RAY “Boom Boom” Mancini’s tragic fight with Duk Koo Kim has a particular relevance because it was on national “free” television — the CBS network — and was thus seen by a lot of people.
Twenty-five years on, and despite increased safety measures, ring fatalities still occur. Consequently critics find it hard to believe the claim that as contact sports go, boxing is safer than most.
Looking back at the Mancini-Kim fight and going back still further, one thing has struck many. Ring deaths can be as surprising as they are disturbing.
In some instances, boxers who were not considered very hard punchers have had the dreadful experience of learning their opponent died after the fight.
There have been ring deaths in which one of the boxers does not seem to have been excessively punished.
The former Canadian junior middleweight champion and Olympic representative Manny Sobral once said to me: “It’s strange, fighters like Jake LaMotta have all those wars and finish up fine, yet another guy might die after a fight. It’s like a lottery.”
Maybe it is just like a lottery, with a ticket that has a terrible price when cashed.
In many years of covering the sport, I have seen a few boxing fatalities — not very many really, considering the amount of fights witnessed on-site and on the screen.
The first was in the summer of 1964 at Shoreditch Town Hall in the east end of London, where a Welsh featherweight named Lynn James collapsed after being stopped by a north London boxer named Colin Lake in the sixth round of a preliminary fight. It surprised people in British boxing because Lake had not been considered a very hard hitter.
Heavyweight Joe Bugner also was never regarded as a big puncher, but a journeyman from Trinidad named Ulrich Regis died after being outpointed by Bugner, again at Shoreditch Town Hall. Once more I was at ringside. Bugner was winning the rounds, but he did not seem to be hitting Regis terribly hard.
As I recall, the fans booed the passivity shown by Bugner.
Yet Regis suffered a brain injury and never recovered.
More recently there was the death of the Panamanian Pedro Alcazar after being stopped in the sixth round by Fernando Montiel at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in June 2002.
Alcazar’s death was almost unbelievable. Montiel had done most of his heavy punching to the body. As I reported in Boxing Monthly at the time: “Although Alcazar was being outclassed in the sixth it wasn’t as if he was taking a terrible beating.”
The intervention by referee Kenny Bayless seemed perfectly timed.
Alcazar was dispirited but did not seem in any way disoriented as he left the ring. He even went out sightseeing the next day — a Sunday.
Yet on the Monday, as he was in the shower and getting ready to catch a flight back to Panama, he collapsed. An autopsy showed significant swelling of the brain. The chief Nevada commission doctor at the time, Flip Homansky, told the press that what was so surprising was that the collapse occurred so long after the fight.
If one pattern has emerged over the years though, it is this: The fighters who get hurt are the courageous ones, the ones who will never surrender.
A boxer whose career is littered with knockout losses is rarely the one who gets hurt. Professional losers know when to bail out of a bout.
Boxers who pay the ultimate price are the ones who will endure punishment and keep fighting. Such a boxer was the Welsh bantamweight Johnny Owen, who suffered a brain injury and died after being stopped in the 12th round of his championship fight with Mexico’s Lupe Pintor.
I was ringside at the old Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles for that fight in September 1980.
Owen, with his angular, bony physique, looked frail and was even nicknamed the Matchstick Man because of his thin frame.
“He’s so skinny he’s almost invisible,” wrote Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times.
Owen even went into the ring with a supporter carrying a flag depicting the challenger as a skeleton with boxing gloves.
Yet for eight rounds, Owen was at the very least holding his own with the much stronger Pintor.
What particularly stands out about the ending was Owen going down heavily from the final right hand thrown by Pintor. In his weakened state, Owen might literally have been hit by that “one punch too many” that we all fear.
This brings us to the great responsibility that referees bear: When to stop a fight and when to hold back.
