When Tyson Fury got into Deontay Wilder’s face during their traveling press conferences before their match in December, the two were following an age-old formula of trash talking to sell a fight.
Fury yelled at Wilder and Wilder yelled back, and they traveled to another city and did it all again.
Despite the chaotic atmosphere, they made sure not to cross any red lines into inappropriate behavior, never threw a punch at each other through all the insults and shoves.
They played with the line, stepped over it and back, but were always aware of its existence.
For a boxing promotion, it was pretty standard fare: the sport often trades on its sense of confrontation and brutality to hype fights. And fans usually eat it up, clearly entertained.
It’s a line that fighters and their camps usually toe with professional dexterity, and we have confidence they will police themselves and things won’t spiral totally out of control.
That line and sense of restraint was totally obliterated before the official weigh-in for the junior middleweight championship between Claressa Shields and Ivana Habazin on October 4 when Habazin’s trainer was violently assaulted in Flint, Michigan.
A punch was thrown. James Ali Bashir was knocked down and wheeled away in a stretcher.
The fight was canceled and suddenly Shield’s swift ascent was grounded. Authorities are investigating.
Ali Bashir required surgery to repair multiple facial fractures, a tragic turn for a fight that was supposed to be another celebration of Shields’ amazing talents.
Now, it should be a reckoning for the entire sport.
Most sports usually go through a period of soul searching and self-assessment in the wake of a catastrophic incident, and this certainly qualifies.
Protocols are reviewed, rules are evaluated.
The sport, as a whole, does an about-face.
It happened in football with the rash of concussions and serious injuries. The league instituted concussion protocol and players can’t tackle while leading with their head as a result. The NFL adjusted. Or at least it’s trying.
But boxing has a complicated relationship with learning from its mistakes, and it remains to be seen whether this tragedy will force the sport to reconsider its procedures pertaining to weigh-ins and pre-fight rituals and make any changes to avoid the next potential disaster. Some may say what happened to Ali Bashir was unavoidable, a fluke incident engineered by a rotten apple in the form of the assailant. We shouldn’t overreact. But there are still precautions that can be taken, options that perhaps should be reconsidered to guard against something like this from happening again.
For example, should there be heightened security at all weigh-ins? Speaking generally, of course there should.
Should fighters weigh in at the same time, their camps mixing together on stage in close proximity?
Or, out of an abundance of caution, should fighters be forced to tip the scales separately?
Should only the fighters be allowed onto the stage for the weigh-in? Or will weigh-ins remain spectacles in which the camps are allowed to mingle.
And what about making weigh-ins closed to the public? Or doing away with the pre-fight stare-downs to reduce the risk of some unforeseen flare-up?
Should fighters dial down the rhetoric before their fights? Or is this asking way too much? Should the sport have to change its protocols because of a single incident? And are we watering the sport down by making all of these changes?
Still, implementing some of these measures would have greatly diminished the chances of violence breaking out at the Shields-Habazin weigh-in.
It would also fundamentally change the way the sport is viewed and structured.
We watch the press conference and weigh-in because we want to see non-violent confrontations, trash talking, and how the fighters and their camps react to these clashes.
We love the theatrics, the sense of peril, our collective noses pressed up against the edges to get a whiff of the dangers that lurk around the corner.
In the heat of the moment, fighters and trainers and promoters and entourages can say crazy and unpleasant things. And we tolerate it because it brings us closer to the action, to their dangerous, unguarded worlds. It’s raw and we watch it in the same way we rubberneck on the side of the road.
(And let’s be clear: No one deserves to be assaulted because of their foul language.)
What other sport allows us such closeness and immediacy?
Boxing is unique and special in that regard.
Only this time someone was seriously injured as a result of that immediacy, the reach-out-and touch-you access that is always available in boxing.
This is not to call into question boxing’s culture of access and trash talking but to ask if anything could have been done to prevent this tragic incident from taking place.
Boxing is under the microscope again. And the world is watching to see if the sport will learn any lessons.
We pray for Ali Bashir to fully recover, while hoping this never happens again.
