On Saturday night in San Bernardino, Isis Sio was knocked out inside a round by Joceyln Camarillo. The following day, March 22, Most Valuable Promotions posted a clip of the knockout to their social media accounts and innocently asked followers whether they believed it was the best knockout of the year.
That it was quick and brutal was entirely the point and MVP, at the time, presumably had no idea that Sio had been put in a medically-induced coma as a result of the knockout. Had they known, one would assume that sharing the footage and asking followers to rate the knockout would be the last thing on their mind. Had they known, they would have simply pretended the knockout had never happened.
It is also worth remembering that MVP, as a promotional outfit, is new to the game and still experiencing many firsts. They may, in other words, have simply been caught out – caught out by how quickly good becomes bad in a sport like boxing.
In this instance, it was only once news of Sio’s plight had been made public that Camarillo’s knockout win was recontextualized and it was only once MVP had been alerted to their insensitivity on social media that the video of it was taken down. By then, they had issued a brief social-media statement of their own – wishing Sio “strength and healing” – and they had clearly seen the posts pleading with them to delete the video from their feed.
Of course, all that had really changed in the space of 48 hours was how that knockout win for Camarillo was viewed. Initially, and quite rightly, it had been viewed as an eye-catching and impressive finish, with the fight itself deemed a mismatch worthy of criticism. Sio, some said, was out of her depth, hence the speed at which Camarillo, a 5-0 prospect, had managed to dispatch her. Also, it was only two months ago that Sio, 1-2, was knocked out inside a round by Perla Bazaldua (albeit stopped by a body punch on that occasion). Her being stopped by Camarillo therefore came as no real surprise. Nor was it any surprise to see how quickly Camarillo’s knockout of Sio spread on social media. After all, before it wasn’t, it was everything one would want from a knockout. It was clean, it was decisive, and it carried a violence we don’t often see in finishes in women’s boxing. Already, at that stage, it looked and felt different; crueller, scarier, worth replaying.
But then we learned that Isis Sio was in a medically-induced coma and immediately reassessed how we spoke about both the knockout and indeed Sio. Now, rather than talk about her being out of her depth, or outclassed, we were instead reminding ourselves of this 19-year-old’s courage and her fighting capabilities in the hope that she would pull through and win the biggest fight of her career. For 24 hours, in fact, Isis Sio would have never felt so popular and so loved.
Because that’s the thing with boxing when it goes wrong. Suddenly there is not only an outpouring of emotion and support, but we come to see the fighters for what they ultimately are: human beings. We seek not to glorify or judge them but protect them. We speak of their exploits no longer in detached sporting terms – “Was that the knockout of the year?” – but in terms more tactile and far more important. Now they actually mean something to us, these fighters, these people. Not just that, boxing itself, their sport and their livelihood, comes to mean something different to us as well. It is now not just something to watch and enjoy, and something others do for our entertainment. Instead, it is made real. It is made real whenever we see how it can go wrong and how the damage we encourage and praise can lead to boxers on the receiving end fighting for their lives as we post futile messages of support. Never, in that moment, do we feel more helpless and to some extent guilty.
It is, in a sense, the rubbernecker’s whiplash. One day you find yourself impressed by a knockout finish and contemplating whether it’s the best knockout of the year and the next you wish it had never happened – or at least that you had never seen it.
Until you have seen a fight go wrong in person it is hard to appreciate the switch – in fights, in you. I only know this because I saw and felt that very switch 10 years ago (March 26, 2016). The fight involved British middleweight champion Nick Blackwell, whose brave effort against Chris Eubank Jnr at Wembley Arena left him with a haematoma above his left eye, then in a coma for six days. Not only was I ringside to witness it, but I knew Blackwell and had been working on the fight in the capacity of press officer for Blackwell’s promoter, Hennessy Sports. Alas, if it wasn’t enough just to see a fight go wrong from close range, I was also directly involved; too close for comfort; too conspicuous to run. I was somewhat complicit, too. We all were. The people who watched the fight and cheered when the action heated up were complicit and so were those who booed when the referee, Victor Loughlin, waved the bout off in round 10 having had the doctor inspect Blackwell’s damaged face. Then you had us, the ones working on the show. We didn’t just put the fight together and sell it, we also made money from it and considered the whole experience part of the job. For us, that’s all any of this was: a job. It was a job until it wasn’t, that is.
When it all of a sudden became something else – a fight between life and death – nobody cared about winning or losing, be it a fight or their job. We only wanted to see a 25-year-old man wake up. We wanted that outcome for him, of course, and for his poor family, but we wanted it for ourselves, too. Because although each of us crave action and knockouts in the ring, nobody in boxing wants a death on their hands, especially if they have any intention of sticking around. “How is that even possible?” I sometimes asked myself once Blackwell recovered and it was okay to carry on as before. “How do you still look at boxing the same way after that?”
Thankfully, I have yet to find out. To date, I have been present for only two fights that went badly wrong and neither delivered the worst-case scenario. Moreover, the first of those, that Blackwell vs Eubank Jnr fight, arrived some 15 years after I attended my very first professional fight in 2001. In those 15 years I had attended hundreds of others, as both a fan and reporter, and had seen enough fights go right to convince myself that boxing was a sport and that more often than not the boxers involved, despite the damage done, would at the end of the night go home safe and sound. Was I, based on the evidence, right to think like that? Possibly. Or was I instead blissfully ignorant and a tad delusional?
Certainly, when it finally happened, my opinion of the sport changed overnight. That it was then followed eight months later by another similar incident – Eduard Gutknecht vs George Groves at the same venue – only intensified the feeling of having fallen in love with something toxic, dirty, and deadly. Now, even if I tried, there was no escaping it. There was no escaping the reality of what a fight can do to the boxers involved and there was no escaping that unpleasant stench of complicity you give off when sitting in your fineries at ringside. You wanted closeness, did you? Well, now you’ve got it. Now you’re too close. Now you’ve seen more than you wanted to see, as well as things you can never unsee. Now you have the full picture and know what it means to really fight.
Yet still you watch and hope for a good one.
