Nick Blackwell: Get Your Act Together – You Were Saved Once Already!
By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart
One of the most precious things we have in the UK is our National Health Service. Provided free at the point of need, if you turn up at hospital in need of care, they treat you without any need for an insurance card. It is a program of immense pride in the UK and any politician who tries to tinker with it is blown out the ballot box.
We are so proud of it that it featured in the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics when Mary Poppins style characters flew in to the beds and comforted the children frightened by the immense scary characters of our literary geniuses. I have occasion to thank the NHS as my deaf son walks around with a cochlear implant and my youngest daughter underwent lifesaving heart surgery at the tender age of 7 days old.
When sports people or anyone who may have a less than monastic lifestyle finds themselves in need of a kidney due to alcoholic excess or they are struggling with keeping themselves safe, we get antsy. We get more than a little fed up. This is because the precious resources of our National Health Service, though they are for us all – are supposed to be for those in NEED.
So…
Nick Blackwell, 19-4-1, 8 KO’s…
What the bloody hell were you thinking?
A serious brain injury sent him to the hospital after his fight with Chris Eubank, JR., 23-1, 18 KO’s, he was out the boxing game. His former trainer, Gary Lockett, set him up to train boxers as he saw a guy who was struggling to cope with losing that side of his life. Lockett took pity on him and gave him a role.
The British Boxing Board of Control sympathised further and Nick Blackwell got his trainer’s licence in October of this year.
He was now gainfully involved in the sport, passing on his experience.
Then he laced some gloves…
Then he climbed in a ring…
Then he provided someone with sparring in a training session…
And he ended up in an NHS hospital, undergoing another surgery because…
He missed boxing….
He didn’t NEED to box…
He didn’t NEED to end up with another surgery to stop bleeding on his brain…
But he did…
Sometimes you simply cannot invent the truth but having come close to death, Blackwell seems to have decided he can dice with it once again and of course it never loses.
The Board would appear to be quietly livid. Talking to Boxing News over here, and all the other media organs, Robert Smith, the general secretary of the British Boxing Board of Control, confirmed that Blackwell is in a stable condition after a procedure to relieve pressure on the brain. Consequently, the Board will be investigating how this could have happened.
One of the unknowns in all of this is not why he thought he could do it but what eejit thought, he’s putting on gloves, he’s getting in the ring, he’s about to do the one thing that nearly killed him… what could possibly go wrong?
Promoter Frank Warren summed it up for many of us when he called for all involved to be banned from boxing. Ironically, this week I was hearing that the team behind Mike Towell have all given boxing up. Tragedy does touch some people.
Speaking on BBC radio Warren went further and said: “It’s why you have a governing body – they’re there to protect the boxers from themselves. Some of these guys want to box because they’re fighters. They just think, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter I can get over that.’ A lot of money was raised to help because he wasn’t going to box anymore and he obviously received his purse from his last fight, so this is not about money, this is about someone wanting to fight. It’s not like this is a few years on – it’s eight months ago. This is madness, total madness.”
And whilst I might not agree that the people involved should be banned, I am in accordance with just how mad this is, and how mad it makes people feel when the NHS – there for us all – served him so well the first time round…
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