Joe Joyce-Derek Chisora and the price the fighters risk paying

There’s a viral clip making the rounds featuring the divisive political party leader Nigel Farage shouting down hecklers with a riposte of “boring, boring, boring.”

And at the risk of drawing the same reaction, it’s worth looking ahead to Saturday’s heavyweight clash between the 40-year-old Derek Chisora and the 38-year-old Joe Joyce and having the conversation about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

CTE is a brain disease that is prevalent among those who compete in contact sports – from football to boxing and MMA to rugby. Even in soccer, through repeated heading of the ball, and baseball, due to the possibility of collisions and being struck by a ball, athletes have suffered neurologically over time.

CTE is undetectable during life. It is only after a patient dies that their brain can be examined and the particles of tau protein can be seen gnawing away at a shrinking brain that the disease, and how badly it has taken hold of someone, can be determined.

Before that, there are signs – slurred speech, walking with an unsteady gait, short-term memory loss and so forth – but early science investigating links to head trauma and athletes claimed decades ago that the first visible sign of a neurological decline can be detected simply when, for instance, a boxer loses a fight against someone they would have beaten years earlier.

What we do know and can see with our own eyes is the volume of trauma that fighters take through their careers.

We know that out of the many extensive and, indeed, celebrated amateur programs around the world, fighters are entering the pros already damaged, having boxed at an elite level for years and having already recorded, in many cases, hundreds of fights and thousands of sparring rounds.

Sometimes a decline can be gradual; sometimes it could be sudden.

Matthew Saad Muhammad, after his first fight with Dwight Muhammad Qawi (then Dwight Braxton), was never the same again. But while “Sugar” Ray Robinson still won plenty of fights in the early-mid 1960s, he was not what he was in the decade prior.

Both suffered neurologically later in life.

The list of heavyweight contenders and champions to also suffer later in life is incredibly comprehensive.

In boxing, even those who thought they left on their own terms were not assured of a happy-ever-after life in retirement, because CTE can manifest itself over time and only start to reveal itself years later – maybe in five, 10, 15 or 25 years.

Boxing, of course, is a choice. 

But Saturday’s fight between Chisora and Joyce has divided fans. Some are looking forward to Joyce – “The Juggernaut“ – crashing into Chisora, reversing, readying himself and slamming into Chisora again, while others are wondering whether Chisora has one more big night left in him.

Chisora has become an unlikely cult hero – partly because he is so often in entertaining fights. That means he has accrued a lot of damage over the years, and he has taken bombs from the likes of Vitali Klitschko, Dillian Whyte (twice), Tyson Fury (three times), David Haye, Oleksandr Usyk, Joseph Parker and countless others.  

I resisted, quite easily, as it turned out, watching Fury-Chisora III. I get that Fury wanted to top up the pension fund of “Del Boy.” But he did so in an apparently withering fashion that, while delivering Chisora cash for a better life now, might strip away the quality of his life further at the back end. This is not disputable. It is inevitable.

Chisora has lost four of his past six bouts, albeit in exceptional company, but what is the method behind the madness of continuing?

Is it to get one last shot? Is it for the money? Is it because he can’t give it up? Is it because you are a long time retired? Is it because there’s a lack of credible advice telling him enough is enough? Or does he want one last hurrah at the O2? That is, after all, how the bout is being billed. Chisora has called it his “goodbye fight at the O2.”

For those arguing that Chisora – at least – should be either resting up with his pipe and slippers or enjoying his career earnings on a beach sipping a cocktail, the argument becomes incredibly difficult to sustain when you look down the rankings and see the names of fighters Chisora could probably still beat. And you wouldn’t only have to dip into domestic rankings but some of the atrocious governing body ratings, too, to see some names for which Chisora might be a real match. 

But that doesn’t make it right. You can’t erase his past – the 40 years, the 47 fights, the 13 losses, the 324 rounds, the sparring, the international amateur career. You can’t pretend his mileage is not flagrantly high simply because he’s still better than many fighters out there. He is not what he was, in many ways – and that is the key indicator.

In the future, through things like health passports and brain IDs linked to annual or bi-annual scans, experts and authorities will be able to determine changes and differences and abnormalities with more data and control than they have now.

We are stretching into the realms, here, of Matt Christie’s boxing utopia – of a centralized medical database documenting and sharing the health of fighters and their subsequent deterioration, so that they can’t slip through the cracks and go and fight elsewhere. If this is Chisora’s final fling at the O2, what’s to stop him fighting in mainland Europe or further afield, with a new, hungry promoter hoping to build a show around a recognizable name?

And it’s not just about Chisora in this case – it’s also about Joyce. For years, we were told to celebrate his toughness, of how he walked through grenades tossed by heavy-handed heavyweights before grinding them down. Apparently, it was big and clever. But by the time he faced Zhilei Zhang, the first time the boulder cracked in six rounds – and it was shattered in three altogether with a highlight-reel knockout in the rematch.

When Joyce came back against Kash Ali in March, he looked older and slower. The Juggernaut had the parking brake on.

Joyce has taken some withering blows in his 18-fight career, too, but his punishment dated well back into the amateurs. He’s sparred the biggest hitters and best fighters of this generation, and he campaigned in the World Series of Boxing – fighting the likes of Usyk. It’s not just eight years as a pro for Joyce.

Which could mean that on Saturday night at the O2 the fight will be competitive – with both boxers again entering the trenches and slugging away at one another. And then that the promoters, in this case Queensberry Promotions, and the matchmakers would have done their job, as they are providing entertainment for the fans. 

But more and more, there is a cross-section of fight fans on social media that are starting to act as a conscience for boxing – who are happy to talk about damage and who have legitimate concerns over the future of the fighters they discuss. 

Many fighters say they are aware of the risks, but that often amounts to the worst-case scenario on fight night – not the slow, often lonely death that occurs years later. It is important to acknowledge it – the risk and the threats that loom – because to ignore it is to carry on blindly without trying to make things better for the boxers.

In boxing, the fights are the fights, and they should not be changed.

But when boxing people have acquired knowledge of certain fights, fighters and wear and tear, it is worth a risk assessment, and alarm bells are once again ringing loudly around Chisora being allowed to step out and ply his brutal trade again, in what will likely amount to another brutal encounter, at a cost we cannot see but to the cheers of a blind crowd singing, “Wooooooahhh, Der-ek Chis-ora” for what should be the last time.

The hecklers might be yelling “boring, boring,” and they might say it’s a match so far removed from the lively upper echelons of the division that it is insignificant to them. But that doesn’t mean a light does not need to be shone on fighters in order to be able to improve the conditions under which they fight – and, subsequently, live.