‘Nobody can be shocked when these tragic incidents happen’: Why it might be time to ban boxing

While the impact of rugby and football on the brain is widely debated, the sport where you punch people in the head is still going strong

It is a Sunday night in May and a crowd of around 300 are waiting for a boxing match to begin. The venue is decidedly unglamorous – the sports hall of a leisure centre in north London – but the basics are all present and correct: a ring, roped off in red, white and blue; swirling disco lights; huge speakers blasting out rap music.
In the wings, Sherif Lawal is preparing to make his entrance. It is his first professional fight. Old for a debutant, at 29, he is nevertheless highly rated. After 60 amateur bouts, he is being tipped for an English title, perhaps more if things go well. His coach, CJ Hussein, believes he has the talent to become a great middleweight. Although not an all-out, Mike Tyson-style knock-out boxer, Lawal is tactical, with an excellent boxing IQ. He also looks the part; his slight frame is packed with muscle. There is not an inch of fat on him.
His opponent is Malam Varela, a Portuguese pro fighter, but as the bout begins, Lawal holds his own. He keeps his distance, throwing out jabs. 
At the end of round one, he returns to his corner and Hussein gives him a hug. “Welcome to the professional game, mate,” he says. “You’re in the programme now.” 
The bell goes for round two. Lawal continues in the same vein. Points-wise, there is little in it, but he is slowly finding his range and, halfway through, he catches Varela with an upper cut. When Lawal comes back to his corner at the end of round three, Hussein is thrilled. “Stay on the jab,” he says. “Keep your hands up. Wait until he gets confident, then throw the upper cut. He’ll walk straight into it.” Lawal nods. He is responding to Hussein’s instructions. Breathing normally. 
When the bell goes for round four, he gets to his feet. And then something strange happens. For no discernible reason, Lawal starts slowing down. His energy seems to have vanished and he is moving as if there are weights tied to his feet. His hands drop and he gets hit by a series of punches. “What the f—k are you doing, man?” Hussein screams. Lawal backs into a corner. And then, as Varela comes towards him once more, he falls on to all fours. The referee begins a count. Then, at eight, Lawal collapses on to his chest. 
Immediately, Hussein is in the ring sprinting towards him. “What’s the matter with you? Get up! Get up! Sherif, what’s the matter?” He tries to pick him up, but Lawal’s body goes stiff. Together with a medic, Hussein turns him over and finds his jaw has clenched shut, they can’t get his mouthpiece out. The medic starts chest compressions.
At the ringside, Lawal’s friends are crying and screaming for an ambulance. It takes 20 minutes to arrive. Lawal is taken to Northwick Park Hospital, but an hour later a doctor emerges with news. He could not be saved. 
Sherif Lawal’s first professional fight had been his last. 
The history of boxing is a history of young men beating each other senseless for money. It may be vastly more regulated than its predecessor, bare-knuckle fighting – which had no round limits, no referees and virtually no rules – but it remains the only sport whose ultimate aim is to knock out an opponent by punching them in the head. 
Death Under the Spotlight, a now-defunct research project that recorded boxing-related fatalities, estimated that 488 deaths were caused by injuries sustained in fights worldwide between 1960 and 2011. There have been many more in the years since. 
In Britain, these include Welsh bantamweight Johnny Owen, who died at the age of 24 after being knocked out in a world title fight in 1980; Bradley Stone, a 23-year-old from east London, who collapsed from a blood clot on the brain in 1994; 25-year-old Scottish boxer Jimmy Murray, who died after being knocked out in the final round of a British title fight in 1995; welterweight Mike Towell, also 25, who died after suffering a fifth-round knock-out during a fight in Glasgow in September 2016; and 31-year-old Scott Westgarth, a light heavyweight from Northumberland, who won a 10-round fight at Doncaster’s Dome leisure centre in February 2018. 
It was the biggest victory of Westgarth’s career. He even conducted an interview after the fight. Then he went to the changing rooms, vomited, collapsed and died from a bleed on the brain.
But it is perhaps two other, non-fatal fights, seared into the nation’s memory, that have done more than anything else to sully the image of boxing in Britain: Chris Eubank’s notorious rematch against Michael Watson in 1991, which put Watson in a coma and almost the morgue, and Nigel Benn’s brutal fight against the American Gerald McClellan in 1995, which left the latter blind, partially deaf, mentally impaired and unable to walk properly.
“The American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimates that the force of a professional boxer’s fist is the equivalent to being hit by a 13lb bowling ball travelling at 20mph,” says Luke Griggs, chief executive of the brain injury charity Headway and one of boxing’s most implacable foes. “Every blow to the head has a chance of causing bruising or bleeding to the brain. The more blows, the greater the risk. So nobody can be shocked or surprised when these tragic incidents happen.”
There are other risks too, says Griggs. Repeated concussions can lead to degenerative neurological conditions like dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disease formerly known as punch-drunk syndrome, which is typically characterised by slurred speech, memory loss, depression and violent behaviour.
The decline of Muhammad Ali, the all-time “Greatest”, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s just three years after retiring and shrunk to a shuffling shadow of his former self by the time he died in 2016, is testament to this. 
Scientists have been assembling a body of evidence that proves a link between boxing and mental deterioration. A systematic review and analysis of previously published research papers, presented last year in the peer-reviewed Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, found that, out of 411 amateur and professional boxers, one in three had some form of brain atrophy, while 46 out of 71 (62 per cent) current and former boxers had either dementia or amnesia. 
“Every time you suffer a blow to the head, cells and neural pathways are damaged,” says Tony Belli, professor of trauma neurosurgery at the University of Birmingham. “And, although inflammation eventually subsides, if the brain is injured again, the inflammation gets reactivated very quickly. [Concussion] also releases toxic proteins that cause nerve cells to die. And because the brain has very limited ability to repair itself, repeated concussions can lead to damage that is both irreversible and progressive.” In other words, mental decline continues, even if the individual suffers no further injuries, and it doesn’t stop until the brain is completely destroyed and the patient dies. 
As the writer and former amateur boxer Pete Carvill puts it in Death of a Boxer, his book about Mike Towell: “The body forgets nothing you’ve done to it.”
Luke Griggs has been calling for a complete boxing ban for many years. He points out that it is extraordinary that so many column inches have been devoted to the risks of brain injury from playing rugby and heading footballs, and yet so few to the risks of a sport that deliberately targets the head: “If footballers are more likely to develop a neurological disorder [from heading a ball], what about people who are being hit in the head by strong and incredibly fit boxers who punch so hard and so fast?”
There are many possible reasons for the comparative lack of care and attention given to boxing injuries, including the vast number of rich and powerful organisations – from promoters to broadcasters – that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
But the reason supporters of boxing most often give for the continuation of the sport is that those who step into the ring know the risks. Everybody knows it’s a brutal sport. Every wannabe champion has heard of Michael Watson and Gerald McClellan. In fact, there is a good chance that, once a junior is 14 or 15, they will personally know someone who has suffered an injury or work with a coach who was in the corner with someone who suffered an injury. And still they want to box – whether for the money, the glory or the sheer, primal urge to fight. 
The counter argument, of course, is that the young men and women who choose boxing have very few other options available to them. As Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, once put it, “If boxing is such a noble art, why is it only boys from poor families who sign on as professionals?” It is a question that still stands today, as working-class men and women make up the majority of Britain’s 1,000-or-so active professional and semi-professional fighters. 
There are certain tests to which a boxer has to submit himself before turning pro in Britain, overseen by the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC). “The board is constantly pulling fighters out of fights, suspending fighters. We are the envy of the world in that sense,” says the BBC’s “voice of boxing” Steve Bunce. 
But that doesn’t mean boxing is in the clear. In fact, Bunce, who has written an autobiography of his life devoted to the sport, Around the World in 80 Fights, stresses that deaths and life-changing injuries are “indefensible”. He has been at the ringside for half a dozen deaths and maybe 15 other fights where boxers have been rushed to emergency procedures: “I’ve been in waiting rooms, I’ve been there when doctors have told loved ones that their son, husband and father has died. Nobody in their right mind is going to defend that.”
He points out, however, that he has met countless people who have told him that boxing saved their life. “[Those] who call for it to be banned have no understanding what it’s like to grow up, in the case of Jimmy Murray, in a tenement on the outskirts of Glasgow. Fighters want to fight and they want what boxing can give them.”
Reforms introduced since Michael Watson’s near-fatal injury in 1991 have undoubtedly made the sport safer. Now, there must be a medic ringside at every fight, and the A&E and neurosurgical units of the nearest hospital must be placed on standby before a match can go ahead. 
Bunce says rule changes saved the life of British fighter Spencer Oliver, who was treated in the ring by a paramedic after being knocked out by a right hook during a defence of his European super bantamweight title in 1998. 
Despite suffering a bleed to the brain, Oliver was stabilised and kept alive with a breathing tube, before being taken to Charing Cross Hospital, where a neurosurgeon successfully removed the blood clot. 
A week later, says Bunce, Oliver “walked out of the intensive care unit to get some Chinese food”.
“Anyone who’s worked in boxing as long as I have – if that person is not conflicted then there’s something wrong with them. But the safety procedures are much better now and injuries are nowhere near as common as people think.”
The risks are still too great in Griggs’ opinion. “It comes down to this question: where, as a society, do we draw the line for personal risk? A responsible society has a duty to put in place laws where we find an unacceptable level of risk, even if people feel it impinges on their personal liberties.
“Wearing seat belts, for example. Quite a few people might not want to wear a seat belt, but the law says it is safer for you to do so. Or a motorbike helmet. A lot of motorbike riders might want to feel the wind flowing through their hair, but as a society we have established that the risk is too great.”
Few people would dare to tell Sherif Lawal’s family that he “knew the risks”. Five months on from his death, his mother, Misitura, and his three sisters, Sarah, Katherine and Doyin, seem unsure how to adapt to his absence. They still cannot bring themselves to read the coroner’s report.
“I just feel like he should be here. I assumed he always would be,” says Katherine.
Lawal got in with a bad crowd in his teenage years, but later he found his way and started training in 2013, initially as a way to get fit. “He didn’t speak a lot [at first],” recalls coach CJ Hussein. “He was very shy. But he was very dedicated and trained hard. Then, after two years or so, I asked him if he wanted to box. He moved up to the boxing class and he embraced it. He loved the discipline, he loved the training. He was the first kid in here and, literally, the last kid to leave. He would be here five days a week.”
He also enjoyed working with youngsters at the gym, mentoring them, reminding them to do their training, haranguing those he saw heading in the wrong direction. He had started training to become a mental health nurse, too. As one of his old school friends, Jack Keatley, says, “Sherif ate hard work for breakfast.” Hussein agrees: “He never gave up; it wasn’t in his make-up.”
The family were living together in a four-bedroom house in north London when he died. Today a deep sadness hangs in the air. They are angry too, about comments from Tyson Fury, the former heavyweight champion, who, when asked about Lawal during a press conference, said: “God rest his soul. You go in there, you’re getting paid for danger. We’re there to inflict damage on each other by punching each other to the head and body and unfortunately things like this happen now and again.”
“That wasn’t nice,” says Sarah. “I was very upset by that.” “Would he have felt the same if it had been his brother?” says Katherine, wiping her eyes. “Or what if his family lost him? If you look at Sherif’s diary, it was full of plans for what he was going to do in life. Now that’s all gone. And he wasn’t even 30.”
The family say they wish they had known more about the dangers of boxing. None could bear to watch him fight and it is only now, after his death, that they understand exactly what happens to the brain when the skull is struck at force; how easy it is for a vessel to tear and how little blood is required to put pressure on the brain, because the skull can’t expand and the brain has got nowhere to go.
In Lawal’s case, the coroner’s report, issued on 21 August, found no damage to his brain. His death was a result of undetected arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle that can trigger cardiac arrest during intense exertion. It is, according to the coroner’s report, a “well-known cause of sudden death in sports”.
The same condition, or similar, was most likely to blame for the on-pitch heart attack suffered by the Manchester United and Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen during Euro 2020, and the cardiac arrest that felled the Luton captain Tom Lockyer during a Premier League match against Bournemouth last December. They were lucky; in both cases, the sportsmen were resuscitated and survived.
Lawal’s family are still struggling to digest that he did not. “Sherif wasn’t on any medication,” says his uncle Niyi Murele. “He had never complained of any pain in the chest. There is no history of heart problems in the family. As far as we’re concerned, he went down because of a blow to the head. That’s all.”
At Lawal’s gym, St Pancras Boxing Club, the dark blue gown he was wearing on the night of his final fight hangs framed on the wall inside the front door. His gloves are tied to a metal pipe, and outside the changing rooms, his cloth hand wraps and head gear can be seen inside a wire locker, just as he left them. 
“Nobody is allowed to touch these,” says Hussein. He still finds it difficult to talk about Lawal.
Since his death, the gym hasn’t been the same. Some of the younger boys don’t come as often. But Lawal’s friend Chris Thomas, 24, himself on the cusp of turning pro, is fighting harder than ever. 
“There is a risk to everything you do in life,” he says calmly. “Sports like boxing help people. It helped Sherif a lot. It’s helped me. It’s kept me here rather than being outside. You’re going to be hearing from me soon. We’re going for world levels. And when I fight, it will be for Sherif. He will always be there… All of it will be for Sherif.”