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"The ugly picture of boxer Nick Blackwell’s swollen eye jarred the conscience of a nation.
"In the name of sport a young man has suffered a serious brain bleed and been placed in an induced coma. With good fortune he will make a full recovery. But visible injuries and ring deaths are a small manifestation of boxing’s avoidable damage to the lives of its participants.
"Boxing is unique, even above mixed martial arts, in encouraging blows to the head. Football is another sport that allows damage to brain cells through heading balls. A football player heads the ball multiple times each game. A boxer can receive hundreds of blows to the head in a single bout. It is similar to using a person's head as a football.
"The brain is suspended in the skull like a jelly in a box, held by strings. A blow causes the brain to strike the walls of the skull. One neurosurgeon has claimed that 80 per cent of all boxers have brain scarring as a result of the cumulative effects of blows. The British Medical Association has said that boxing should be completely banned.
"If that happened the sport would go subterranean and the health precautions of the legal activity would disappear. Boxing would revert to its barbaric 19th century past. The Queensberry rules prohibited blows below the waist. Armed with our present knowledge that boxers are as vulnerable to blows above the neck as they are to blows below the waist, I proposed a parliamentary bill to ban blows to the head as a sensible first-step reform. It was intended to probe the mood of the U.K. parliament and the country towards this issue. A favourable response would have persuaded the government of the day to support the bill or introduce a similar one of its own."
Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/nick-blackwell-boxing-head-punches-442027?rx=us
Body shots cause damage, too. If you ban head shots, body injuries will increase. Maybe they should just thumb wrestle.
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2 comments:
Ban BOXING. What sense does It make?
It makes a lot of $, and that's all that matters.
Look at dog fights and cock fights. They're illegal, but they still happen regularly. I think there's more than the excitement of the fight and/or betting on it that occurs. I think some people like the sight and/or smell of blood.
Btw, from what I can tell, there's quite an "underground" boxing movement on the west coast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx44NzShaCU.
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