The horror that stalks my enduring passion

The inquiry into the fight which led to the death of James Murray begins tomorrow. Ken Jones, the Independent's chief sports writer, has covered the sport for 25 years, with increasing unease. Even so, he argues, the case for abolition has not been made

It can be of no comfort to James Murray's grieving family and friends that the British Boxing Board of Control is tomorrow inquiring into the circumstances surrounding his death last month as a result of injuries received in the professional ring.

Whatever the outcome, it will not ease the deep sorrow felt since Murray became another of boxing's grim statistics when challenging Drew Docherty for the British bantamweight championship. And yet not even the young Glaswegian's heartbroken parents felt sufficiently traumatised to speak out against the sport that took his life. "Losing the boy is a terrible thing," Murray's father, Ken, said, "but it hasn't made us think that boxing should be banned."

As someone who was first drawn to boxing as a small boy and has written about it extensively for more than 25 years, I am hardly in a position to support calls for its abolition, especially on moral grounds, but visits to the ringside these days never fail to raise a profound sense of unease.

It is not simply that Murray's death followed all too quickly on that of Bradley Stone and others worldwide, or the sight of Michael Watson in a wheelchair or the pitiful impairments Gerald McClellan is left with as the result of a brutal contest against Nigel Benn.

In themselves, those tragedies are enough to justify serious misgivings about boxing, but more troublesome personally is the realisation that an instinctive response to its vicarious thrill has left little room for concern.

It was when assisting Peter Wilson, who lorded it over the sports pages of the Daily Mirror for many years, that I first felt a shudder of ambivalence about boxing. A 12-round eliminator for the British featherweight title brought together Terry Spinks, the baby-faced East Londoner who won a gold medal at flyweight in the Melbourne Olympics of 1956, and Johnny Kidd of Scotland.

After gaining a clear points advantage by the middle rounds Spinks, the superior boxer, began to wilt, taking such violent punishment that he was almost out on his feet when declared a narrow winner. Visitors were not immediately welcome in the victor's dressing-room, but at Wilson's behest I managed to squirm through to the corridor outside and found Spinks in a shower stall, propped up against one wall, almost obscured by steam that billowed from the hot water cascading over his slight shoulders. He asked a question, not of me but of his manager, Sammy McCarthy. "What round is it, Sammy?" he mumbled, eyes closed, not yet in full possession of his senses. "Leave him," McCarthy said quietly and I turned away, realising for the first time how much boxing takes from them.

This was not what I must have imagined all those years ago when lifted from bed at my grandparent's home in Merthyr Tydfil to follow on radio the noble effort Tommy Farr put in when challenging Joe Louis for the heavyweight championship.

Shortly before Farr's death, at 73, I visited him in Hove. A romantic, he remained devastatingly alert, able to recall clearly the contest that established him as a Welsh hero. "I put everything into those 15 rounds," he said. "The lot. My face looked like a dug-up road. It felt as though I'd been run over by a lorry. There wasn't a muscle in my body that didn't ache with the pain of it. When my manager, Ted Broadribb, came to my hotel room the next day to say it was time to go and collect our money, I didn't have the strength to get out of bed, just enough to hurl one of those big New York telephone directories at him."

The irony in Farr's mental condition was that Louis, one of the greatest champions in history and considered by many to be the supreme heavyweight, passed into a bleak old age, barely able to communicate with those who came to shake the hand he was paid to hold out at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

When rumours of Muhammad Ali's diminishing responses became clinical reality after tests in September 1984, I grew angry with those who believed stubbornly that his state of mind was due to disease not the punishment he took from heavy punchers.

Through the refraction of time there came disturbing images, especially a ferocious defence against Joe Frazier in Manila in 1975 that saw both men utterly exhausted when the challenger's trainer, Eddie Futch, called a halt wisely at the end of the 14th round. "Joe wanted to go on ," Futch would say, "but I thought about his kids, how much he meant to them." Ali too was in a dreadful state, eyes glazed, unable to stand and accept victory.

To see Ali now measuring his steps carefully and then remember him as he was, forever soaring off on another flight of fantasy, is a grim reminder that boxing is the one sport that should never be referred to as a game.

Boxing is a rough and dangerous sport, the most basic and natural and uncomplicated of athletic competitions. In her book, On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: "Boxers are there to establish experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings; they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess - of how much, or how little they are capable. To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one's life is to make of one's audience voyeurs of a kind."

The day poor Johnny Owen was buried on a hillside in Merthyr in 1980, dead from the injury that sent him into a coma when challenging Lupe Pintor of Mexico for the world bantamweight championship, some of us found it difficult to defend the sport that had taken his young life. Although my friend Eddie Thomas, the former British, European and Empire champion who turned Ken Buchanan and Howard Winstone into world title holders, had played no part in Owen's career, he said: "I had to ask myself whether boxing is worth the candle. But boxing is in me as it was in Johnny. That isn't easy to explain because there is more to it than money or fame, or even the knowledge that people who follow boxing are living out a part of their lives through you. There is something mysterious deep inside that keeps leading you back to the ring."

A problem personally is that boxing is embedded in the Merthyr psyche - a mysterious instinct Thomas attributes to the harsh experiences endured by past generations. One of many Merthyr legends speaks of children coming so angrily into the world that their fists were already clenched.

Sometimes I go back to that strange town where I was born and, if nothing urgent springs to mind, I leave the motorway at Newport and drive up to Abergavenny, then westward through Brynmawr and Tredegar so that Merthyr can be reached from the brow at Dowlais top. The town lies below you there and at a distance you are seeing it much as it was observed by travellers more than 150 years ago.

Quiet now; land reclaimed, the valley collieries but forgotten catacombs; the great foundries of Dowlais and Cyfartha laid to waste.

But in the early part of the 19th century, a small community with no significant history was transformed into an industrial hell-hole, its name to be known around the world: a bawdy, brawling Klondike, attracting not only the rural Welsh but swarms of immigrant workers - English, Irish, Italian, Spanish. Merthyr became unquestionably one of the hardest towns on earth, its riverside ghettoes the natural habitat of murderers, tricksters, shysters, thieves, prostitutes and footpads.

In that grim setting fist-fights were a way of life. Self-appointed champions emerged, taking on all comers in contests that drew vast crowds.

To grow up with tales of their prowess, however exaggerated, and the legitimate claims of many outstanding Welsh fighters such as Farr, Jimmy Wilde, Freddie Welsh and Jim Driscoll, who showed Merthyr their hands, was to develop a feel for boxing strong enough so far to resist the notion that it has become a blight on modern society.

It cannot be legislated out of existence, and nor should it be. But the sure knowledge that James Murray will not be the last boxer to give his life in the ring is deeply disturbing.