Terry Dooley believes Derek Chisora is perfectly entitled to fight on, boosted by that crucial 12-round points win over Kubrat Pulev at the weekend, amid repeated calls for his retirement after some gruelling defeats in the higher echelons of heavyweight boxing.
When Derek Chisora beat Danny Williams in two rounds at Upton Park in May 2010 to win the British heavyweight title it seemed liked a changing of the guard. Neither man was going to get to the very top — Tyson Fury was waiting in the wings for that honour and Anthony Joshua was still an a amateur — but it felt like a significant British title fight on an odd show.
Promoter Frank Warren had put everything into place for Kevin Mitchell to relieve Michael Katsidis of the WBO interim lightweight title, spending a lot of money to put the show together and skimping on a pre-fight poster in which Mitchell posed with two hammers and with his tongue hanging out — if you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it.
The fight itself did not go to plan. Mitchell’s most meaningful punch came before the first bell when he hit a balloon during one of the most ill-conceived ring walks we’ve seen on these shores, and we’ve had some bad ones.
Still, the Williams-Chisora fight was either supposed to be good fun while it lasted or would usher in Chisora’s reign as British Champion and there had already been early warning signs that “Del Boy” wasn’t quite right in the head aka ‘a character’ in British boxing parlance.
Roll on a few years and Chisora was on his way to title contention, while Williams had taken the first steps on the path that would lead him to a late-career run that took in a nine-fight winless streak and saw him battered to submission by Djuar El Scheich in three rounds in March of this year.
On the other hand, Chisora is evaluating his options after a hard-fought, split decision win over Kubrat Pulev on Saturday night, a fight that some felt would be the final straw for Chisora’s health and could send him spiralling down the Williams route.
The pre-fight handwringing over this one always felt disingenuous, a case of being seen to make a stance when it really wasn’t required. Sure, Chisora was 0-3 going in yet he holds a BBBofC-approved licence, has faced top opposition in recent years and, while some said that his behaviour seemed punchy, weird and erratic going in, many others replied: ‘I don’t see a dramatic difference here.’
It reopened the can of worms over when and where a boxer decides to retire or make a final stance and who gets the final say-so over this. We, the fans, watch a fighter throughout their entire career, enjoying the ups and downs, but then it reaches a point where the fighter is diminished and damaged so we decide that it is time for them to turn it in. That way, we can turn to the next one and start the process all over again.
However, some fighters don’t want to or can’t turn it in, they “Rage against the dying of the light”, and as we will see this is an important distinction, so they carry on, and on and on, and we don’t like it. We expect them to hit and be hit when they are younger men, some of us gain extra satisfaction in their wins when they go beyond their prime years and then when time ticks on we reach a point where it becomes uncomfortable to watch them fight on and we demand that they stop. Some fighters simply say: “No.”
Why do they say “No”? In the case of Williams, he continued fighting and earning to put his children through private school. It is ironic, he has served up his braincells on a silver platter so that his children could improve theirs, earning enough on the road to do what he considers to be his duty as a father. His children were not born with the proverbial silver spoon, he went out and earned it for them. Every so often, his name pops up and we think or say: ‘I don’t like seeing Danny Williams box.’ But we don’t really see it, do we? We just know that he is out there, getting battered, hurt, stopped and paid to do the only thing he can do to pay certain bills.
Chisora is a different kettle of fish. Unlike Williams, we regularly see him in action. We’ve watched his decline. We’ve studied his behaviour, his speech pattern and his physique and decided it was time to throw him on the scrapheap of memory. Thanks, Del, but your time has some, I’ve moved on and you should retire.
Only Chisora doesn’t want to retire. He could do it; he is worth around eight or so million, a dramatic contrast to Williams, so has earned decent money, yet he wants to fight, and what do we do with a problem like Chisora. How do we deal with someone who lives to fight rather than fighting to live?
Well, we can tell him that it is time to retire. We can refuse to watch him fight, which is merely lip service — almost everyone who said that they wouldn’t watch Pulev-Chisora II caved in and either watched it or is talking about it. Ultimately, though, if a fighter who wants to fight, and can get a licence to fight, they will go ahead and do so, be it in the UK or the boxing backwaters that we sneer at despite the myriad of issues and scoring scandals that happen right here on our doorstep.
Boxing fans and pundits are an odd breed as the sport is a moral grey area during the time a fighter is fit, young and capable of producing their best then becomes black and white when they are past their best: they want to carry on, for whatever reason, whereas we’ve had enough and don’t want to see our aged heroes take a beating. Maybe because the damage becomes more pronounced in direct relation to how difficult they find it to pronounce the words that once flowed forward as effortlessly as their punches and fighting form.
We can tell ourselves it is because we care about someone we’ve never met, that we truly want a safe sport — it will never be truly safe — or just admit a few truths: moralising about boxing and what it does to fighters is the easiest way to fill a blank page, we’ve moved on to new idols and don’t want our old ones getting in the way, the realisation that boxing is a brutal sport has bubbled up again so we need to bury it by pretending it is as safe as it can be.
All you need to consider when gauging where you fit into this is where you rank the third fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in your various Top Tens. Both men were past their prime, and arguably more damaged than Chisora, yet they fought in tropical heat, in humidity that led to their gloves becoming crumpled and waterlogged — and we all love that fight. It was brutal, intense, they battered each other until the only option was for one of them to either quit or be pulled out for their own safety. No one batted an eyelid until the damage surfaced a few years down the line.
As fighters get older, they get slower, they become easier to hit and take more punches, we watch boxing to see people get hit and knocked out; obviously with some fine defensive skill on display, otherwise what is the point? “The last thing a fighter loses is their punch,” and when we say that we thank the boxing gods for small mercies — even if they get old, someone can still get chinned. You either enjoy those types of fights or find another sport. I hear that lawn green bowling is marvellous this time of year.
Amid all this, we argue for the long-term safety of fighters and voice concerns for their future while also stating that, for some, their only means of income should be taken away from them. It is disingenuous, especially if you consider things from the other perspective.
While some were arguing that Chisora should suffer the same fate as Boxer from Animal Farm, the 38-year-old was working hard to ensure he could get revenge over Pulev and move on to another big fight. After the win, promoter Eddie Hearn said: “He wants to go somewhere in the Middle East, he wants to cop the caviar.”
Therein lies the rub, while we are trying to enact the saviour narrative by trying to save Chisora from himself, the heavyweight was working towards a fight against Deontay Wilder — a fight that lots of people claim not to want to see but that everyone will watch — or a huge payday in somewhere like Saudi Arabia, which is a human rights nightmare, one of the world’s top countries for executions and repression of the rights of women. It is a lovely place to visit, as long as you are just visiting, and a man, and bring some money in, and don’t break the rules, of which there are many.
It is all part of the inherent hypocrisy or boxing. On the one hand you must be seen to publicly denounce fights such as Pulev-Chisora II, rather than privately refusing to watch them, while still tuning into Usyk-Joshua II, which takes place in a country with an appalling human rights record.
As for Chisora, it is highly unlikely that he thought about any of this, boxing fans wanted him to quit because encouraging him to continue impinges on this reality, but he doesn’t care about that. Nor does he care about the ramifications of getting one last, huge payday in the cash rich Middle East. While we worried about Chisora’s health, he was busy making sure that he kept himself in the sports washing race. We focus on individual fighters because it is easier to pin a moral tale on that donkey rather than considering the wider picture.
Fans and pundits alike like to portray themselves as decent people who have become addicted to an indecent sport, and we build straw houses to protect ourselves from the reality of the business of boxing. However, as Scott Westerfeld said: “You can’t blame a match for a house made of straw.”
Fighters like Chisora grit it out in the gym and in the ring to get the result and move on to the next payday, and they don’t care where it comes from. That’s the line between boxers and fans. It’s also the line in the sand dunes that we need to keep the sport going. Del’s alright — thanks for asking — and he’s going to feel even better when he signs on the dotted line for his next one.
Main image: Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing.