Joe Brolly says it is time to ban violent pro sports.
The RTÉ pundit and barrister reckons it is not right that the law permits sports like MMA.
Following the tragic death of Joao Carvalho in Dublin last week, serious questions have been raised over the safety of combat sports and, in his Sunday Independent column, the Derry man has hit out and said that human beings need to be protected from themselves.
Especially if they want to fight.
“Is it good enough that a young man be beaten to death in a cage for our amusement?” he wrote.
“Is it good enough that as he begins the slow process of dying, lying on the canvas like a tranquillised cow in the abattoir, Conor McGregor, our most famous sportsman, is giving high fives all around, laughing, and beating his chest? Is it?”
Brolly told the story of how he was once a boxer himself – until he got expelled from the club in Dungiven for kicking out at an opponent.
He would also go in support of his old club mate Paul McCloskey and sit at his fights. It ended when Dudey knocked Guiseppe Lauri to the canvas in Belfast and the crowd screamed in celebration.
“The violent professional sports lobby reacts violently to criticism, like the US gun lobby. When the young Welsh boxer Johnny Owen died in the ring, Hugh McIlvanney, one of those great writers who mythologises fighting, said, ‘It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a violent language.’
“As though nothing could’ve been done about it. He was f**king dead, Hugh. Dead! Do you comprehend what that means? For him. For his family.
“The face that there are young men with violent tendencies is neither here nor there.”
People like what they do. That’s why Brolly says that the law has to step in and take the decision out of their hands.
“The truth is that violent sports are a rich man’s play thing, where poor men try to put each other into a coma for our amusement.
“These violent life-an-death sports are fun. They bring us to somewhere primitive inside us. It is why the spectators in the Colosseum gasped and cheered as the knife was thrust home.
“The law permits it. And it shouldn’t. Time to ban these violent pro sports. Sometimes, human beings have to be protected from themselves.”
