Most Difficult Moments in Boxing, Long After The Lights Have Faded
By Robert Brizel, Head Real Combat Media Boxing Correspondent
The most difficult moments in boxing happened long after the lights have faded. It is a question a boxing or sports reporter rarely gets, and one most prefer to avoid answering.
The most difficult moment occurs when a fighter who has killed another fighter in the ring must confront his past. The fighter must meet with one of the children of the man who died at his hands.
Emile Griffith had to face the full grown son of Benny Kid Paret Jr., long after the 1962 championship bout at Madison Square Garden where Paret died at Griffith’s hands. The Griffith documentary took place decades after the pain which followed the win. Twenty years after Griffith-Paret, Ray ‘Boom-Boom’ Mancini knocked out Duk-Koo Kim of South Korea, who died after the bout. The win also cost the lives of referee Richard Greene and Kim’s mother, who subsequently took their own lives. Mancini, decades later, met with the son of Duk-Koo Kim. These meetings were very important for the emotional balance of the former world boxing champions, lightweight Mancini, and welterweight and middleweight Griffith, to answer to within and make their own peace.
The consequence of the Mancini versus Kim bout meant the World Boxing Council reduced its championship bouts from 15 to 12 rounds. All other boxing organizations followed suit. This maneuver, of course, did not reduce the fatality outcomes, which still occur in boxing on occasion by the law of averages. While awareness of safety regulations has been heightened at boxing matches, the use and abuse of steroids by professional athletes is a testament to the fact illegality can still take place outside of the arena where professional sports take place.
Whenever boxing incurs a fatality, amateur or professional, it is a reminder the surviving boxer must live with the consequences of the outcome of the bout. In this reporter’s view, Griffith, Mancini, Sugar Ray Robinson, and others who experienced this situation (when an opponent died in the ring of from injuries received shortly thereafter) are never the same fighter afterwards, because they no longer want to hurt the other person. The killer hungry animal instinct to win is gone. As a reporter, one is always aware of both the danger and the different possibilities. Many boxers, over time, became my friends, and I have lost friends inside the ring, and outside the ring, who lived their life inside the ring.
COMMENTS
English