B.M.A. seeks boxing ban

Press, 13 July 1984, Page 32

B.M.A. seeks boxing ban

NZPA-PA London Doctors are to campaign for a ban on both professional and amateur boxing. They have pledged to win their fight against the “noble art,” even if it takes 10 years. The move was approved by a majority of the 600 representatives at the British Medical Association’s annual meeting in Manchester. Until now, B.M.A. policy was limited to seeking the abolition of professional boxing. The association is now committed to a total ban.

A motion asking the B.M.A. to organise a campaign to influence public opinion ultimately to ban boxing was passed in spite of warnings by some doctors about interference with personal freedom and the imposition of a “nanny state.”

But the doctors all agreed that there was evidence that boxing caused brain and eye injuries and some argued that a sport where the only aim was to batter the opponent senseless was morally indefensible. Afterwards the secretary

of the 8.M.A., Dr John Havard, a junior heavyweight boxing champion when at school in Malvern, said the association would gather more evidence on the dangers of the sport and lobby members of Parliament. If all went well, boxing could be banned in five to 10 years, he said. Earlier, a Colchester consultant psychiatrist, Dr Harry Jacobs, said parachuting, hot air ballooning, and jogging were also dangerous activities. “The liberty to hazard your own life, is that to be taken away?” he said. “What a nation is this going to be if we have this sort of misguided paternalism?” Dr Jacobs said that black and poor children in deprived areas got the chance to show they were equal in the boxing ring. A ban on boxing would lead to a “flat greyness of obedience, everyone bowing down to old father 8.M.A.”

A Leicester consultant surgeon, Mr Dick Greenwood, said: “The B.M.A. is making a fool of itself. Why don’t we stick to medicine, stop being do-gooders and interfering with personal freedom?

“Boxing is dangerous, but so is tobacco, alcohol, and other sports. So is crossing the road. Ban all these things and you are not going to have an awful lot left in life to do. All you are left with is staying in bed, and an awful lot of patients die in their beds every day.” But Dr Justin Robins, of Plymouth, said the medical profession should give a lead to ban the “un-noble” art of boxing.

"It is an affront to society. It is licensed brutality. It degrades those who box and those who watch,” he said.

Mr Ray Clarke, secretary of the British Boxing Board of Control, immediately attacked the B.M.A.’s decision. He said that since 1949 there had been 11 deaths in British professional boxing. “When you compare this with deaths in other sports it is way, way down — you cannot compare it.” “Why not stop people climbing mountains and say there will be no more deaths in mountaineering, or ban rugby because there are more and far worse injuries there than in boxing? We have our safeguards against injuries.”