Paul Lewis: Boxing heads for self-inflicted KO

Boxing is an indefensible sport. As someone near and dear to me continues to point out, it is the only sport built on the basis of physically hurting the opponent.

You can't argue against that. It's true - people do get hurt and some even die. It's the next bit I struggle with - banning it.

Cards on the table: boxing is one of the last great physical challenges; a sport which, stripped back to its bare essentials, pits one man against another, using physical attributes allied to scientific techniques.

Not for nothing is boxing known as "the sweet science". There is little in sport more interesting than watching a talented boxer use reflexes and skill to outpoint a puncher and, I'll admit it, it is also fascinating watching a puncher catch up with a boxer and knocking him into next Wednesday. Skill v power, speed v strength make for a compulsive contest, as does two sluggers in the same ring.

Not everyone feels that, however, and many recoil from what they regard as boxing's barbarism. But those who would ban it don't need to worry. The sport is doing a fine job of killing itself.

You might as well ban war. Or skiing, or gridiron, or motor racing, ice hockey, free diving, base jumping, mountaineering or synchronised swimming - all sports which cause serious injuries and even deaths from time to time. Well, synchronised swimming doesn't, except maybe death by boredom.

And that's the point, really. I'd rather set fire to my ears or be locked in a room with an angry hippo than watch synchronised swimming. But there are many other folk who do enjoy it and, last time I looked, we live in a free country. Boxing, like all those other life-and-limb-risking sports, doesn't compel anyone to get in a ring and beat the bejesus out of someone or have it done to them. It's not compulsory.

Like all sports with a physical element, there is an implied consent. Those who take part know the risks.

Yet there is always that consistent, telling refrain - a sport built on the back of someone deliberately hurting someone else.

That's not the reason boxing is killing itself, however. Far from it. Boxing - or the heavyweight division anyway - is dying for two reasons: hype and confusion.

Boxing has dipped far too often into the well of hype for its own good. Too many times, it has slathered and drooled and hollered that a fight (and some boxers) were the biggest things since Ben Hur. Or sliced bread. Or the day that Ben Hur invented sliced bread.

We saw it only the other day with the naked promotion of the undercard to the Anthony Mundine fight in Australia, when rugby league rebel Sonny Bill Williams took on someone called Gary Gurr - a puzzled old darling pulled in off the street who was never going to trouble Williams.

A bit of trash talking here, a suggestion there that Gurr was a genuine tough guy who spent his time bopping bouncers at Auckland nightclubs, and a legend was born, and then promptly buried. The media fell for it (small wonder many in the publicity and PR world laugh at the New Zealand media's lack of discernment) and, to be fair, a lot of public interest was generated.

But it was inevitably disappointing.

The hype was built around the fact that Money Bill is about as popular as diarrhoea on a duvet. It played to people's instincts to see him get a good hiding or, at worst, cop a punch or two.

The David Tua-Shane Cameron fight in October also exploded into being with a burst pipe of hype, billing itself as the "Fight Of The Century". At best, at very best, with the kindest perspective possible, it is the fight of the century in brackets; the "Fight Of The Century (in New Zealand, maybe, possibly)".

In the end, all boxing does with this stuff is to chew a big hole in its own credibility.

Short-term cash considerations clash with long-term health of the sport. Sounds like rugby, doesn't it?

There's also the confusion generated by the four main boxing organisations - the WBC, the WBA, the WBO and the IBF. They usually have different champions and different challengers.

Great marketing strategy, guys, generated by greed and self-interest. Things got so bad that the prestigious Ring magazine set up its own rankings system - meaning there are now five different global authorities/organisers.

And that's not even counting the myriad minor organisations, such as the IBA, the IBO, the IBC, the IBU, the WBF and the WBU.

Good grief. So the casual boxing fan understands what is happening in the sport and what is real and what is not about as much as they understand the theory of relativity and, no, it's got nothing to do with Auntie Joan.

In the heavyweight division, the competing organisations have recently tried to hold two big fights - WBC champion Vladimir Klitschko against Britain's David Haye and the 7-ft, 330-pound WBA champion Nikolai Valuev against the only man to beat him so far, Ruslan Chagaev. Only Chagaev failed a medical which said he had hepatitis B (he denies being infectious) and the fight was off (although Chagaev is considering suing Valuev whom he suspects of dodging him).

Meanwhile Haye had a genuine back injury and his fight against Klitschko could be off and, hey presto, Klitschko is now considering a fight against Chagaev.

Confused? Bemused? Of course you are. It gets worse when you realise that the WBA actually have two heavyweight champions - Chagaev (whom they call the champion "in recess" because he has been injured since beating Valuev) and Valuev - who took advantage of Chagaev's absence (he once cried off a fight suffering from "inflammation of the body") to regain the title.

Their fight was supposed to have sorted out who was the real champion. What a disaster ...

That's why there is no need to ban boxing. Give it long enough and it will knock itself out and drown in a sea of hype, confusion and self-interest.