The brain-damage game

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.’

Last weekend, after a boxing match for the British middleweight title, Nick Blackwell was in an induced coma with bleeding to the brain. Things would have been a good deal worse if his opponent, Chris Eubank Jnr, had not been told by his corner to stop hitting Blackwell in the head and confine himself to body shots. Eubank’s father and trainer, Chris Eubank, was also imploring the referee, Victor Loughlin, to stop the fight. He was certainly recalling the night in 1991 when his own fight against Michael Watson ended with Watson brain-damaged and disabled.

Boxing has slid down the sporting agenda in recent years, the big fights on pay-per-view and marginalised by football on the sports pages. You don’t often come across boxing by accident these days. It seems astonishing that it’s still going on in the 21st century.

It’s not risk that makes boxing inappropriate to modern life. Risk sports are more important than ever: life is so comfortable for many people that they seek adventure and are the richer for doing so — and sport is the world’s most accessible adventure. Most sports require serious physical commitment, and the best demand a little courage even to take part. Everyone gets hurt now and then. For a few, it’s worse; for a very few, very much worse. In 1999 five people were killed in the sport of eventing — the finest sport of them all, at least for the participants.

There’s something particularly awful about deaths and serious injuries in sport: they seem like death in pursuit of a triviality.