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Friday, September 30, 2005
Taneo: When right is wrong
By Paul J. Taneo
Free-for-all
Especially when it’s the brain that moves from the right side of the skull to the left.
Leavander Johnson died because of a brain injury so severe “it caused a swelling so pronounced that it pushed Johnson’s brain from the right side of his skull to the left,” according to the Associated Press report.
Johnson sustained the injury in his IBF lightweight-title defense against Jesus Chavez two Sundays ago in Las Vegas, which has seen its sixth ring death in 11 years. Not bad numbers, considering it happened in Vegas, and if you go by cold statistics. The trouble is, these are not just numbers, but human lives snuffed in their physical prime.
Even if Vegas sees one death a year in the ring in the next 11 years, that wouldn’t put a stop to the lucrative business of boxing. Sure, the money made in boxing cannot begin to compare to the millions that change hands (usually from gamblers to casinos, rarely vice versa) everyday in Sin City, but the tens of millions that is made from professional pugilistics are worth some Vegas chips and the respectability that accompanies these ensures that nobody will stop Manny Pacquiao from making a comfortable (if he stays unmaimed and alive) living legally beating people up especially on that part above the neck called the head which incidentally contains a vital organ called the brain.
“Dr. William Smith of the University Medical Center said he performed a second operation to remove a blood clot but Johnson was too gravely injured to survive,” The AP report went.
“He suffered a very severe injury. The problem is that the injury was to the brain itself,” Smith said. “In some cases, the punishment is absorbed by the skull, but in this young man’s case, the brain absorbed the punishment itself.”
Smith said it was not clear whether one punch or an accumulation of punches in the fight caused a swelling so pronounced that it pushed Johnson’s brain from the right side of his skull to the left. Unless punches to the head are made illegal or boxers both amateur and pro are required to wear full-face motorcycle crash helmets, head injuries will be a constant in the headhunting game. Sure, body shots are a beauty to watch, but the fatal beauty in boxing are the punches to the head and not many boxers would waste attacks to the body if the opportunity to batter the head and the brain is available.
“We had no further mode to improve his prognosis, so the family very correctly made the decision to withdraw care,” Dr. said. “He passed away very peacefully.” Is there any other way? Unless a person on the threshold of the great beyond thrashes around holding on for dear life, the dying fades away to become a part of the cosmos in cycle.
“There’ll be a lot of people who’ll take pokes at boxing for this. We can be better for protecting our athletes. But this was not a situation where anyone failed Leavander Johnson,” said Johnson’s promoter, Lou DiBella, Johnson’s associate for more than 10 years. “It was just God’s will. It’s a sport that’s inherently dangerous.”
CATHOLIC CONFESSION. Like a Catholic who goes to confession after a night of mortal sin only to fall again to the temptation, is like the way boxing reacts to fatalities. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate boxing. I like boxing. It’s the damage done that I detest. Hate the sin, not the sinner. Perhaps it’s something like guns. I hate the damage done to the human body by bullets but I like the act of shooting a firearm, the way power emanates from that metal, wood, plastic object in your hands, spewing lethal projectiles that, if this were a perfect world, would only strike cardboard targets.
Minus a gun in hand or a bird in the bush, boxing is power unto itself; knocking out someone senseless with a PacMan left straight, a Felix Trinidad hook, a Larry Holmes jab. That power can turn brain matter to mush. As one Free-For-All reader, Dr. Truce T. Ordoña, said in his e-mail, describing Freddie Roach, “his (PacMan’s) trainer who now battles Parkinsonism secondary to taking too many blows to the head.” Roach is a former pro (39-13 W-L record) himself who now talks with a pronounced slur/lisp which he could not or could have had even before undergoing brain battering as a pro pug. At least it was Roach’s choice to box.
Johnson too most likely could have chosen to be a pro. “What a wonderful guy this was. And I’ve never met anybody so proud or so grateful to achieve his dream,” Johnson’s promoter, Lou DiBella said. “If there’s any solace to be taken in this, it’s that he died doing what he loved. He died a champion.”
FORTUNATE. A live non-champion. A dead champion. Take your pick. Consider yourself fortunate. Johnson can’t. Not anymore.
So why do boxers box? Why do sluggers slug? Because they like to. Because they earn a living that way. So why do people watch boxers and sluggers do what they do? Because it’s exciting. People like to watch violence. Violence is exciting. Have you ever seen an action movie without action? Take the punch-ups, shoot-’em-ups, the stabbings, the blood out of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and you have Jingle All the Way. A Schwarzenegger movie should have all the elements of exciting violence.
Everybody gets queasy in a highway accident but cars slow down and people can’t look away. So we love to watch human beings, male or female, batter each other in the ring, the Octagon, the basketball court, the football pitch, the streets. Blood and gore is dramatic, it’s exciting.
People involved in boxing, and that counts the whole human race, should not finger point and search their souls every time a poor sap gets his life cut off short in a gladiatorial encounter.
We like it. We put them there.
P.S. Filipino Ayon Naranjo, who fought in the undercard of the Sept. 25 WBA minimumweight title match between Cebu’s Eriberto Gejon and Japanese champion Yutaka Niida, which Gejon lost, is recovering from brain injury after his six-round bout with Venezuelan Jorge Linares.
P.P.S. Thank God for little favors.
(paulotaneo@yahoo.com)
(September 30, 2005 issue)
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