Anthony Joshua versus Wladimir Klitschko: best of boxing or the worst?

Anthony Joshua against Wladimir Klitschko could showcase the very best of boxing or something awful.

British boxer Anthony Joshua, left, and Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko pose for the media. They fight tonight at Wembley Stadium.

A few days ago, a colleague of mine on The Times, Matt Ridley, wrote about a time, perhaps in the not so distant future, when eating meat will be widely recognised as barbaric. I sometimes wonder the same about boxing, and especially in a week such as this.

Tonight, I will take a seat at Wembley Stadium for what is being widely billed as one of the biggest fights in British history. For once, the hyperbole is understandable. For sheer scale, it will be one of the largest crowds ever to watch any bout and the opportunity for Anthony Joshua, a photogenic, amiable, hugely promising Olympic gold medallist, to add the vacant WBA title to his IBF world heavyweight crown will draw interest far beyond the usual fight fraternity.

It could showcase the very best of pugilism, help the sport’s rehabilitation after so much self-inflicted damage and the wretched interregnum featuring Tyson Fury. And yet. And yet.

There is the possibility of something awful too, although it will not take any dire scenario to make me feel conflicted or squeamish however much I try to avoid it.

“People want to see blood, uh?” Joshua once remarked, and who among the 90,000 crowd, or on pay-per-view, can deny it? Of course we do not want to see lasting injury, a man in a wheelchair, but a fearful punch-up, a crunching knockout? The roars will be primal.

When Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao turned the Fight of the Century into one of its greatest frauds, I know I was one of millions screaming for blood. “Smack him! Hit him!”

But I did not like myself for it. I heard myself baying for one man to belt another unconscious and reflected that those instincts could come straight from ancient Rome’s Colosseum — and, even if the rules have changed, should we not have moved beyond this in the past 2000 years?

A primal urge for violence that should not be denied? One that finds the safest possible outlet in boxing’s rules and regulations? That argument becomes increasingly unconvincing at a time when global sport has been forced to become hyper-vigilant about head injuries.

In the NFL, years of denial about blows to the skull and their devastating long-term effects have given way to an awful, sobering realisation of the damage sustained by so many players. Several recent studies have highlighted a frightening number of abnormalities in brain scans and, in many cases, depression, memory loss and worse.

In rugby, the debate is very active around the big-hit culture, with concussion protocols tightened almost annually yet still struggling to keep pace with modern expectations of safeguarding.

Boxing is more overdue a proper understanding of brain damage than any sport. The science around prevalence of injury, and occasional death, is very incomplete but there are concerted attempts to fill the many gaps in knowledge.

One of the most comprehensive studies is led by Charles Bernick, a neurologist at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, who began the Professional Fighters Brain Health Study in 2011 and has studied hundreds of fighters from MMA and boxing.

But it is not easy when there is a need to study cumulative damage over many years, and especially when head trauma from training is so hard to quantify.

“We do not know what happens in sparring,” Bernick says. “When you ask a fighter if he has ever been knocked out, he’ll say, ‘No.’ ‘Have you ever had concussion?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you ever gotten your bell rung?’ ‘Oh yeah, that happens all the time.’ ”

Supported by the boxing industry, he has established a Fight Exposure Score “based on the number of fights, fights per year, age, education, and the number of times a fighter has been knocked out, which can predict who is at higher risk of having cognitive impairment”.

Early findings showed that those who fought over a long period, and regularly, were much more liable to suffer various forms of brain impairment but the scary thing is that studies such as this have so far to run to be comprehensive. It could take many years because the only true way of diagnosing the extent of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition caused by repeated blows and the modern, scientific term for punch-drunk syndrome, is examining the brain once the athlete is dead.

Bernick is trying to predict those most at risk and to suggest intervention before it is too late. He is working with boxing rather than advocating abolition. That argument only briefly flares after the most high-profile traumas, such as the night when Chris Eubank’s blows caused such grievous damage to Michael Watson in 1991, or the permanent disability inflicted on Gerald McClellan in February 1995 during a savage fight with Nigel Benn.

I was gripped by both those bouts and those horrors did not stop me enjoying boxing thereafter.

Boxing is not uniquely dangerous and the fact that a key intention is to batter someone unconscious is probably not sufficient cause for state intervention to protect willing fighters from themselves.

Indeed, it is hard to think what will bring about a popular campaign against this resilient sport. We move on quickly even after Chris Eubank Jr put Nick Blackwell in hospital after their British middleweight title bout, Blackwell suffering a bleed on his skull and spending a week in an induced coma.

The show goes on, uninterrupted, even after the most recent death in Britain of Mike Towell, the Dundee fighter, who was knocked down twice during a title eliminator against Dale Evans last September, suffering a brain bleed. He died a day later.

Tonight, two prize fighters will be expected to show that bravery in front of a huge audience baying not just for a British victory but for Wladimir Klitschko to be knocked out by Joshua’s immensely powerful punches causing his brain to move and smash up against the skull in a form of cerebral concussion.

It may prove a thrilling occasion but how many of us will feel that conflict over the sport — and be sure that, in future decades, science will ask ever harder questions of boxing to justify itself, and the damage it inflicts.

The Times