Friday, November 9, 2012
'Gamebreaker' helmet aims to prevent concussions, head injuries on playing field
The Gamebreaker is a new type of protective headgear designed to reduce the threat of concussions and other head injuries for participants in what are considered "non-contact" sports.
Manufactured and distributed by Newbury Park-based Gamebreaker Helmets, the protective cap is fast becoming required equipment in flag football and at high school seven-on-seven passing tournaments across the country.
The helmet is also much more forgiving than the hard shell design used in tackle football.
"They are really well made and they attenuate force. And they can't be used as a weapon,"
The helmet is essentially a protective cap that can also be used in sports like soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and water polo.
Gamebreaker was founded by Mike Juels, owner of Corporate Images, a promotional products company, and former NFL player Joey LaRocque, an Agoura Hills High School product.
Juels said they began marketing the helmets last summer after the research and development phase.
Concussions have become an increasing concern over the past several years for athletes competing in a variety of sports at the professional and amateur levels.
For example, the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center is part of a university consortium that has received a $400,000 grant from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to examine the effects of head injuries on student-athletes over the course of their college careers and beyond.
"There is growing concern about the cumulative effect of concussions on long-term cognitive health, and yet our current understanding of what factors contribute to later problems is inadequate," said Dr. Christopher Giza, the study's principal investigator at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA, said in a statement.
"One major goal of this research is to identify these factors so that the risks for chronic problems can be minimized."
By Gregory J. Wilcox, Staff Writer
Created: 11/05/2012
Source:
'Gamebreaker' helmet aims to prevent concussions, head injuries on playing field - Daily Democrat Online
Link: http://www.dailydemocrat.com/sports/ci_21934982/gamebreaker-helmet-aims-prevent-concussions-head-injuries-playing
‘Head Games’ delivers hard blow to contact sports
Right from the first bone crushing video of a football player splayed out midfield after a helmet to helmet hit you know that “Head Games” is not going to pull any punches when it comes to shedding light on head trauma in sports and the consequences of sports related head injuries later in an athlete’s life.
Director Steve James (who is no stranger to the sports world after directing the award winning documentary “Hoop Dreams”) trains his camera on Chris Nowinski, a former college football player at Harvard who traded in his pads and helmet for a professional wrestling career getting his head repeatedly slammed against the corner cushion of a WWE wrestling ring.
After being diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome Nowinski left the WWE circuit on a quest to research and bring to light the trauma and life altering damage that is being done to athletes all across the country.
He turned his research and analysis into “Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis,” a book he published in 2006 that subsequently started a fierce debate, not to mention some sweeping rule changes in the National Football League, about the roles that concussions play at all level of sports.
But in “Head Games” no contact sport is spared. From football and hockey to basketball and soccer the reports of serious injuries and resulting consequences cut across all sports.
By: Michael Nank
Read More:
Review: ‘Head Games’ delivers hard blow to contact sports - Seattle Art Industry | Examiner.com
Link: http://www.examiner.com/article/review-head-games-delivers-hard-blow-to-contact-sports
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Why NFL players are turning to Adderall: Decoder - YouTube
''PEP" PILL for Narcolepsy, ADHD and M.S. Drug... book writers use to concentrate... students use it to study.........
Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Why NFL players are turning to Adderall: Decoder - YouTube
Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard to Penn State: I'm sex abuse poster child - chicagotribune.com
Former world champion boxer and gold medalist Sugar Ray Leonard speaks with the press about being the victim of child sexual abuse at the National Conference on Child Sexual Abuse in State College (Pat Little Reuters, REUTERS / October 29, 2012)
STATE COLLEGE, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard recounted his own sexual abuse by coaches he trusted, telling a Penn State audience on Monday he hoped to encourage other victims to report abuse to police.
Leonard spoke at a sold-out conference on child sex abuse hosted by Penn State weeks after former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, 68, was sentenced to prison for 30 to 60 years for sexually assaulting 10 boys he befriended through his charity for at-risk youth.
Leonard, 56, who retired after winning world boxing titles in five different weight classes, said as a youth he was sexually assaulted by men he trusted as his boxing coaches.
"Trust is a very sacred thing, especially for young people, kids, or a young boxer, so I trusted these people, these individuals who impacted my life," said Leonard said. "They told me everything I wanted to hear, and more."
The former champion said he used drugs and alcohol to "numb" his shame of being a victim of child sexual abuse.
"I beat myself up for years," said Leonard as the two-day conference got underway with Hurricane Sandy quickly approaching Pennsylvania.
Now Leonard said he wants to step into the spotlight as a leader in the fight against child sex abuse in the hopes it will help other victims find the courage to report crimes to police.
"I'm going to be the poster child. I don't care," Leonard said to applause.
"I will be that leader. I will stand right there and say, ‘Yes, something must be done now. Not later, now,'" Leonard said.
Without mentioning Sandusky by name, Penn State President Rodney Erickson told the audience in opening remarks that he hoped the silver lining of the abuse scandal is that more victims will come forward rather than keep the secret to themselves.
"I hope that even more survivors will take their first steps towards recovery with the confidence that their family, friends and community will believe and support them," Erickson said.
Erickson took office after Penn State's president, Graham Spanier, and legendary football coach Joe Paterno, who has since died, were fired in the wake of Sandusky's arrest last November. An independent report by former FBI chief Louis Freeh concluded that four former university officials - Spanier, Paterno, vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley - were alerted to Sandusky's abuse but did nothing to stop it or report it to authorities.
Since Sandusky's sentencing, The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, says the volume of calls to its sexual assault hotline has increased 47 percent.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Sandra Maler)
Source:
Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard to Penn State: I'm sex abuse poster child - chicagotribune.com
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/sns-rt-us-usa-pennstatebre89s159-20121029,0,5249752.story
Nigel Benn vs Gerald McClellan (High Quality) - YouTube
Uploaded by BalaclavaBoxing on Dec 7, 2011
25th of February, 1995.........London, England_________________________________________________________________________
Nigel Benn vs Gerald McClellan (High Quality) - YouTube
1989-2010 KO by Ring Magazine - YouTube
Uploaded by 12125andrew on Sep 26, 2011
1989: Michael Nunn KO 1 Sumbu Kalambay1990: Terry Norris KO 1 John Mugabi
1991: no award was given
1992: Morris East KO 11 Akinobu Hiranaka
1992: Kennedy McKinney KO 11 Welcome Ncita
1993: Gerald McClellan KO 5 Julian Jackson
1994: George Foreman KO 10 Michael Moorer
1995: Julio César Vásquez KO 11 Carl Daniels
1996: Wilfredo Vázquez KO 11 Eloy Rojas
1997: Arturo Gatti KO 5 Gabriel Ruelas
1998: Roy Jones Jr. KO 4 Virgil Hill
1999: Derrick Jefferson KO 6 Maurice Harris
2000: Ben Tackie KO 10 Roberto Garcia
2001: Lennox Lewis KO 4 Hasim Rahman
2002: Lennox Lewis KO 8 Mike Tyson
2003: Rocky Juarez KO 10 Antonio Diaz
2004: Antonio Tarver KO 2 Roy Jones Jr.
2005: Allan Green KO 1 Jaidon Codrington
2006: Calvin Brock KO 6 Zuri Lawrence
2007: Nonito Donaire KO 5 Vic Darchinyan
2008: Edison Miranda KO 3 David Banks
2009: Manny Pacquiao KO 2 Ricky Hatton
2010: Sergio Gabriel Martínez KO 2 Paul Williams
1989-2010 KO by Ring Magazine - YouTube
Boxing: The night Michael Watson's career was ended
Hidden by onlookers, Michael Watson is treated after collapsing at the end of his defeat in the 1991 rematch with Chris Eubank
Chris Eubank celebrates his victory shortly before Watson collapses
Twenty years ago today he was on the verge of a world title – then it all went horribly wrong. Steve Bunce was ringside on a brutal night that changed boxing for ever
We all know when Michael Watson's boxing life ended: it was 10.54pm on Saturday, 21 September, 1991, in a corner of a boxing ring in the middle of the White Hart Lane pitch. That was when it ended.
Watson was 26 that night when he was led from one corner of the ring to his own corner after taking the final punches. He was gazing over the shoulder of the referee, Roy Francis, looking at his opponent. Francis had a hand on Watson's elbow and was having a screaming match with trainer Jimmy Tibbs, who had jumped up into the ring yelling abuse at the referee for stopping the fight early. "He's gone, Jim, and you know he's gone," Francis roared back. We all knew Francis was right; it was very noisy high up in the ring but it was going very quiet, very quickly inside Watson's head.
Tibbs finally took charge of his boxer and then it all changed. "He just slumped. I felt him go, he was on my chest and I knew he was gone," remembers Tibbs.
In a neutral corner Chris Eubank, his own features smeared with swellings, was having his gloves removed and trying to smile as people screamed in joy at him from ringside. There was blood on his teeth. In other areas, not far from ringside, fights broke out in sections of the 22,000 crowd. The television images were still going out live on ITV and an audience of 13 million tuned in. They watched as the people in Watson's corner started to panic, they watched as desperate cameras tried to find Watson somewhere under the track-suited horde that guarded the boxer's corner. There was a glimpse of his boot; it was a recurring image during the next hour.
I was at ringside, resting a hand on the second rope about three feet from Watson's head. His head was resting on a briefcase belonging to the British Boxing Board of Control's doctor. It was 10.56pm and the fighter was slipping away. The rope I was holding, and the place where I was gripping it, was just about exactly where the back of Watson's head had hit with such fury in the very last second of the 11th round.
The 11th round is unforgettable. Eubank was sent reeling and exhausted to the canvas with about 20 seconds left in the round. He was finished, his eyes a blur as he took some of the count on his knee. The noise was incredible. Nobody was sitting.
"I know that I was thinking about my daughters, thinking about my family. Thinking that life would be easy from now on; I would be world champion. What else would I have been thinking?" Watson told me.
Eubank stood, wiped his gloves on the referee's shirt, stepped forward and threw one punch.
It was all it took. Watson also walked forward, his chin neatly hidden between his blood and sweat-coated gloves, but Eubank's punch, a simple right-uppercut, picked the direct route and slid between the gloves to connect cleanly with the point of Watson's chin. He went over, his legs stiff and his head snapped off the second rope. The bell sounded. It remains, even after all these years, a moment that never fades. Tibbs and Dean Powell, his assistant on the night, were quick to assist their boxer back to his corner. It's the hurt business, a brutal game so don't ask questions of men that act and fight with their hearts in truly desperate moments.
Watson replied to Tibbs in the corner, he was alert. Big Roy Francis stood in the middle of the ring and called the boxers out to touch gloves after the 60-second break. It was the last round of a rematch that had dominated the back pages and was only taking place because of public demand. Watson faltered but that was because Tibbs had hold of his heels to gain a few extra seconds of rest. Everybody wanted to fight some more.
Watson was leading the fight on all three scorecards by three rounds, six rounds and one round. He only had to survive three minutes and the World Boxing Organisation's super-middleweight title would be his. It would also be sweet revenge for the injustice of his loss on points to Eubank in June of the same year. The bell sounded and 29 seconds later it was over.
Watson was not throwing punches and Eubank was throwing too many. Francis, his hair flying in the outdoor breeze of a cooling autumn night, jumped between them. "He's gone, Jim, and you know he's gone."
In Watson's corner it is now 11.08pm and he has been placed on a stretcher. The doctor has a tube in Watson's mouth to help him breathe. He is, let's not hide from it, slowly dying. There is no emergency resuscitation equipment available at ringside. That all changes in the months to come. Tibbs, the DJ Tim Westwood, a nice guy called Kamel and a scared-looking medic each has a corner of Watson's stretcher. He is carried at pace from the ring, from the ringside area and to a waiting, but ill-equipped, ambulance. The police have restored order inside the football ground and as Watson leaves the pitch an announcement comes over the Tannoy thanking people for coming, and giving details of the next Spurs home game.
Watson is taken to the North Middlesex hospital, arriving there at 23.22pm. It is the wrong place. There is inadequate resuscitation equipment and no specialist head trauma staff. That all changes after the fight. He is placed alongside other Saturday night specials and his boxing boots are glowing in the gloom. His pupils were fixed and dilated; his brain stem had suffered an injury. (If this is grim reading, try and listen as Watson tells the story in his faltering and often haunting voice.) Thankfully, he is resuscitated and one pupil becomes unfixed. It is 23.55pm when he leaves North Middlesex for Barts Hospital. That is one minute outside the Golden Hour of essential rescue that all neurosurgeons preach. But, this is Michael Watson and he doesn't want to die.
Meanwhile, in another part of town Dr Peter Hamlyn is having a night away from surgery.
Hamlyn receives the call shortly after Watson arrives at Barts and has been assessed by experts. He has a massive bleed on the surface of his brain. The fighter is prepared for surgery and goes down just before 1am. Hamlyn has reached the hospital but is unable to enter because of a gathering crowd of friends, fans, the curious and media outside the main entrance. He walks to the back of the Victorian building, searching for an open door. He knows time is crucial. He is standing in despair and looking up when a darkened door in front of him, and immediately below where he needs to be, suddenly opens. It is the bag lady of Barts, a legendary woman who has been living inside the hospital for years. Hamlyn races through.
The surgery, the first of five procedures, is over by 4.20am and Watson is placed in the eerie world of intensive care. His mother goes to his bed. At 5.10am Tibbs, who had been on his knees praying with Watson's mother and all the sisters from the church, was sent in to see his boxer. I know it was a final look. But, the other fight is on and the hospital years have started.
"Michael was closer to death than anybody that I have ever operated on," Hamlyn said. The pair are now great friends. "Michael has done more for me spiritually than I've done for him physically." And, yes, Hamlyn does call it a miracle.
And so it goes. In 1993 a few weeks before the Eubank and Nigel Benn rematch I went to see Watson. He was finally living back at his home. He had a series of carers. I sat with him as he ate chicken and rice. It was messy. He was struggling with words. There was a gaudy boxing belt on one wall, a gift from Benn, and the house was horribly sterile. It all seems so remote looking back now.
Ten years later I went back to the house. There was a lot of laughter this time. Watson made me a cup of tea, taking stick from Lennard Ballack, the gentle hero in the story. He has been at Watson's side from coma to marathon to the hundreds of dull days that require Watson to defy boundaries in pursuit of ordinary pleasures. Ten minutes in their company can be shattering – in 2003 I spent months with the pair eating, talking, laughing and walking. I was helping Watson with his autobiography. We all know where his boxing life ended but that was only part of Brother Michael's story.
An era of brutal rivalries
Benn vs Watson
Nigel Benn's abrasive character clashed with Michael Watson's relatively reserved persona, and things climaxed before their 1989 fight. Benn's relentless bragging grated, so Watson told the press of a stare-out between them when Benn blinked first – a sign of fear. "I'll hit him with so many lefts, he'll be crying for a right," exclaimed Benn, but Watson won convincingly, causing Benn to fly to America to resurrect his career. Despite this, Benn supported Watson in his ill-fated rematch with Chris Eubank.
Eubank vs Benn
"I do detest him, I really do. It's no joke, I can't stand him," simmered Benn, fuelling the fire ahead of a brutal classic clash in 1990. The rivalry was the greatest in middleweight boxing, as Eubank's flamboyant posturing drove Benn crazy. Benn's entourage sabotaged Eubank's entrance music before their bout by causing it to stop abruptly, but Eubank emerged victorious on the night. Three years later their drawn rematch was watched by half a billion people, and the two have since become friends, a recognition that each man helped to define the other.
Eubank vs Watson
Animosity filled the air prior to their first 1991 bout as Watson insisted Eubank was "foolish to take this fight", before instructing him to remove his "silly glasses". The rivalry was enhanced by Eubank's hate-figure status which generated Watson widespread support. Eubank regarded Watson as "strictly an obstacle which I must get past in order to enhance my standard of living", but despite winning both the fight and the infamous rematch later that year, his standard of living suffered when he was declared bankrupt in 2005.
Benn vs McClellan
Benn had his own Eubank vs Watson moment in an encounter with American Gerald McClellan in 1995. During one of the most savage fights in boxing history, McClellan sustained a blood clot in his brain, leaving him blind, almost deaf, and with permanent short-term memory loss, while 17 million watched. Benn, now an ordained minister living in Majorca, has helped raise funds for his opponent's treatment and met him for the first time since their clash, in February 2007.
And Watson's road to recovery...
After six brain operations, no one thought Watson would walk, write or talk again but he has defied those expectations. After partially recovering from his injuries, Watson sued the British Boxing Board of Control for negligence and was awarded around £1m. It was ruled that the Board should have been responsible for medical provision at the fight. In 2003, he completed the London Marathon. With each mile taking an hour, Watson walked two miles in the morning and two in the afternoon, completing the course in just over six days. In 2004, he was awarded an MBE for his continued services to disabled sport, a moment he described as "the pinnacle of my life".
Rik Sharma and Matt Bodimeade
An era of brutal rivalries
Benn vs Watson
Boxing: The night Michael Watson's career was ended - Others - More Sports - The Independent
LINK: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/others/boxing-the-night-michael-watsons-career-was-ended-2358050.html
Monday, October 29, 2012
Interview: Michael Watson | Sport | The Observer
Uploaded by BalaclavaBoxing on Sep 25, 2011 Great Documentary about British Boxing
Legend MIchael Watson and his recovery after the tragic fight with Chris Eubank 20 years
Once a fighter...
Boxer Michael Watson's long and incredible comeback from brain damage is due to his faith, his fitness and his friends. That and an extremely fine line in near-the-knuckle jokes
In September 1999, Peter Hamlyn, a consultant neurosurgeon, wrote these words about
Michael Watson: 'He will never run again, never move his left side, walk or speak smoothly.
Though he can stand, take steps and enjoy conversation - a wonderful achievement I never thought we would see - to cross a room on foot is for him a marathon. He reaches the "wall" not at 20 miles but 20ft.'
Having operated on Watson six times, Hamlyn knew what he was talking about. But having become a good friend of the former boxer, he also knew Watson. The surgeon had watched his patient defy the medical textbooks on many occasions. Even so, when Hamlyn wrote those words, the idea that Watson might take on a real marathon, much less complete it, would have bordered on the territory of a sick joke.
Last month, when Watson crossed the finishing line of the London Marathon, he was smiling.
The joke, the uncontainable amusement, the gleeful satisfaction, was that most rational people had thought that he was too disabled to walk 26 miles, that he was too sick. Had he not laughed, he would have cried.
'If I wasn't a fighter, I would have broken out in tears,' Watson told me, when I visited him last week. 'I felt touched. A lot of people could not have seen me doing it; could you?'
The true answer is that I don't know what I think about Watson. Much of it, I suspect, is wrapped up in the abiding romance of a fighter's comeback. In a cartoon fashion, I half-believe he'll turn up on the news one day jogging and sparring. But I do know what I feel - humbled.
He has journeyed to places, mental and physical states, that are the locations of our loneliest nightmares. And they were not short trips. He was there for years . Even now, almost 12 years after the bout with Chris Eubank that left him in a vegetative condition, he is severely restricted in his movements. He cannot see out of his left eye and he requires a full-time carer. But, discounting the life he led before that fight, he has never felt better.
He certainly appears in tremendous shape. His forearms are pumped, his body lean and his face has lost the slight plumpness of inactivity that hid his previously striking features. In photographs of Watson taken before his injury, he bore a strong resemblance to the young Marvin Gaye. He had about him a mild-mannered composure that was all the more impressive for the courage and commitment it masked.
When Watson boxed in the late Eighties and early Nineties, there were, including himself, three world-class middleweights (or, as they became, super-middleweights) fighting in Britain. The others were Nigel Benn and Eubank. Watson knocked out Benn, then fought and lost a controversial points decision, which most observers felt he deserved to win, to Eubank.
Benn and Eubank both wore world championship belts, but Watson, who outboxed the pair of them, never did. They were boastful and understood TV's need for 'characters'. Watson was quiet, measured, uncomfortable with the hype; he was not a character, but nor did he lack it.
The other two were household names, but only boxing fans had heard of Watson.
That changed in the rematch with Eubank on 21 September 1991 at White Hart Lane. The fame that eluded Watson as victor was cruelly bestowed on him as victim. It was a night of ugly tension and shocking violence. Watson dominated and in the penultimate round, the eleventh, he put his opponent, the preening world champion, on the canvas for the first time in his career.
Watson, arms at his side, was already dreaming of slipping on his new world championship belt. There should have been a mandatory count of eight seconds before the fight resumed. Instead, Eubank somehow sprung up and swung the punch that almost certainly tore a blood vessel on the surface of Watson's brain.
He has no memory of the ensuing minutes. Yet what took place has been the subject of much debate, endless legal action, and Watson's most bitter thoughts. Incredibly, he got up and, even less credibly, he came out for the final round. Eubank, himself on the brink of collapse, launched two more onslaughts at Watson's head before the referee finally stopped the bout.
Fights broke out among a crowd livid that Watson had not been allowed to continue. The ring filled with bodies and confusion, and Watson collapsed into a coma. It took seven minutes for the designated doctor to get to the boxer, a time that challenges the traditional job title of 'ringside'. Unfortunately, the doctor possessed neither the appropriate equipment nor skills to aid Watson's breathing. For 28 minutes before he reached a hospital, the 26-year-old lay without oxygen. It then took a further hour to get him to a hospital with a neurosurgeon - Peter Hamlyn.
After two emergency operations, Watson was in intensive care for a month. 'Like a statue of a Greek god encased in muscle,' recalled Hamlyn. What kept the boxer alive, he says, was his supreme fitness. Recovery was excruciatingly slow and every gradation of improvement made unceasing demands on Watson's willpower. At first, he could not swallow his saliva or control his bladder. He could not eat or speak, let alone stand or move.
According to Hamlyn: 'The damage had all been done by the delay in treating the blood clot.'
In other words, Watson's injuries could and, given the known perils of his sport, should have been avoided. Three years ago, a High Court judge agreed and, awarding damage, found that the British Boxing Board of Control's medical provisions were not adequate. The board appealed (it lost) and went into administration. Watson has still to receive compensation.
It's necessary to outline the succession of injustices that Watson has suffered, the abominable luck and ongoing battles, to begin to appreciate his near total absence of rancour.
The man who met me at the door of his house in north-east London seemed at ease with the world. His struggle was with himself - his limbs, his mind - but it was one that he is waging without complaint. His speech is now only slightly slurred. He lives in Chigwell, home of sports stars and porn barons, but there is nothing gold-tapped about his two-storey terrace squeezed into the end of a cul-de-sac.
On his sitting-room wall are some lines from the Bible, a photograph of his two teenage daughters (he is separated from their mother, with whom they live, and you gather that the split, which took place after what he calls his 'accident', was not entirely amicable), and the world championship belt that Nigel Benn gave him. A coffee table bears two biographies of Muhammad Ali. (The legend came to visit Watson in hospital and made him smile for the first time after his injury.)
He tells me that his upbeat outlook on life is due to his belief in God. He was always a religious man - his ringname was The Force - but he says he kept company with the wrong people.
'I used to hang out with street boys. Going to discos, pubs; I didn't used to be much of a drinker, but I still lived that kind of lifestyle. But my life has been transformed, in a miraculous way, by Jesus. I love my new life. I love my new lifestyle. I love the people that surround me. My true friends.'
There was no shortage of what he refers to as 'so-calleds' - friends who visited him in hospital when the cameras were there but who later 'disappeared with the media'. It gave him an insight into what people are about, he says, and it made him stronger. 'I can now count my real friends on one hand.'
He acknowledges that there were times when he felt like giving up. 'I can remember being put in a stretching frame to straighten out my leg. I couldn't keep my balance, let alone walk.
I had a splint in this arm [pointing to his left] to straighten it out. Friends of mine, they were angels. My mother, Joan Watson, my Uncle Joe, they've lifted my spirit. You are who you mix with.'
There are still bad periods. 'Waking up in the morning, not being able to go out. I come downstairs and make my breakfast, read my books. Get bored with my books and wait for my carer to come. And I think, "What a joke. Why me?" It's horrible to rely on other people.'
His carer, and great friend, is Leonard, an old family neighbour, with whom he has struck up something of a double-act, trading punchlines as Watson once exchanged punches.
'Andrew,' says Watson apropos of nothing much. 'What do you call a three-foot black man?'
'I don't know,' I say, perplexed.
'A yardie,' he replies, straight-faced, then bursts into laughter.
There is a view that sees boxing as a business in which black fighters hit one another for white entertainment. And, further, that in Britain it is not until a black fighter loses or presents himself as unthreatening, like Frank Bruno, that he is truly loved. Of course, if you wanted to take this theory to its extreme, there is no more unthreatening boxer than a disabled boxer.
But the reality is Watson was always liked and respected, and it would be the final injustice to mistake him as some kind of cuddly cripple wanting to please. He was, and remains, a hard man who knows his own worth. When I mention that his marathon walk was one of the most high-profile sporting events of recent months, he almost snaps: 'So it should be. I was told I'd never walk again, never talk.'
He did the marathon, which took him six days (a mobile home followed him), to raise money for two charities, the Brain and Spine Foundation and the Teenage Cancer Trust. Hamlyn says that the mark of the man is the empathy he feels for those worse off than himself. He talks of how moved Watson is by stories of others' suffering and how, at the same time, he is an inspiration to those sufferers.
Medical orthodoxy has it that after the first year there is no further physical improvement in people with brain disabilities such as Watson's. Yet it was more than four years before he made his first unaided steps. He is now looking for commercial sponsorship to help him help other people. 'I know my potential. I don't want to waste it. I want to put my qualities to good use, put a smile on somebody's face. I'm here on this earth for that purpose.' The words are messianic but the delivery is modest.What has energised him is both the experience of the marathon and the preparation that he undertook at the Hustyns hotel and gym complex in Cornwall. Watson was always a dedicated trainer as a boxer, he got high on the 'buzz', and he relished the return to a strict regime of exercise.
It was harder than the marathon, he says, but it gave him that buzz again. 'I worked on the speedball while I was at the Hustyns centre. I'd never hit a speedball since the accident. I hit it like I was never off it for a day.'
How did that feel?
'I couldn't get off it.'
I wondered if he still felt the boxing moves inside him, the weaving and bobbing and punching.
'Do you want me to get up and show you?' he says, fixing me with a mock-tough stare.
'He hits me on the leg sometimes, Andrew,' complains Leonard. 'Bang. It hurts.'
'Andrew, this guy has got such a big mouth,' Watson replies. 'He goes on and on. There's a saying, if you can't hear you can feel.'
The joking aside, Watson still talks of his boxing in the present tense, which is not uncommon among ex-boxers. I ask him if he continues to take an interest in the sport.
'Certain fights,' he says. 'I love the artistry. But now it's all play acting. They're all pampered. Too much money involved.'
It might seem a strange response from someone who received such a raw deal himself from boxing. But Watson was always a purist, a man in love with the discipline of boxing rather than the business, which he dismisses as 'corrupt'. It's one reason why he holds no grievance against Eubank, who accompanied him on the last leg of the marathon. In the wake of the fight, the tabloids tried to stir up enmity between the two, exploiting Eubank's gift for saying too much. But now they're friends.
'He's such a character, he really makes me laugh,' says Watson. 'What happened was an accident. It could have happened the other way. He didn't do it intentionally. If someone should be blamed it should be the controlling bodies. He did the job that he had to do.'
Eubank tells me that Watson handed him a boxing lesson 12 years ago. 'I've always been there for Michael,' he says. 'Can the media say the same?' He speaks of his former adversary with a respect that is both intensely private and necessarily public. He says he felt 'ashamed but at the same time inspired' when Watson completed his marathon, 'a miraculous feat of human endeavour'.
Back at Watson's house, I notice that among his boxing paraphernalia is a ringside pass for Nigel Benn's match with Gerald McClellan in 1995 that rendered the American blind and brain-damaged. I can't believe he attended that night, but he did, in a wheelchair.
'What a fight,' he recalls. 'What a barbaric fight.' It's less a criticism than a compliment.
Watson has never been an abolitionist. Does he miss boxing?
'I don't miss it. Boxing misses me.'
And so it should.
· To make a donation to the Brain and Spine Foundation, call 0207 793 5900.
Michael Watson: 'He will never run again, never move his left side, walk or speak smoothly.
Though he can stand, take steps and enjoy conversation - a wonderful achievement I never thought we would see - to cross a room on foot is for him a marathon. He reaches the "wall" not at 20 miles but 20ft.'
Having operated on Watson six times, Hamlyn knew what he was talking about. But having become a good friend of the former boxer, he also knew Watson. The surgeon had watched his patient defy the medical textbooks on many occasions. Even so, when Hamlyn wrote those words, the idea that Watson might take on a real marathon, much less complete it, would have bordered on the territory of a sick joke.
Last month, when Watson crossed the finishing line of the London Marathon, he was smiling.
The joke, the uncontainable amusement, the gleeful satisfaction, was that most rational people had thought that he was too disabled to walk 26 miles, that he was too sick. Had he not laughed, he would have cried.
'If I wasn't a fighter, I would have broken out in tears,' Watson told me, when I visited him last week. 'I felt touched. A lot of people could not have seen me doing it; could you?'
The true answer is that I don't know what I think about Watson. Much of it, I suspect, is wrapped up in the abiding romance of a fighter's comeback. In a cartoon fashion, I half-believe he'll turn up on the news one day jogging and sparring. But I do know what I feel - humbled.
He has journeyed to places, mental and physical states, that are the locations of our loneliest nightmares. And they were not short trips. He was there for years . Even now, almost 12 years after the bout with Chris Eubank that left him in a vegetative condition, he is severely restricted in his movements. He cannot see out of his left eye and he requires a full-time carer. But, discounting the life he led before that fight, he has never felt better.
He certainly appears in tremendous shape. His forearms are pumped, his body lean and his face has lost the slight plumpness of inactivity that hid his previously striking features. In photographs of Watson taken before his injury, he bore a strong resemblance to the young Marvin Gaye. He had about him a mild-mannered composure that was all the more impressive for the courage and commitment it masked.
When Watson boxed in the late Eighties and early Nineties, there were, including himself, three world-class middleweights (or, as they became, super-middleweights) fighting in Britain. The others were Nigel Benn and Eubank. Watson knocked out Benn, then fought and lost a controversial points decision, which most observers felt he deserved to win, to Eubank.
Benn and Eubank both wore world championship belts, but Watson, who outboxed the pair of them, never did. They were boastful and understood TV's need for 'characters'. Watson was quiet, measured, uncomfortable with the hype; he was not a character, but nor did he lack it.
The other two were household names, but only boxing fans had heard of Watson.
That changed in the rematch with Eubank on 21 September 1991 at White Hart Lane. The fame that eluded Watson as victor was cruelly bestowed on him as victim. It was a night of ugly tension and shocking violence. Watson dominated and in the penultimate round, the eleventh, he put his opponent, the preening world champion, on the canvas for the first time in his career.
Watson, arms at his side, was already dreaming of slipping on his new world championship belt. There should have been a mandatory count of eight seconds before the fight resumed. Instead, Eubank somehow sprung up and swung the punch that almost certainly tore a blood vessel on the surface of Watson's brain.
He has no memory of the ensuing minutes. Yet what took place has been the subject of much debate, endless legal action, and Watson's most bitter thoughts. Incredibly, he got up and, even less credibly, he came out for the final round. Eubank, himself on the brink of collapse, launched two more onslaughts at Watson's head before the referee finally stopped the bout.
Fights broke out among a crowd livid that Watson had not been allowed to continue. The ring filled with bodies and confusion, and Watson collapsed into a coma. It took seven minutes for the designated doctor to get to the boxer, a time that challenges the traditional job title of 'ringside'. Unfortunately, the doctor possessed neither the appropriate equipment nor skills to aid Watson's breathing. For 28 minutes before he reached a hospital, the 26-year-old lay without oxygen. It then took a further hour to get him to a hospital with a neurosurgeon - Peter Hamlyn.
After two emergency operations, Watson was in intensive care for a month. 'Like a statue of a Greek god encased in muscle,' recalled Hamlyn. What kept the boxer alive, he says, was his supreme fitness. Recovery was excruciatingly slow and every gradation of improvement made unceasing demands on Watson's willpower. At first, he could not swallow his saliva or control his bladder. He could not eat or speak, let alone stand or move.
According to Hamlyn: 'The damage had all been done by the delay in treating the blood clot.'
In other words, Watson's injuries could and, given the known perils of his sport, should have been avoided. Three years ago, a High Court judge agreed and, awarding damage, found that the British Boxing Board of Control's medical provisions were not adequate. The board appealed (it lost) and went into administration. Watson has still to receive compensation.
It's necessary to outline the succession of injustices that Watson has suffered, the abominable luck and ongoing battles, to begin to appreciate his near total absence of rancour.
The man who met me at the door of his house in north-east London seemed at ease with the world. His struggle was with himself - his limbs, his mind - but it was one that he is waging without complaint. His speech is now only slightly slurred. He lives in Chigwell, home of sports stars and porn barons, but there is nothing gold-tapped about his two-storey terrace squeezed into the end of a cul-de-sac.
On his sitting-room wall are some lines from the Bible, a photograph of his two teenage daughters (he is separated from their mother, with whom they live, and you gather that the split, which took place after what he calls his 'accident', was not entirely amicable), and the world championship belt that Nigel Benn gave him. A coffee table bears two biographies of Muhammad Ali. (The legend came to visit Watson in hospital and made him smile for the first time after his injury.)
He tells me that his upbeat outlook on life is due to his belief in God. He was always a religious man - his ringname was The Force - but he says he kept company with the wrong people.
'I used to hang out with street boys. Going to discos, pubs; I didn't used to be much of a drinker, but I still lived that kind of lifestyle. But my life has been transformed, in a miraculous way, by Jesus. I love my new life. I love my new lifestyle. I love the people that surround me. My true friends.'
There was no shortage of what he refers to as 'so-calleds' - friends who visited him in hospital when the cameras were there but who later 'disappeared with the media'. It gave him an insight into what people are about, he says, and it made him stronger. 'I can now count my real friends on one hand.'
He acknowledges that there were times when he felt like giving up. 'I can remember being put in a stretching frame to straighten out my leg. I couldn't keep my balance, let alone walk.
I had a splint in this arm [pointing to his left] to straighten it out. Friends of mine, they were angels. My mother, Joan Watson, my Uncle Joe, they've lifted my spirit. You are who you mix with.'
There are still bad periods. 'Waking up in the morning, not being able to go out. I come downstairs and make my breakfast, read my books. Get bored with my books and wait for my carer to come. And I think, "What a joke. Why me?" It's horrible to rely on other people.'
His carer, and great friend, is Leonard, an old family neighbour, with whom he has struck up something of a double-act, trading punchlines as Watson once exchanged punches.
'Andrew,' says Watson apropos of nothing much. 'What do you call a three-foot black man?'
'I don't know,' I say, perplexed.
'A yardie,' he replies, straight-faced, then bursts into laughter.
There is a view that sees boxing as a business in which black fighters hit one another for white entertainment. And, further, that in Britain it is not until a black fighter loses or presents himself as unthreatening, like Frank Bruno, that he is truly loved. Of course, if you wanted to take this theory to its extreme, there is no more unthreatening boxer than a disabled boxer.
But the reality is Watson was always liked and respected, and it would be the final injustice to mistake him as some kind of cuddly cripple wanting to please. He was, and remains, a hard man who knows his own worth. When I mention that his marathon walk was one of the most high-profile sporting events of recent months, he almost snaps: 'So it should be. I was told I'd never walk again, never talk.'
He did the marathon, which took him six days (a mobile home followed him), to raise money for two charities, the Brain and Spine Foundation and the Teenage Cancer Trust. Hamlyn says that the mark of the man is the empathy he feels for those worse off than himself. He talks of how moved Watson is by stories of others' suffering and how, at the same time, he is an inspiration to those sufferers.
Medical orthodoxy has it that after the first year there is no further physical improvement in people with brain disabilities such as Watson's. Yet it was more than four years before he made his first unaided steps. He is now looking for commercial sponsorship to help him help other people. 'I know my potential. I don't want to waste it. I want to put my qualities to good use, put a smile on somebody's face. I'm here on this earth for that purpose.' The words are messianic but the delivery is modest.What has energised him is both the experience of the marathon and the preparation that he undertook at the Hustyns hotel and gym complex in Cornwall. Watson was always a dedicated trainer as a boxer, he got high on the 'buzz', and he relished the return to a strict regime of exercise.
It was harder than the marathon, he says, but it gave him that buzz again. 'I worked on the speedball while I was at the Hustyns centre. I'd never hit a speedball since the accident. I hit it like I was never off it for a day.'
How did that feel?
'I couldn't get off it.'
I wondered if he still felt the boxing moves inside him, the weaving and bobbing and punching.
'Do you want me to get up and show you?' he says, fixing me with a mock-tough stare.
'He hits me on the leg sometimes, Andrew,' complains Leonard. 'Bang. It hurts.'
'Andrew, this guy has got such a big mouth,' Watson replies. 'He goes on and on. There's a saying, if you can't hear you can feel.'
The joking aside, Watson still talks of his boxing in the present tense, which is not uncommon among ex-boxers. I ask him if he continues to take an interest in the sport.
'Certain fights,' he says. 'I love the artistry. But now it's all play acting. They're all pampered. Too much money involved.'
It might seem a strange response from someone who received such a raw deal himself from boxing. But Watson was always a purist, a man in love with the discipline of boxing rather than the business, which he dismisses as 'corrupt'. It's one reason why he holds no grievance against Eubank, who accompanied him on the last leg of the marathon. In the wake of the fight, the tabloids tried to stir up enmity between the two, exploiting Eubank's gift for saying too much. But now they're friends.
'He's such a character, he really makes me laugh,' says Watson. 'What happened was an accident. It could have happened the other way. He didn't do it intentionally. If someone should be blamed it should be the controlling bodies. He did the job that he had to do.'
Eubank tells me that Watson handed him a boxing lesson 12 years ago. 'I've always been there for Michael,' he says. 'Can the media say the same?' He speaks of his former adversary with a respect that is both intensely private and necessarily public. He says he felt 'ashamed but at the same time inspired' when Watson completed his marathon, 'a miraculous feat of human endeavour'.
Back at Watson's house, I notice that among his boxing paraphernalia is a ringside pass for Nigel Benn's match with Gerald McClellan in 1995 that rendered the American blind and brain-damaged. I can't believe he attended that night, but he did, in a wheelchair.
'What a fight,' he recalls. 'What a barbaric fight.' It's less a criticism than a compliment.
Watson has never been an abolitionist. Does he miss boxing?
'I don't miss it. Boxing misses me.'
And so it should.
· To make a donation to the Brain and Spine Foundation, call 0207 793 5900.
Interview: Michael Watson | Sport | The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2003/may/04/boxing.features
Muhammad Ali - 50th Birthday Celebration (1992) - YouTube
Uploaded by ibhof2 on Jul 19, 2011
Celebrity guests: Whitney Houston, Dustin Hoffman, Dan Aykroyd, Howard Cosell, Billy Crystall, Tony Danza, Sugar Ray Leonard, The Pointer Sisters, Little Richard, Diana Ross, Nelson Mandela and many more !_______________________________________________________________________________
Muhammad Ali - 50th Birthday Celebration (1992) - YouTube
When We Were Kings Full / HD / Muhammad Ali Documentary / 1996 - YouTube
Uploaded by damuttz112 on Jan 5, 2012
The Full Documentary about the famous (1974) Boxing Fight: Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman and the events preceding the "Rumble In The Jungle".
Movie Navigation:
Chapter 1 / 0:00 (Introduction)
Chapter 2 / 7:28 (Ali & Cosnell)
Chapter 3 / 14:09 (Fighting For The 'Rumble')
Chapter 4 / 19:38 (Welcome To Zaire)
Chapter 5 / 26:28 (The Congo)
Chapter 6 / 31:43 (Differences of Culture)
Chapter 7 / 37:14 (Rumble Hits A Delay)
Chapter 8 / 41:50 (Soul Power)
Chapter 9 / 47:59 (Stadium Preparations)
Chapter 10 / 51:15 ("Boma Ye")
Chapter 11 / 55:13 (The Witch Doctor)
Chapter 12 / 59:30 ("Rumble In The Jungle")
Chapter 13 / 1:08:52 (The Punch He Never Threw)
Chapter 14 / 1:11:34 (Reflections)
Chapter 15 / 1:14:04 (When We Were Kings)
Chapter 16 / 1:20:10 (Ending Credits)
Movie Navigation:
Chapter 1 / 0:00 (Introduction)
Chapter 2 / 7:28 (Ali & Cosnell)
Chapter 3 / 14:09 (Fighting For The 'Rumble')
Chapter 4 / 19:38 (Welcome To Zaire)
Chapter 5 / 26:28 (The Congo)
Chapter 6 / 31:43 (Differences of Culture)
Chapter 7 / 37:14 (Rumble Hits A Delay)
Chapter 8 / 41:50 (Soul Power)
Chapter 9 / 47:59 (Stadium Preparations)
Chapter 10 / 51:15 ("Boma Ye")
Chapter 11 / 55:13 (The Witch Doctor)
Chapter 12 / 59:30 ("Rumble In The Jungle")
Chapter 13 / 1:08:52 (The Punch He Never Threw)
Chapter 14 / 1:11:34 (Reflections)
Chapter 15 / 1:14:04 (When We Were Kings)
Chapter 16 / 1:20:10 (Ending Credits)
Source:
When We Were Kings Full / HD / Muhammad Ali Documentary / 1996 - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kKBJsWXFoc&feature=related
Shadow Boxing - The Journey of the African-American Boxer (Great Documentary) - YouTube
Uploaded by ibhof2 on Jan 18, 2012
A Great Retrospective of Black fighters through the history of boxing and their plight against hostile opposition to break the color barrier. This Documentary from 1999 includes Legends like Peter Jackson, George Dixon, Sam Langford, Harry Wills, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Ray Robinson, Ezzard Charles and Archie Moore.
Rare video footage of a blind, old Sam Langford is included.______________________________________________________________________t
Rare video footage of a blind, old Sam Langford is included.______________________________________________________________________t
Shadow Boxing - The Journey of the African-American Boxer (Great Documentary) - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGf-s8wjpuM&feature=related
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