“A CHAMPION is someone who gets up when they can’t”

So said legendary American heavyweight, Jack Dempsey, whose very name is synonymous with the hardest of hard times endured by the US working class in the decade following the first world war.

This particular quote breathes verisimilitude into the cliche that boxing is a metaphor for life, which for the vast majority of us has and does involve getting up at precisely the point at which we don’t believe we can.