What next for Scotland’s undisputed champion, Josh Taylor?
There are many more boxing champions than there used to be. Before, there used to be only eight recognised weights. Now, twice that number. Generally, there also used to be only one title-awarding body. Now there are four, and that doesn’t include an unofficial title awarded by The Ring magazine, which, paradoxically, carries at least as much prestige (even if nothing else) than any of the titles won in a match approved by one of the boxing boards. Consequently, there may, at any time, be as many as fifty fighters entitled to style themselves “World Champion.”
Yet last weekend, Josh Taylor from Edinburgh put up his two World light-welterweight titles in Las Vegas against Jose Ramirez, the holder of the other two, won the fight and scooped the lot. He is now the undisputed king of that division.
There haven’t been many Scottish World Champions. Most of the early ones were wee men – flyweights; Benny Lynch in the 1930s, Jackie Paterson in the next decade, and Walter McGowan in the Sixties. Ken Buchanan was an undisputed Lightweight champion, and also, many would say, Scotland’s greatest, partly at least, as he won his title on the other side of the Atlantic. Taylor has matched this, and Taylor is only the fifth or sixth boxer recognised as World Champion by all four Boards and the first British one.
Taylor had a successful, if not stellar, amateur career, representing Scotland in the Commonwealth Games and Britain in the 2012 Olympics. Though, unlike Anthony Joshua and Luke Campbell, he won no medal there. He is thirty now, but his match with Ramirez was only his eighteenth professional fight. He has won them all and done so without attracting much notice outside Scotland – no British UK television broadcaster showed the Ramirez fight.
This was surprising but not significantly. Most of his eighteen fights have been in Scotland, and he has fought only three times in England; twice in London, once, early in his career, in Manchester. So the London Boxing Press has taken less notice of him than his style and record deserve. This will surely change, all the more so because against Ramirez, he showed that he had not only great skill but a powerful punch.
He hasn’t taken a beating and thinking of his long-term health; this is a good thing. If he continues to develop his defensive skills and escapes the temptations of celebrity, his prospects are rosy. Drink has damaged, even destroyed some of the best Scottish boxers; Scott Harrison recently, Jackie Paterson and Benny Lynch in the more distant past. So let’s hope Taylor doesn’t yield to that other temptation.
Most of us who love or have loved boxing, and admired its heroes, are now, I would think, ambivalent about it. We recognise that it offers boys a way out of poverty, crumbling estates given over to gang violence and fosters self-confidence and self-esteem, which is important. But the dark side is equally well known. For years we knew or heard of boxers becoming what was called ‘punch-drunk’: the slurred speech, abrupt mood changes, the memory loss and mental confusion, all symptoms of what we now called dementia.
Many of the greatest succumbed: Joe Louis, who defended the World Heavyweight title twenty-five times, Sugar Ray Robinson, judged by many the greatest pound-for-pound boxer of them all. Muhammed Ali’s family and friends insisted that he was the victim only of Parkinson’s Disease, but it was hard not to think that boxing contributed, at least in part, to his loss of speech and movement. Heavy defeats, going on too long, too many fights – Sugar Ray had more than 160 – all contribute. With luck and if well advised, Josh Taylor will retire when he has had no more than, say, twenty-five fights.
We now know much more about the effects of repeated blows to the head and repeated concussions than we used to. Other sports, notably rugby and football, are alert to the danger as never before and are adjusting laws and training methods accordingly. Boxing must surely take note.
To some extent, this is already happening. Referees and boxers’ corner-men are much quicker to stop a fight now than they used to be. Boards of Control are more ready to revoke a boxer’s licence or refuse to grant one if an ageing fighter seeks to come out of retirement and return to the ring.
One of the more interesting suggestions is that sparring – the rounds boxers fight in the gym in preparation for their return to the ring – may be even more damaging than the actual fight because over the weeks of training, they will suffer many more blows to the head.
They indeed wear head-guards in training, but there is an argument that a head guard may be damaging rather than protective by spreading the impact of a blow. It had been remarked that the former Heavyweight champion, George Foreman, whom Ali knocked out in the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ and who returned to the ring again in his forties, even winning one version of the title, did very little spring in preparation for a fight and seems in his seventies still mentally alert. One example doesn’t prove anything. Nevertheless, it might be wise if, in sparring, fewer head blows were delivered, or even none at all.
All contact sports pose a risk to physical and mental health, and it’s fitting that administrators and trainers should now be aware of this. But, of course, such sports also offer many benefits, as well as pleasure. They teach respect for yourself and others, and we know that boxing has rescued many young men from a way of life that seemed to be heading for years behind prison bars.
For Josh Taylor, at the moment, the future is rosy. Let us hope it stays that way, and we can take pleasure in his achievement. Meanwhile, he will be in demand as never before. One call doubtless will be to the Scotland football team before the Euros: Text: “How I won and how you can do likewise”.