Has Andre Dirrell's corner dealt with his injuries appropriately?
As the smoke begins to clear regarding Andre Dirrell’s withdrawal from Showtime’s Super Six boxing tournament, the many questions are taking new forms.
Dirrell was originally slated to face former U.S. Olympic team mate Andre Ward on September 25 for the WBA super middleweight title in the Group Stage 3 of the tournament. After both fighters’ promoters failed to agree upon a venue, the bout was pushed back
to November 27. And then Dirrell announced his sudden departure, stating neurological problems that were immediately connected to his previous Super Six bout with German Arthur Abraham.
That bout doesn’t need to be rehashed, but the final moments do seem full of hidden insights. First of all, Dirrell was winning the fight, and had out-boxed Abraham and stayed out of danger all night, when he got caught and slipped in a corner in the 11th
round. Abraham swiped him once in the head, and Dirrell flopped onto the canvas and went into what appeared to be a seizure. Abraham was rightfully disqualified.
Immediately after the fight in the ring, commentators tried to interview Dirrell, but it became clear he wasn’t sure of anything that had happened. “What the f*ck happened,” he kept whimpering, his corner chiding that he hadn’t lost the fight, but actually
won via disqualification. When a Showtime interviewer was finally able to speak to Dirrell for a moment, he asked Dirrell what happened, to which the fighter responded: “I got dropped, man,” implying, again, that he still didn’t know he won. Moments after
Dirrell asked the interviewer, “is this the speaker man?”
When Dirrell announced his injury, parties split like night and day over a question Arthur Abraham had already asked in a post-fight interview. Abraham speculated whether Dirrell’s injury was legitimate, and went so far as to say he was a “good actor.”
So too with Dirrell’s withdrawal and citing of neurological problems, many automatically asked if he had dropped out for hidden, ulterior reasons. And while that inquiry remains alive and active, it is beginning to be replaced by another.
As many boxing analysts have suggested, when a fighter claims a doctor has told him he isn’t fit to fight due to neurological discrepancies, it’s not a joke, and shouldn’t be treated like one. The point is, regardless of the legitimacy of Dirrell’s injury,
it should be accepted as legitimate, because the risks involved are simply too high.
With this in mind, various insiders studied Dirrell’s post-fight interview, as well as the headlines leading up to his Ward fight, and asked the inevitable question: why didn’t his camp and corner deal with this immediately after the Abraham fight? And
have they been responsible for it at all?
One unsettling fact about watching the post-fight interview with Dirrell is that his corner seems so happy and willing to celebrate his win, nobody seems to care an ounce for Dirrell’s health. Nobody asks him if he’s all right, nobody examines him, nothing,
despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what the h**l is going on.
The other unsettling fact is that nobody seemed to know about the headaches and dizzy spells Dirrell was having post-Abraham until very recently—not even those who should have from the outset.
The really scary fact is that the team wasn’t entirely ignorant to Dirrell’s state, but chose rather to ignore his odd actions after the fight in hopes he would improve. According to Leon Lawson, Dirrell’s co-trainer, Dirrell “wasn’t the same” after the
Abraham fight, and there were “changes in his normal being.” Even though this was apparent, nobody spoke to Dirrell because they thought he would be A-OK by the time of his Ward bout.
This kind of treatment of a fighter does not say good things for the sport of boxing.
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