How many more blows can boxing take?

On March 26 a British middleweight boxing title fight between Chris Eubank Jr and Nick Blackwell ended with distressing scenes.

During the 10th round, the referee stopped the fight as a bloodied Blackwell, whose left eye had swelled markedly, appeared to have no more to give.

While still in the ring, Blackwell collapsed. Bleeding had begun on his skull and Blackwell subsequently spent nine days in a medically induced coma.

Blackwell woke from his coma on Saturday and by Sunday was talking to family and friends at his bedside.

It is likely that he will never box again.

Backwell’s injuries – inflicted on live TV - raise legal, medical and moral concerns about the sport of boxing.

The courts have long recognised the legality of contact sports where the risk of injury, even serious injury, is taken to be assumed by the participants.

That assumption or consent is premised on the injury suffered being incidental to the playing of the game in question.

Boxing stretches that legal tolerance beyond its limits because intrinsically it is about the deliberate infliction of injury. The most efficient way of winning a professional bout is by way of knockout. A knockout is a temporary stunning of the body’s most sensitive organ and thus, to many, a repulsive aspect of boxing’s scoring system is that it promotes the intentional infliction of brain damage.

In reply, the boxing fraternity highlights that, although mountain and equine sports, and even ball sports such as rugby and American football, have far higher rates of serious injury, those pursuits rarely face calls for their outright proscription.

The difficulty for boxing is that such activities can mitigate associated risks through better use of safety equipment or rule changes. Only if boxing bans blows to the head, which unacceptably for the boxing community would eliminate an elemental part of their sport, will it satisfy abolitionists such as the British Medical Association.

There are, however, other ways of limiting the risks that boxers face inside the ring.

First, in the lighter divisions there has been a tendency for fighters deliberately to dehydrate in order to make the weight before the fight. There is some medical evidence of a link between sudden weight loss of this nature and brain injury among fighters. Medical regulation of fighters, based on strict liability principles, may have to be introduced to promote graduated, pre-fight weight loss.

Second, there was a significant decline in mortality rates in boxing after 1983 when championship bouts were reduced from 15 to 12 rounds, following the death of South Korean Deuk Koo Kim in a world title fight in November 1982. Is it now time to reduce championship boxing bouts further from 12 to 10 rounds?

Third, as Blackwell lay in a coma, the media focused, somewhat unfairly, on the performance of the referee, Victor Loughlin. Should he have intervened earlier?

Are pro-boxing referees trained to an adequate level and especially in light of the fact that generally the referee is the only person authorised to end a fight for excessive punishment (and not the medical assessor who can only recommend a stoppage)?

In Eubank’s corner on fight night was his father, Chris, who 25 years ago fought in a world title fight that ended with his opponent, Michael Watson, suffering serious brain trauma. Watson successfully sued the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) for negligent provision of ringside medical care.

The Watson litigation concerned the duty of care of the sport’s governing body.

But what now about the other key stakeholders in professional boxing – the promoters?

Currently, many boxers have to fend for themselves in covering insurance and medical costs. A licensing requirement that promoters underwrite such costs for “their” contracted fighters would be hugely significant for the welfare of boxers.

A last reform of note is that professional boxers need a representative body – a union – to provide assistance in negotiating contracts and in advocating for better post-career rights for boxers such as pension provision and education.

Physical exploitation of boxers inside the ring should not be followed by financial exploitation outside of it.

Overall, it is unlikely that professional boxing will face abolition in the UK or Ireland any time soon. Criminalising the sport might even make it less safe, forcing it underground and regressing to its bare fisted roots.

In the immediate, the debate on the sport’s future is ethical in nature and has three dimensions – those who in the classic liberal tradition respect the participants’ autonomy; those who take the paternalistic view that it should be prohibited to protect the participants from themselves; and those who take the view that so long as the sport is properly regulated, it should be allowed to continue.

All who love the sport, as I do, hope that Blackwell now goes on to make a full recovery.

As he does so, some reflection is needed on the proper regulation of all fighting sports in the UK and Ireland and including mixed martial arts.

This is also because sometimes, to paraphrase Bob Dylan’s celebrated lament for Davey Moore, who died in the after a world title fight in 1963, you have to ask: why and what’s the reason for.

Jack Anderson lectures is sports law at Queen’s University, Belfast