SAD but nonetheless true is the fact that when Taylor and Prograis enter the ring tonight, the recent tragic fate of fellow professional Patrick Day will follow them. 

Day’s death from brain trauma sustained in his super welterweight fight against Charles Conwell in Chicago on October 12 shines a harsh light on the sport of boxing in a year in which four ring fatalities constitutes a grim and impossible to wish away toll.

Though inevitably raised at such moments is the chorus of voices calling for the sport to be banned, such talk will always be incompatible with reality. 

Boxing has remained a fixture of human culture for millennia and will continue to do so as long as men (and increasingly women) feel the primal urge to climb into a ring and reach for something more than life on the other side of the ropes is able to offer.

As to the risks involved, Joyce Carol Oates in her classic work “On Boxing” makes the salient point that “death in the ring is extremely unlikely; a statistically rare possibility like your possible death tomorrow in an automobile accident or in next month’s headlined airline disaster or in a freak accident involving a fall on the stairs or in the bathtub, a skull fracture, subarachnoid haemorrhage.”

Yet though the inherent risks involved in boxing may be minimal, we still cannot airily dismiss four fatalities in one year alone — not if the sport is to remain on the right side of the line it straddles between nobility and barbarity.

Likewise, the usual assertion bandied around whenever a ring tragedy occurs by those seeking to mitigate the impact, namely that the fighter involved knew the risks, is facile. 

Knowing the risks in the abstract sense and believing that you are actually at risk is not the same thing. We all know objectively that there’s a risk involved in crossing the road or in getting on an aeroplane, but if we had so much as a tincture of feeling or belief that doing so in a given moment or on a particular occasion would be to actually invite death, we would refrain from doing either.

Patrick Day was down three times before being stopped in the tenth round on that fateful night in Chicago. And though it would be crass and unjust to ascribe blame for this tragedy to any one individual involved in the fight — whether referee Celestino Ruiz, Day’s long-time trainer Joe Higgins, the doctor who passed him fit to fight on, or indeed anybody else — boxing now needs to take a hard look at itself.

With this in mind, rule changes should now be seriously considered to the standing eight-count, which is not nearly long enough after a knockdown in most cases, the number of times a fighter can touch the canvas before a fight is automatically stopped, the size of gloves used in professional contests, the role of doctors at ringside, and perhaps most importantly of all an end to the madness of fighters half starving and dehydrating themselves in an effort to make weight.

The most important thing that needs to change though, and by definition the hardest to change, is the prevailing culture — one in in which the vocabulary of combat serves to dehumanise fighters and project onto them a romantic notion of warriors for whom the laws of medical science and physiology do not apply. 

For me and countless others, boxing remains the greatest sport in the world. Its history is littered with some of the most brilliant, courageous and truly ennobling of men, and it’s a sport is rich in drama and excitement, carrying within it the potential to touch greatness. 

That said, boxing has also found itself at wallowing in the gutter at various points.

If Patrick Day’s death is to mean anything, let it be that it marks the beginning of the end of the sport’s slide towards the latter.