John Roughan: Barbaric spectacle should be banned

A battered and bruised Shane Cameron at a press conference following his vicious defeat by David Tua. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Should boxing be banned? Until a week ago I'd have said no.

Knowing nothing of Shane Cameron I was a sucker for boxing's usual build-up and bought the telecast.

I even backed the underdog because the pundits gave him a chance.

It turned out they knew about as much as I did. Maybe nobody knows anything in this business. The fighters perform so seldom that possibly even they have no idea how they will shape up.

That must be a large part of prize-fighting's appeal, but as we saw last Saturday night it also makes it highly dangerous, and ugly, and sick.

Many have wondered this week about the state of Cameron's brain after the battering. I've been wondering also about the mind of David Tua.

Tua does not appear to be a brute. Everything I have ever heard him say on radio or television suggests he is a modest, gracious, even gentle human being. He was almost child-like in his respect for interviewers in his early days. Murray Deaker used to tell him not to call him "sir".

These days he looks a little more world-wearied by his battle with leeches he'd trusted to manage his finances but still sounds decent in every utterance. So what goes through the mind of such a person when he is sent out to take down a beaten man?

It wasn't his fault, of course. Cameron shouldn't have been sent out to inevitable slaughter after being knocked down twice in the first round. He wouldn't have survived to the first bell if the referee hadn't contrived an early respite for him.

The lowest life-forms in sport are surely to be seen in a boxer's entourage, wizened little men who walk tough in a heavyweight's slipstream and get in the big man's weary face between rounds. They patch him up with vaseline, pour water on his head, pinch and slap and talk something tactical into his befuddled brain.

In the movies, the words and the water work wonders. Rocky slowly rises at the call of the bell, stumbles back into battle, the opponent materialises in his unfocused eyes and somehow, after taking another blow or two, he breaks through barriers of pain and exhaustion and makes a gallant fight of it. In the movies.

Cameron was not coming back. If the men in his corner couldn't see that, everybody else could. Tua could.

So what do you do if you are Tua? You could spar with him, landing enough to stay ahead on points, but that would be risky. You'd be playing his game, not yours, and who knows how judges might see it?

No, you have to play your game. You've trained so hard that you owe it to yourself. He is vulnerable and this is your profession. This is what you do.

So you do it. You bore in fast and close, you thud those gloves into his bouncing skull.

In his eye you see nothing. He is against the ropes and cannot fall. You do what you do with the heavy bag, the power coming all the way from your legs and exploding in your shoulders. You feel the endorphins of performance and don't think about the target. Maybe it's like that.

We have grown up with a romantic view of boxing, I think, thanks to Muhammad Ali. He gave us to believe that art beats brawn, that style and flash is better than dour, dogged demolition work.

While he was around you didn't notice that professional boxing was a business in which big promoters manipulated fights, publicity, coverage and probably often enough, results.

We should have known it almost from the beginning when Sonny Liston lay down a few seconds into his re-match with the young Cassius Clay. But so arrogant was the new champion that we couldn't believe anyone would've wanted him to win.

Then we came to admire him for living up to his boasts and being brilliant. He made boxing appear a contest between equals and reasonably safe. Clay/Ali never seriously hurt himself or anyone else.

David Tua is the one world-class heavyweight New Zealand has produced in a lifetime. It is not his fault that his career has shown us the ugly, unglamorous truth of his trade.

Those who write about boxing and claim to understand it cite Tua fights that were respectable victories, but I can't recall them. I can remember only opponents who looked like blubbery has-beens. They were plainly not to stop his career before it came his turn for a title shot, and we all recall what happened then.

I don't think any contest associated with this country has embarrassed me more. I swore that day boxing would never fool me again. But it did last weekend. Ban it? Please.