| It must have been reassuring for many to see and hear our Henry Cooper, as high, wide | ||
| and handsome as ever and obviously in full possession of his faculties, disagreeing on television | ||
| with the decision of the British Medical Association (BMA) to campaign for the abolition of | ||
| professional boxing. Given the universal tendency to generalize from the particular, some will | ||
| 5 | have argued from his obviously excellent form that there is nothing at all in the doctors' case: | |
| that the BMA is a conspiracy of killjoys bent on destroying yet another innocent pleasure of the | ||
| masses (and quite a few of their betters) on grounds of interfering and misplaced do-goodery. | ||
| Even Mr Cooper's celebrated eyebrows, which his opponents would aim for because they often | ||
| exuded enough blood to cloud his vision, looked in fine shape. And, of course, we were shown | ||
| 10 | the immortal clip of film of Cooper flooring Cassius Clay, as Muhammed Ali was still known at | |
| the time. | ||
| All this overlooks the fact that Cooper, despite his defeat at the hands of Ali, was in boxing | ||
| terms one of the winners, retiring with few defeats to remember, a string of trophies, and the | ||
| lasting respect of the general public. The very fact that he was an exceptionally good fighter | ||
| 15 | meant that he took fewer of those dreadful punches that the doctors are worried about. He | |
| therefore emerged in apparently sound physical as well as financial condition, avoided the | ||
| embarrassing and sometimes sickening error of the pathetic comeback (unlike Ali, who could | ||
| well turn out to be one of the losers in this respect) and still appears to be the very model of the | ||
| fighter that hungry boys in the slums used to be encouraged to imitate. And on the face of it, | ||
| 20 | there is no answer to Mr Cooper's point that professional boxers are volunteers to a man. So are | |
| those who are, for the moment, free not to wear seatbelts in their cars. | ||
| Boxing, though, is not in good shape. Sweden and Norway (where else?) have already banned | ||
| it. Since the war 337 men have been killed by it. Those who saw them will not forget the sorry | ||
| pictures of the all time great, Joe Louis, in his dramatically declining years; nor the coast-to-coast | ||
| 25 | action relays of Benny Paret and Johnny Owen losing lives as well as world championship fights. | |
| Now the BMA wants to ban it on health grounds, trying to give the kind of lead they provided | ||
| against smoking. This abolition campaign may have more muscle behind it than any of its | ||
| predecessors, and it conforms with the trend towards prohibition, for a still simply defined | ||
| general good, of other blood sports, tobacco, lead in petrol and nuclear power stations. | ||
| 30 | As a matter of fact, boxing is the only sport in which it is legitimate to seek to win by disabling | |
| your opponent. Some American states classify a professional boxer's fists by law as lethal | ||
| weapons not to be used outside the ring. Boxing belongs in the same historical dustbin as | ||
| cockfighting, if only because it can transform audiences into mobs baying for human blood. | ||
| The Guardian Weekly, July 18, 1982 |