Dangerous Sport

ESPN the Magazine has a conceptually interesting article about deaths in boxing that wound up being little more than a hodgepodge of looney comments and ill-formed ideas. Among them:

Dr. Michael Schwartz, chairman of the Association of American Professional Ringside Physicians: The resulting dehydration from fighting outside a weight class can be a big deal. It's not uncommon for fighters to lose up to 20% of their body weight two or three days before a fight and we're still trying to figure out what effect this has on the brain.

Twenty percent? Is he serious? So welterweights the week of a fight commonly weigh 175 pounds? That's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. 

Other questionable suggestions: 

Ed Hutchinson, president of the North American Boxing Council: Boxing gloves are one of the biggest scams of all time. That they're presented as safety devices is a joke. By wrapping fighters hands with gauze and tape, boxers are essentially turning their hands into casts. It makes for spectacular knockouts on television, but it's bad for pugilistic dementia and injuries.

[Break]

I would follow the example of the MMA. They go three rounds, and five for title fights. Boxing should probably be 4 rounds for a non-title fight and 6 rounds for the title fights.

It's always been my understanding that really dangerous knockouts are not the spectacular one-punch variety, but rather when they are the product of punch after punch after punch, when the fighter in danger is strong enough to withstand hundreds of blows from the gloved fist, which add up to a life-threatening beat-down. That's certainly been the case in the recent fights where one fighter suffered a serious brain injury: Leavander Johnson, Victor Burgos, Beethavean Scottland come to mind. Therefore, the hand-as-cast (or the bare fist, MMA-style) is less dangerous, because it is more likely to produce a knockout quickly. That's why MMA's knockouts, while flashy, aren't deadly. That's why fighters who suffer horrific one-punch knockouts are usually able to bounce back (physically at least): think John Ruiz, or Vic Darchinyan. Hutchinson has it backwards: softer hands are worse for the boxer. 

And as far as his second suggestion, well, that'd be like asking the NFL to play three 12-minute periods. Not gonna happen, at least not this century.

Also, the author quotes "Dr. Martha Goodman, Las Vegas neurologist and writer for Ring Magazine." Goodman, a ubiquitous presence at Vegas fights, is a good place to start (and ESPN should have just let her write the article), but there's one problem: her name is Margaret Goodman. Aside from the journalistic rudiment of knowing the name of the experts you quote, anyone who has watched a half-dozen fights on HBO has seen Goodman a number of times, and probably seen her play an active role in a fight. Such a mistake undermines any shred of authority that the author has in writing about boxing. If a writer referred several times to Ted Hochuli, you'd probably not take his opinion on the NFL all that seriously. 

Solution: ESPN, and maybe the mainstream media in general, should pay Dan Rafael to read every word written about boxing, so that there'd be less of this stuff out there.