Quote:
Originally Posted by John Dewey
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.
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John, like you I have created some files for fighters that paid the ultimate price in the ring. I have similar feelings of melancholy when doing so. I also
wonder that if by creating files for ring fatalities I'm being ghoulish. Your lines, about remembering our dead and giving them a bit of importality are a help to me. I feel heartened and uplifted by them.
bear