The author chairs the New York State Athletic Commission. A former light-heavyweight world-champion prizefighter, he is a contributing editor to “Penthouse” and has written for several magazines and newspapers, as well as being a columnist for “El Diario La Prensa.”
Is Boxing Hazardous to Your Health?
Doctors are nags! Not content with whining about high medical-insurance rates while attempting to reap ever-higher profits from the sick, the American Medical Association has in its wisdom decided that boxing should be banned in the United States.
Not surprisingly, this announcement made headlines and caused a great controversy. But very few people have bothered to look at the facts. They think they know what they’re talking about, but they’re wrong. In fact, I would be absolutely certain that none of the doctors who voted to ban boxing ever bothered to fully investigate the sport before reaching their outrageous verdict.
For instance, there was a time — from 1917 through 1920 — when boxing was outlawed In the State of New York. As we were later to learn when we outlawed selling alcohol, the decision was a disaster. Boxing was driven underground into disgusting barges, gutters, alleys, cellars, barrooms, and onto the rooftops of ghettos. By the time State Senator Jimmy Walker (who later became mayor of New York City) pushed through a bill restoring boxing’s status and taking it “away from the unscrupulous criminals dedicated to exploit, hurt, and murder boxers in illegal prizefights,” over 18 youngsters had lost their lives.
In the next 65 years, however, only seven boxers perished in the boxing rings of the State of New York. Most of them, according to subsequent autopsies, suffered from dangerous cerebral preconditions unrelated to boxing — old injuries undetected by the medical technology of the times. Today, these conditions are more easily discovered, although obviously in boxing — as in construction work, playing football, or even in practicing medicine — one cannot always foresee every eventuality.
“I would take doctors more seriously if they would put together an in-depth study comparing boxing and medicine to see which of the two is truly more harmful to society.”
The AMA’s war against boxing has ignored, amazingly, some of the best medical evidence on the subject. Dr. Bennett Derby, for example. professor of neurosurgery and neuropathology at New York University Medical Center, dismissed the AMA findings as “an emotional decision made in the absence of medical data … Derby, who advises the Athletic Commission in New York. had just concluded a careful study of electroencephalograms and CAT scans of 200 selectively chosen boxers. He reported that the study — performed on boxers who had been excessively punched or who had suffered knockouts — had uncovered “no evidence of brain damage caused by boxing.”
The AMA’s attack also failed to take into account previous studies that consistently found boxing to be safer than at least eight other popular sports. Paralysis, for example, is virtually nonexistent in the world of boxing. But according to the AMA’s own research, football has been plagued with quadriplegia. And deaths and injuries in such sports as horse racing and auto racing, mountain climbing, ice hockey, scuba diving, skiing, hang gliding, boating, and even baseball are more common than in boxing.
So why is boxing singled out? Perhaps the sociologist Thomas Sowell has one answer: “The affluent climb mountains, ride horses, go boating, skiing or scuba diving ….. The affluent are regarded as adults with the right to make their own decisions and take their own risks. The poor are treated as wards, almost as the property of humanitarians.”
Professional boxing does not have a lobbying force or a powerful organization to advocate and protect its interests. It is a business and sport almost totally dominated by Hispanics and blacks — and, most especially, it is the domain of the poor. Most of these people never received a proper academic education and grew up in an environment of crime, frustration, and neglect. The temptation to escape all of this by taking drugs is ever present. But if in the midst of all this depression, a boxing gymnasium is erected, the option becomes clear. The training young people receive in a boxing gym — hard work, serious dedication, physical endurance, and strong discipline — produces a transmutation of character. A positive change is inevitable!
Dr. Wilbert “Skeeter” McClure, a 1960 middleweight Olympic boxing gold medalist and former professional contender, is a typical example of what I’m talking about. He worked hard in the gym, became addicted to its discipline, and as a result pursued a full academic education — while remaining determined not to give up his boxing.
“I didn’t have to box,” the distinguished psychologist told TV commentator Dick Schapp. “But I liked it a lot. I liked it more than college, as a matter of fact.”
McClure, of course, is not the first prizefighter to become prominent in another field after quitting the ring. Cantinflas, Tony Danza, and Jack Palance were ex-fighters who became successful in show business; Billy Petrolli became a bank president; John Morrisey went on to become a two-term congressman; John Sirica was the judge who almost single-handedly broke the Watergate case; Albert Rosellini became the governor of Washington; and Charles Milton III is a senior producer of CBS Sports. And, with all due humility, I’m proud to mention my own career as well.
A. J. Liebling, the late New Yorker journalist, was one of our greatest sportswriters. In his book The Sweet Science, he addressed perfectly the know-nothing AMA stance on boxing: “If a novelist who lived exclusively on apple cores won the Nobel Prize, vegetarians would chorus that the repulsive nutriment had invigorated his brain. But when the prize goes to Ernest Hemingway, who has been a not particularly evasive boxer for years, no one rises to point out that the percussion has apparently stimulated his intellection.”
Which one of the AMA doctors bother to look up statistics on the sport they want to outlaw? Perhaps they reached their “resolutions” after watching movies like Stallone’s Rocky series or listening to tirades by the likes of Howard Cossell, who made his reputation on boxing, only to turn on it when he saw which way the tide was going.
“The AMA is more than a group of doctors,” said Bert Randolph Sugar, a writer who is one of the most respected men in the pugilistic world. “It is a group of doctors parading around as politicians, representing less than one-half of all licensed doctors in the United States, all in the name of referral fees, tax shelters, private corporations ….”
Sugar also sarcastically called upon the organized physicians to deal with the many problems that beset the medical profession. “Problems,” he said, “like rising medical costs, care for the aged, and outrageously priced brand drugs — those men who play golf on Thursday and God every other day of the week.”
As the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, I am very well aware that there are aspects of boxing that can be dangerous. It is for this reason that in order to obtain a boxing license in New York a young man must subject himself to a most stringent medical examination, including an electroencephalogram, a CAT scan, an electrocardiogram, and urinalysis, which is capable of location the presence of any type of drug in his anatomy.
Furthermore, New York Governor Mario Cuomo has joined with the Athletic Commission to initiate action to make professional boxing even safer — including writing a letter to the governors of every state (as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) where boxing is regulated, expressing his desire to form a national boxing association to increase the safety and protection of prizefighters. He asked that a central computer system be created in order to share continually updated information on every single boxer who throws professional punches.
None of these precautions, it’s safe to say, would be of any interest to the AMA types who would do away with boxing. Nor, I think it’s also safe to say, would the AMA ever call for the probation of football, a sport that causes far more pain and suffering than boxing. (For that matter, the next time these doctors’ wives take in an evening of ballet, they and their husbands might want to go backstage and see what a professional dancer’s feet look like. Maybe they’ll call for a ban on ballet next!)
No. I, for one, would take these doctors much more seriously if they would put together an in-depth unbiased study comparing boxing and medicine to see which of the two is truly more harmful to society. The result, I’m sure, would surprise no one!
Some of our readers may well be able to follow “El Dirario” which still publishes today. The rest of us feel slightly inferior because we cannot. Although the AMA still officially strives to ban boxing, the group has evolved into trying to regulate it out of existence — a much more modern and sophisticated methodology, of course. That said, they have also recently published some guidelines geared to participant safety which honestly make sense to everyone except the folks who make money off of boxers. Presumably as long as people will pay money to watch athletes beat on each other, we will have controversy (says the writer currently planning a Super Bowl party as this article publishes).
