

issue 02 April 2016

In the course of a queasy hour in Harley Street 30 years ago I learned a great deal about the brain — what Woody Allen called ‘my second favourite organ’ — and altered the course of my life in sports writing. Dr Peter Harvey concluded: ‘Boxing is a contest in which the winner seems often to be the one who produces more brain damage on his opponent than he himself sustains.

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