Thread: Lightweights
View Single Post
Old 08-10-2009, 11:33 PM   #34 (permalink)
John Dewey
Hall Of Famer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 2,168
Thanks: 8
Thanked 947x in 610 posts
ring casualties

I always have a melancholy feeling whenever I post a fighter who has died or been critically injured in the ring. Previously I submitted Willie Classen who also died. I saw Gerald McClellan fight down in Beloit when he was up and coming. Later he became Middleweight champion. Now he's blind and adalded down in his home in Freeport, Illinois requiring 24 hour nursing care courtesy of Nigel Benn. It's a brutal sport and there's always a pang of guilt in we who enjoy it. I know that more jockeys and race car drivers die or are seriously injured each year than boxers, but that does not make me feel any better. Still, my father was a boxer (amateur only I am told though there is some question about that) and I was brought up with a love for it. I hope it never gets banned but I understand those who think it should be. But you're right. By posting such a fighter in the game gives him a tiny speck of immortality. We boxing fans don't forget our dead.
John Dewey is offline   Reply With Quote