PEDs – BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK

It is 70 years since Orville Henry, the wiry Sports Editor at the Arkansas Gazette for the thick end of six decades, first put the term Slobber-knock to print. Filing copy in March 1964, he was describing the playing style of Dennis McLure via the words of Barry Switzer who had recruited McLure to the University of Arkansas’ football programme. This was long before Switzer’s own assent to the NFL, the position of head coach at the Dallas Cowboys in 1994 and a famous SuperBowl triumph in 1995.

“DENNIS doesn’t wait for anything to come at him,” says Barry Switzer, who recruited him. “He gets to where that ball carrier is going, meets him head-on, and I’d say he slobber-knocks ’em.”

Reading about Henry, who passed away in 2002, his status as a legend of the written word acquired in a life time of detailed and colourful coverage of the Arkansas Ridgebacks, I drew the conclusion he would’ve enjoyed the absurdity of Sunday’s heavyweight fight between the one-time contender Dillian Whyte and Ghana’s improbably named Ebenezer Tetteh.

It was, as Dan Rafael had forecast it to be on the BigFightWeekend preview podcast, “a heavyweight slobber-knocker“.

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I wonder where it is all going to end don’t you? You, we, I sit and watch from the sidelines as the events of the day unfold, beyond our control, beyond, at times, our understanding. The sense of helplessness, the difficulty of arriving at a balanced opinion without wondering whether you are merely adopting a promotional message from one side of the argument or the other, is hard to elude.

In the shadow of larger issues like Syria, the friction and/or collusion between military super powers and people dying in hospital corridors or in the street, the reporting and regulation of PEDs in boxing can appear a trivial point on which to muse. Nevertheless, the pursuit of justice, sanction and clarity suffers the same distortion of facts and an ensuing disengagement which is as dangerous as the problem itself. Continue reading “Boxing, drugs and the complicity of the apathetic” →