CUTHBERT TAYLOR was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1909. A superb amateur boxer, he competed for Great Britain at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam in the flyweight division. Given that he was born with brown skin at this point in Britain’s social history, the boxing ring was the least of his worries.

Racism has long informed and plagued British culture in all aspects. To be black or brown was designated to be less than on these shores for generations. The country’s sordid legacy of slavery and empire made it so, yet young men such as Taylor refused to let the colour of their skin make them feel less than.

Regardless, the colour bar was a shameful part of the reality of professional boxing in his era, which both he and Manchester’s Len Johnson — previously featured in this column — found to their cost.

As with Johnson, Taylor was denied the opportunity to fight for a British professional title. A black father was enough to deem him “not white enough” to do so. Just imagine the assault on the spirit of a young athlete in the prime of his life this must have engendered.

But though Taylor is no longer with us, his story — the sheer and monumental injustice he experienced — has been resurrected by the Welsh theatre company, Theatr na nOg. Indeed, their play, The Fight — written by Geinor Styles and directed by Kev McCurdy — has succeeded in keeping Taylor’s flame alive.

It has, at this writing, been performed at the Dylan Thomas Theatre in Swansea and also at the Theatr Brycheiniog in Brecon. Further still, it has been performed at primary and secondary schools in both towns.

The result, phenomenally, has been 300 schoolchildren who’ve seen the play and learned of Taylor’s story, taking it upon themselves to write a letter to the British Boxing Board of Control, demanding an apology for the injustice meted out to this young Welsh boxer back in the day.

Such acts on the part of the young provide hope in a time in which despair has been allowed to become hegemonic.

Taylor was one of the finest boxers of his generation and a proud Welshman to boot. That his story is being told on the stage today is a credit to all involved. But those 300 schoolkids are surely where the future resides. Racism is the devil’s work and racial justice is poetry in an age of of bad prose.

By the time these words appear, we will have entered 2025. If boxing really is the metaphor for life that many maintain, 2024 was a year to forget. The Saudis stuffed the mouths of boxing’s major players with gold — and boy have they feasted. Prizefighting is an exercise in being paid, this we know, but there does come a point when being paid well crosses over into the realm of prostitution.

Does Tyson Fury really need another 50 million quid? Does anybody? Do we really need fighters and promoters and pundits genuflecting at the feet of a Saudi patronage?

To ask the question is to answer it.

They were better back in the day. Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Henry Cooper, Richard Dunn, Larry Holmes — for such men boxing was a means to self-realisation as much as it was to financial security.

Boxing in 2024 was the very epitome of a curate’s egg. It had its high points but also more than its low.

Jake Paul and all he represents needs to be exorcised from the sport like the devil he is. Every time he steps into a boxing ring, as he did against a way over the hill Mike Tyson this past year, he denigrates himself and all the greats who have done so over generations for a fraction of the money he has made.

The clown belongs in the circus not the arena, and the ability of this particular clown to turn boxing into a spectacle of the absurd heaps layers upon layers of embarrassment onto the image of a sport that is was already in jeopardy as a result of greed being allowed to take precedence over integrity.

Tyson Fury losing two back-to-back encounters against Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk was the major talking point of 2024. Many inches shorter and considerable pounds lighter, Usyk delivered up two stunning performances to confirm that he more than deserves the mantle of fighter of the year.

Fury would do well to consider retirement going forward, but there remains talk of him facing Anthony Joshua in a domestic and now non-title clash in 2025. The word “redundant” springs to mind where such an event is concerned. Yet no doubt there still exists an audience for it. Money talks, and this in the event would be about nothing else apart from same.

Sadly, 2024 was also the year in which Israel Vasquez passed away at just age 46. This former Mexican world featherweight champion was a pure gentleman outside the ring, and a warrior inside. I had the inordinate privilege of meeting him in Los Angeles back in the early noughties. We had coffee together once, during which he revealed that he was a lover of Scottish history and the great Ken Buchanan.

Women’s boxing in 2024 provided something approximating to the preservation of the noble in the noble art. Shorn of the bravado and increasingly sewer-like trash talking that has come to typify the male version, women have come into the sport to remind us that decency does not have to be incompatible with combat.

Happy new year, everybody. And keep punching.