Vasyl Lomachenko, Nicholas Walters and Boxing’s Armchair Sadists
Vasyl Lomachenko, Nicholas Walters and Boxing’s Armchair Sadists
by Gautham Nagesh
On Saturday night at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Jamaican boxer Nicholas Walters committed boxing’s unforgivable sin: he quit.
Overmatched and hopelessly behind on the scorecards against the superlative Vasyl Lomachenko, Walters informed referee Tony Weeks before the 8th round that he no longer wished to continue. His trainer even declared “No Mas”, invoking shades of Roberto Duran and another unexpected capitulation.
In that instant Walters went from a dangerous if inactive puncher with an undefeated record to an irredeemable coward, at least according to Twitter:
By quitting before he had shown visible signs of serious injury, Walters broke one of the cardinal rules of boxing: the fans pay to see someone get hurt. Great fighters, according to the online boxing commentariat, HBO’s announcing team, and others, are supposed to go out on their shields, which is to say, they must be beaten into submission.
To understand the twisted mindset behind this rationale, one must understand that boxing might be a sport, but it is surrounded by a cult-like subculture, one with any number of unwritten rules and norms, where behavior considered deranged in any other aspect of life is acceptable, and traditional notions of right, wrong, and logic are suspended.
It is a world where the only price of entry is tuning into the fight that evening, and paying for a ticket or Pay Per View turns every fan into a tiny shareholder of the chattel on display in the fighting pit that evening. It is also a world that has no intention of changing, despite the seismic shifts in science and our understanding of how the brain works.
That is how we can live in a world where we now cringe when wide receivers are hit over the middle or players return to the field after sustaining obvious blows to the head, but in boxing we expect the concussed to bravely march back into the ring to sustain the additional blows that have already been proven to yield the most long-term damage.
The most confounding aspect of the outrage over Walters’ decision is that it was so obviously the correct move to anyone with even an rudimentary understanding of the sport. Lomachenko was toying with his opponent in what proved to be the final round, showboating and challenging Walters to throw a punch so he could continue picking the Jamaican apart. Lomachenko’s lead on the scorecards was already insurmountable barring at least one knockdown, and Walters had shown no signs that he was capable of landing his vaunted right hand with enough impact do do so.w