On the Chin

  Browne, a junior lightweight, had died a year and a half earlier after losing a fight to a Filipino boxer called Carlo Magali at Ingleburn RSL in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. The coroner wanted to find out whether Browne’s death could have been prevented, and to what extent the referee, the ringside doctor, the Combat Sports Authority’s inspectors (one of whom was my old friend Paul Toweel), Browne’s corner and the fight’s promoters were responsible.

  I watched the videotape on an aged MacBook in a lawyer’s office. The camera had been positioned just behind Magali’s corner, and the quality of the footage was grainy, more like CCTV than the high-definition clarity of cable. There was no sound, leaving me with an oddly silent, unsentimental overview.

  I wasn’t in a rush to get to the awful end I knew was coming, but it seemed pointless to watch the ceremony of the fighters making their way to the ring and the announcer doing the introductions without sound, so I skipped ahead to the inaudible opening bell.

  Davey Browne was born to be a boxer. He fought his first amateur bout when he was fourteen. He turned professional at eighteen and was considered by some to be a possible future world title contender. Certainly he was a strong domestic-level fighter. At twenty-eight he looked the part, with a nose that advertised his profession and a tattoo of Ned Kelly in armour on his chest. A 2009 loss to world titlist Billy Dib had dimmed his prospects somewhat, but by 2015 he was on the comeback trail and favoured to beat Magali for a regional alphabet belt. He had never been knocked out.

  Though there were rumours before the fight that he was having trouble making the junior lightweight limit of 58.97 kilos, Browne had every reason to be confident—he was fighting in front of his home crowd and his father, David Browne Senior, was the promoter.

  Magali, a compact man with a helmet of thick black hair, only arrived in Australia a few days before the bout. A native of Talibon, a small commercial centre on the island of Bohol, he had fought for regional belts, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. Few expected him to defeat Browne. Brad Vocale, an experienced referee and the former National Boxing Federation president, who served as an expert witness at the inquest, believed from the outset Browne was the more skilful fighter. In a textbook example of sports English, euphemistic even when it’s sincere, he described Magali as ‘a good honest hardworking competitor who was very well prepared’. Magali, he testified, ‘came here to give his best performance and never stopped trying at any time, this is a trait of Filipino boxers they never give up until the final bell has rung’.

  In retrospect, this rather undersold Magali.

  As I watched the silent bout on the small screen, stopping occasionally for the MacBook to process the video, the first thing that occurred to me was the shameful thought that it was a fun fight. Magali and Browne were not elite, but they were good fighters whose styles and flaws complemented one another. The shorter Filipino tried relentlessly to get in close enough to throw his wide, looping shots, but had to absorb punishment to do so. Browne wanted to box and keep Magali away, but his punches lacked the snap to discourage his opponent and he didn’t have the stamina to box on his toes for a whole twelve-round fight.

  All of which is to say that it was by no means a beatdown. Through the first five rounds, Browne seemed to be in control: sticking, moving and peppering Magali with combinations. Magali occasionally landed eye-catching single punches, but they didn’t trouble Browne. Until they did.

  At the start of the sixth, Magali connected with an overhand right that sent Browne reeling, then followed up with a two-fisted assault. Despite Browne’s best efforts to move and hold, he was virtually helpless by the middle of the round, held upright by the ropes, absorbing blow after blow.

  One of the questions posed by the inquest was whether the referee, Charlie Lucas, could have stopped the fight at this point. It certainly looked like he was about to. On the grainy LCD display, I could see Lucas crouching just to the side of the two boxers, looking into Browne’s eyes.

  In an instant near the end of that sixth round, Lucas had to weigh a number of factors. Least of all, but not irrelevant, was the amusement of the paying crowd: boxing fans like to see knockouts, and are sometimes outraged by early stoppages. Then he had to consider Browne’s own desire to win the fight and advance his career, while evaluating his chances of achieving that. Stopping it without giving him a reasonable chance to recover would be unfair to Browne, who was well aware of the risks he was taking. Finally, and most importantly, Lucas had to take the safety of the hurt fighter in front of him into account. Whatever Browne himself might have desired—and as we’ve seen, boxers are always supposed to want to continue—Lucas needed to consider the chance of injury, as well as the long-term health consequences of the punches he was allowing Browne to take.

  Despite what happened later, Lucas made the right decision to allow the fight to continue in the sixth. Just when Lucas seemed ready to intervene, Magali ran out of puff and Browne began throwing punches of his own. As the bell rang to end the round, the local boy was having the better of it.

  In the seventh, a chastened Browne went back to using his range, and for the next four rounds the fight returned to its previous pattern: Browne boxing, Magali landing the occasional right-hand bomb. Again, I had to shake my head and admit that if it were not for the looming ending, I would have considered Browne vs Magali a good fight. Magali’s surprise knockdown of Browne, Lucas’ decision to allow Browne to continue, Browne’s subsequent comeback and desperate efforts to protect his presumed lead on the scorecards as he tired—these momentum swings marked the bout as the kind of contest of wills boxing fans always hope to see.

  It only became clear how badly Browne was tiring in the tenth and eleventh, when Magali began to close the distance. The visitor was emboldened, and looked remarkably energetic as Browne wilted. With thirty seconds to go in round eleven, Magali hurt Browne severely with a left hook. The taller fighter tried desperately to hold on, but Magali shook him off and hit him with a series of punches, ending in a right hand. Browne crashed to the floor, but got up quickly.

  His legs did not seem particularly unsteady. Lucas followed the correct procedure, looking carefully into Browne’s eyes for signs of glassiness or lack of focus as he gave him the mandatory eight count. He decided Browne was OK to go on: he stepped into centre ring and brought his palms together, the sign for the boxers to continue.

  Magali leapt forward, ready to finish the fight. With seconds left in the round, he connected with another series of blows and kept punching to the bell. Browne fell backwards, lolling momentarily against the ropes like a fly caught in a spider’s web. Disoriented, confused and barely able to walk, he made it back to his corner but only with the help of Tommy Browne, his brother and cornerman. He was clearly in a very bad way.

  Sitting in the office, I tried to look unruffled, but things were getting ugly, and Charlie Lucas was starting to make mistakes. When the ropes are the only thing holding a boxer up after a punch, it should be ruled a knockdown and the boxer should be given a count. Lucas also failed to check on Browne’s condition in the break between rounds. He was speaking to the other officials, making sure everyone knew the last round was coming up. The fight doctor, Lawrence Noonan, stayed in his front-row seat opposite the camera the whole time. If either of them had checked, they would have found a near-insensible fighter slumped in front of the turnbuckle.

  Browne’s corner definitely knew how much trouble he was in. But with the end of the fight in sight, and the hometown hero almost certainly up on the scorecards, they just needed him to make it through one more round.

  To stall for time and get Browne precious extra seconds to recover, his cornermen did three things. They spilled water on the canvas—this makes the ring slippery, and sometimes forces referees to call time while it is mopped up. Then they loosened the tape around Browne’s left glove. Referees often pause fights while loose tape is removed, on the basis that it’s a distraction. It’s also said to be an i
njury risk in that it could flick the eye of the other fighter, though I have never seen this happen. Last, and most obviously, one of the three cornermen simply hung around in the ring long after the ‘seconds out’ announcement and the opening bell of the final round.

  These kinds of subterfuges are so commonly employed in boxing, and often so unsubtly, that they’re hardly considered cheating. No matter the truth of the tale, it’s a well-established part of sporting lore that Angelo Dundee ripped a hole in the glove of Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) after he had been knocked down and badly hurt by England’s Henry Cooper in 1963. The ensuing scramble to find a spare pair of gloves bought Ali precious seconds to recover, and he stopped Cooper on cuts in the very next round. Dundee employed a similar ruse while working the corner of the poorly conditioned Wilfredo Gomez during the 1970s, untying the junior featherweight champ’s shoelaces before every round, then doing them up as slowly as possible when the referee paused the fight. ‘Call it gamesmanship, if you will, but whatever you call it, call it timely and time-consuming,’ wrote Dundee in his autobiography.

  At Ingleburn RSL, referee Charlie Lucas had little tolerance for the timely and time-consuming. As the bell went to begin the twelfth round, he strode across the ring towards the loitering cornerman and gave him a two-handed shove towards the ropes. The water and the tape he didn’t notice. The attempt to buy time failed. If it succeeded in anything, it was in distracting Lucas from the state Davey Browne was in.

  Browne walked to centre ring on stiff legs, as if he couldn’t bend his knees and still trust them to hold him up. The referee seemed in a hurry to get proceedings back underway after the Browne corner’s attempts to buy time. He asked Browne if he was OK to continue, received a bare nod, and motioned for the two fighters to touch gloves.

  At first, very little happened. Browne still looked unsteady but Magali didn’t take advantage right away. Perhaps he didn’t realise how bad a state his opponent was in; perhaps he realised all too well. But after circling for thirty seconds, he drove Browne towards a neutral corner and started punching. Browne, back to the ropes, was absorbing unanswered blows, but began to fire back a little just as Lucas seemed ready to jump in and stop it.

  The referee stepped back again. As he did so, Browne’s left hand dropped a fraction and Magali crashed home with the same overhand right he’d been throwing all night.

  Browne fell to the canvas. Lucas didn’t even bother counting.

  Davey Browne never woke up: he died in hospital four days later, probably from injuries caused by the final punch.

  I have sympathy for Charlie Lucas. Yes, the referee missed chances to check in with Browne, and yes, he had ample opportunity to stop the fight before Browne got hurt. But unlike me, watching on the MacBook a year and a half later, he did not have the ability to drag the progress slider back and watch things again. Everything happened so fast. In round twelve, the amount of time between Magali’s first effective punch and the blow that killed Browne was only a few seconds.

  But with the ability to use that slider, I soon noticed one more disturbing detail.

  Taking the tape back to just before the final punch, I used the arrow keys to advance it frame-by-frame. In slow motion, Browne is rocked from side to side by the force of Magali’s blows. The referee hovers as Browne fires back ineffectively. Browne is trying to cover up and punch at the same time. Something in the corner of his eye catches his attention—the loose piece of tape hanging from his left glove. The tiny distraction is all Magali needs, and in aching slow motion he drives home the punch that ends everything.

  The coroner’s findings, when they were delivered in June 2017, were a confronting reminder of the differences between the unwritten rules that still dominate boxing and legislation that is supposed to govern it.

  For starters, the coroner found that the witnesses’ uncertainty about the rules ‘was a striking feature of the evidence’. Charlie Lucas was unsure whether he should have applied a count to Davey Browne at the end of the eleventh round. Lawrence Noonan (who was unapologetic) considered his role as ringside doctor to be ‘very limited’. Some of the witnesses did not know that the Combat Sport Authority inspectors, Paul Toweel and Darren Perkins, had the authority to stop the fight (I hadn’t known that either). Toweel testified that he had never seen an inspector do so.

  Perhaps most startling was the coroner’s rejection of the idea that Davey Browne’s cornermen had a responsibility to save their fighter, pointing out the inherent conflict of interest between their desire to win and the presumed duty of care. ‘They cannot be relied upon as an effective safeguard to stop the fight for the welfare of the fighter,’ read the findings, challenging a principle that everyone in boxing takes for granted.

  The coroner recommended legislative tweaks, more training for inspectors, officials and doctors, the introduction of ‘triggers’ that would prompt compulsory medical examinations during bouts, and updated emergency procedures. Some of the recommendations are being acted on by the New South Wales Government, while others remain under consideration. If their adoption helps to prevent further ring fatalities, then at least some good will have come from Davey Browne’s death—though I doubt that’s much comfort to his widow and two fatherless sons.

  When the video ended, the lawyer folded her laptop and asked what I thought. I shrugged awkwardly and spoke as a boxing fan: nobody present would have expected the inspectors to step in. The doctor should have got out of his seat. The referee could have acted sooner. Small mistakes had catastrophic consequences.

  But in the days and weeks that followed, what stuck in my mind was that pixelated f lash of white hanging from Davey Browne’s glove. With impressive honesty, Browne’s cornermen, Glen Smith, Todd Makelim and Tommy Browne, told the inquest they never seriously considered stopping the fight. I wondered how they felt now. It didn’t matter what the coroner and the law said about their responsibility; they must have questioned their decision to loosen the tape and let the fight go on. Imagine being forced to watch that video and see that little white tab again and again.

  Davey was not just their fighter—he was their friend and brother, and having to live with the memory of that night, and of that terrible slow-motion footage, seems far too severe a sentence for what they did. Which was what? Only to forget—momentarily and like everyone who watches it—that boxing is not like other sports.

  Deaths and injuries like Davey Browne’s grab headlines. They are confronting and difficult to ignore, but they are relatively rare when you consider the thousands of professional boxing matches that take place around the world each year. When people call for boxing to be banned in the aftermath of such incidents, boxing advocates inevitably reply by pointing out that horseriding and scuba diving kill many more people each year, and nobody is calling for a ban on them. The anti-boxing camp respond in turn, saying that in boxing hurting someone is the point, whereas in horseriding injuries are incidental (though I’ve seen some horses that might disagree).

  This debate has been going on for centuries, and seems destined for a no-decision. If anything is going to render boxing a thing of the past, it’s recent advances in science’s understanding of chronic traumatic brain injury (CTBI), and specifically its sub-type, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This condition, which affects people exposed to repeated head trauma, such as contact-sport athletes and domestic violence victims, can manifest itself years after the original injuries. Symptoms include slurred speech, memory problems, tremors, loss of coordination and sometimes behavioural changes.

  A growing scientific consensus points to the fact that it is not only concussions that contribute to its development, but the accumulation of sub-concussive blows. And what is a boxing career if not an accumulation of sub-concussive blows? Unlike traumatic brain injuries, which have been reduced over time by better refereeing and officiating, and could be reduced still further, chronic brain damage is difficult to address. It is the inevitable product of boxing.

>   (Other contact sports have only twigged to the risks posed by CTBI relatively recently. In Australia both the AFL and the NRL have scrambled to institute concussion policies, attempting to head off the kind of billion-dollar class action lawsuit America’s NFL settled with more than twenty thousand former players in 2017. To what extent these measures are effective may well be the biggest sports story of the next few decades.)

  In 2017 a team of neurologists from the Mayo Clinic went so far as to suggest that Cleomedes of Astypalaea, who went mad after being convicted of foul play at an Olympic boxing match in the fifth century BCE, may have been the first recorded case. And the famed Boxer of the Quirinal, a bronze statue of an aged but muscular Greek boxer at rest, his hands still wrapped in their leather caestuses, seems to be an early comment on the damage prize fighting can do. The anonymous boxer looks up at the viewer, blank confusion etched on his fantastically scarred face. He could easily be a shaky ex-pug being introduced to fans before a world title fight—except they usually wear clothes these days.

  At times, fight fans have tried to deny the obvious. A high-profile 1950s study that used faulty brain-scanning methodology dismissed CTBI as little more than a ‘popular theory’ and provided ammunition for the deniers. Even A. J. Liebling got in on it. In a passage that has not aged particularly well (for multiple reasons) he argued that ‘if a boxer ever went as batty as Nijinsky, all the wowsers in the world would be screaming “punch-drunk”. Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn’t there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs.’

  Of course he was being facetious, but if you follow the logic, then smoking isn’t a problem because some people who never smoke get lung cancer. Similarly, examples of seemingly unaffected retired boxers, such as the grinning, grill-hocking George Foreman, should be seen in the same light as reports about centenarians who smoke and drink every day: heartwarming but not representative.