"Whatever happens, whatever you do, do NOT stop this fight!!

November 4th, 2010
Iceman John Scully

Whenever I had an expected tough fight coming up and my team and I were about to head out to the ring for it I often repeated those words to my trainer. I often spoke them out loud to him within earshot of everyone else connected to the fight, too, because, for me, it was something personal and I wanted to make sure everyone close to the scene knew where I stood on the matter.

Ever since I first began boxing as a kid I had always related "getting stopped" to weakness and embarrassment. It was as if the opponent who scored the stoppage held something personal as a man over you for life and it bothered me. I realized early on that very few boxers go undefeated in their career, that there is always going to be someone better on a given night at some point. I didn't ever try to lose, mind you, but I was aware that it was probably going to happen sooner or later and it did, of course. I made up my mind early on, though, that if I had to lose to someone it was most likely going to be by decision. If I was cut I was going to keep going. It was always so simple to me: "I'm already cut, my face is already messed up. If you stop the fight now that's not going to change. You may as well let me finish."

If I was injured I was going to keep going regardless and I was going to do my absolute best to hide the fact from the referee, the doctors, the audience and even my own corner, too. Now if I got caught with a huge shot and KO'd, well, that was one thing. The ref and my corner would have no choice but to agree with the fight coming to an end under that circumstance and for me I had it ingrained in my head that it was the only acceptable circumstance. When I told my corner man not to stop the fight on me I meant not to stop it as long as I am able to stand up under my own power, no matter how much blood was lost, no matter how many punches had been landed. Please, please, please, let me decide.

I realize now as a trainer more than ever that safety is very important but I'm telling you, if you were to tell me between rounds of some of my toughest losses that a potential long term injury to me was imminent and you gave me a choice I would have chosen to stay on course to get hurt rather than have you stop the fight on me.

I actually did that several times in my career with no regrets.

At the Blue Horizon back in March of 1993 I found myself in only the second round of a tough fight with top contender Tony Thornton with three terrible cuts on my face, one under each eye and another above the right one. I had originally received them less than four months earlier in a fight against Tim Littles out in Las Vegas on the under cardd of the first Bowe and Holyfield fight. I came back to the ring much too soon after that fight and the same cuts opened up almost as soon as Tony's gloves found them.

To my horror, I had respected referee Rudy Battle in my ear after the second round, telling me how he was going to stop the fight if the cuts got any worse.

I kid you not, I verbally threatened his life right there in the corner. I was in panic mode and looking back on it now I truly believe my panic and my apprehension and my diligence and the serious tone in which I threatened this man's life is what enabled me to convince him to allow me to keep trudging on for another eight rounds en route to a decision loss instead of one by TKO. I spent much of that fight hiding from Rudy Battle the very real fact that I was having an extremely difficult time even seeing Tony in the ring due to the combination of blood, sweat and coagulant that was steadily streaming into my eyes round after round.

And despite the fact that the scars from those terrible cuts remain to this day (and that I had to have plastic surgery done on one of them) I would 100 percent guaranteed do it over exactly the same way in one second if the situation ever came again.

And on the night in 1997 when I suffered from a severe case of heat stroke (complete with hallucinations during the fight!), I did everything I could to hide my distress from the ref, the audience and my corner. Once again, despite the danger I knew I was in (I actually thought of Gerald McClellan as I sat on the stool after one of the middle rounds), it was a mission accomplished.

I also think back to my 1999 fight with Sam Ahmad at the Blue Horizon where I suffered a seriously strained rotator cuff in the very first round after landing a solid left hook. My left arm was literally rendered useless less than two minutes into that fight and it is in my view one of my finest accomplishments as a boxer that I not only made it through that fight to the final bell (losing a majority decision to the then undefeated Philadelphia light heavyweight) but I did so having successfully hid my injury from the referee, the crowd, the promoter, my trainer and the ringside doctor. At the time, during the fight and sitting on the stool between rounds, I assumed the injury was the final nail in my career coffin and if it had become a permanent one I was very much willing to accept that. What I wasn't willing to accept was to have some guy tell me that I couldn't finish the fight if I wanted to and felt I was able to.

Now, I tell you all of this not to make myself out to be some kind of hero or tough guy. I do so only because I want you to understand men like Shannon Briggs and why they would willingly accept poundings like he chose to withstand against Vitali Klitscho two weeks ago without quitting. I want you to understand why a man like Diego "Chico" Corrales would cry like a baby in the ring after getting scientifically torn apart by Floyd Mayweather ten years ago on the way to a 12th round TKO loss. He didn't cry in the manner that he did because he had suddenly lost, the fight was pretty much lost for all intents and purposes well before the referee finally pulled the plug on it that night. He cried as he did because he wanted to finish the fight on his feet. Period. I truly believe that if in those moments if you were to ask him for an honest answer Diego Corrales would have replied with sincerity, "Don't stop this fight. Let me get hurt"

Apparently that is what Shannon Briggs felt the other night when he was in the process of losing to Vitali. Many in the boxing world have since criticized the result of the fight, claiming it should have been stopped several rounds before it came to its natural conclusion. Now the longer I distance myself from actual competition (my last professional fight was in June of 2001) the more I have for the first time in my life began to see the point of people who make such claims. However, I am still close enough to the action (I train boxers now but I still spar on a very regular basis, as frequently as I did when I was an active pro) that I have maintained a mental stranglehold on what it really is that pushes most boxers to do what they do, to endure what they endure in the name of business and sport.

I believe there comes a moment in a great many fights that two things can happen. One is that a fighter will be matched extremely tough and it will occur to him at some point that he isn't going to win. He's just not strong enough, fast enough or good enough to actually defeat this particular opponent. It happens.

The other moment is the one where the fighter realizes he isn't going to win the fight but he decides he wants to finish it at all costs to gain a moral victory of sorts, if not over his opponent than a victory over himself. He doesn't want to give any opponent the satisfaction of "stopping" him. And he doesn't want to live with the anguish of knowing he submitted physically and mentally to that opponent. Fighters at their core generally have a different way of thinking and a different way of rationalizing things than people who don't fight would.

As Jake LaMotta famously told Ray Robinson in the ring after the original Sugar Ray literally brutalized him over 14 rounds back in 1951, "You never got me down, Ray."

No doubt many people laughed and/or scratched their heads at that statement, thinking how foolish Jake was for bragging about not going down when the fact was he instead took a terrible beating that resulted in numerous hideous cuts and bruises on his face. The number of brain cells lost that night probably can't even be tallied, I know this. The average person would find it extremely difficult if not impossible to endure even a fraction of the abuse Jake swallowed in the name of sport. But that is actually the point of it all: Boxers are not average people and they are not asked to do average things for the amusement and entertainment of the paying customers. We spend weeks on end training our bodies and minds to soak up mental and physical punishment. We must train ourselves to take punches, body shots and head shots. Shots that make our vision cloudy and our knees sag on an almost daily basis in training camp. You asked us to get ready to take punishment on the way to a victory or a loss and now you've decided we can't take anymore? We believe that boxers are individuals and each one has a different capacity -and an acceptance of- to take punishment. We have a cut that wouldn't even cause us to bat an eye on or around our eye and you are going to say we cannot continue? You came to see me fight this man and now we are fighting and this is what happens? We get cut and hurt and punched and dizzy and you told me to get ready for that and now that it's happening you want to stop the fight?

We think to ourselves, "If you want to protect me then don't allow me to take up boxing when I'm 14 years old. Don't let me prepare myself and sacrifice and go through all this misery only to end up with a knockout loss piled on top of it all."

We worry that the same people who tell us to stop pushing forward are the same people who will mercilessly criticize us behind our backs if we do. Gerald McClellan trudged on through pain and misery during his ill-fated 1995 fight with Nigel Benn only to end up where he is now, in something close to a vegetative state. I do know that many people from around the world of boxing hold him in high esteem for the tremendous heart he showed that night while at the same time wishing sympathetically that he would have simply made his distress known several rounds earlier so that the fight could have been stopped.

But guess what?? I can assure you that it is not lost on boxers that if they were to go ahead and actually quit when faced with some form of extreme physical or mental distress for their own safety and future that they will still be verbally tortured in newspaper and magazine articles and on boxing message boards across the internet, labeled everything from a coward and gutless to a tomato can and a bum by people who hide behind made up names that don't allow for any type of real retribution to come to them. 

Gerald McClellan could have quit on the stool when the pain in his head first started to materialize and he would have lived to see another day. Maybe even fight another day. I'm pretty sure it even occurred to him to do so at some point in that brutal fight. But the fighting spirit we paid to see took over and, as a result, now there he sits at home in Illinois day after day, not even fully realizing who or where he is or what has happened to him. He ultimately decided that he would rather accept whatever was maybe coming to him in those moments than what he was sure was coming if he were to quit on the stool. It's the curse of being a professional fighter in the first place. Decide for your own safety that you've had enough and people who don't fight for a living will label you a coward for life. Decide to fight on, though, when you know you've already had enough and risk permanent injury and death. It may seem like a simple choice but when you've trained your mind and body for weeks at a time for this moment the warrior in a fighter is almost always going to choose door number two.

I bring up Gerald because I think of myself in that fight back in the 1990's I mentioned earlier where I suffered from hallucinations during a fight on ESPN due to a very severe case of heat stroke. I specifically recall a point late in the fight, maybe around the 8th or 9th round, where I specifically wondered if what I was feeling in those moments was what Gerald had felt in the rounds before he finally caved in against Benn. It occurred to me that maybe Gerald also hid from his trainers and the referee the extreme troubles he had seeing his opponent, the troubles he had being able to tell if he was even actually in a professional boxing match or if he was still in the dressing room thinking about being in a professional boxing match. Maybe Gerald felt exactly what I was feeling and seeing on his way to his demise. It occurred to me but I still couldn't bring myself to allow my condition to be known. As crazy as it will come across to most of the people who read this, in those moments I honestly figured it was better to risk serious injury to myself than to tell the referee that I was in distress.

I haven't spoken to him about it yet but I am pretty sure Shannon Briggs thought something very similar during his fight with Vitaliy when the questions popped into his head. And the answers he gave over the course of an eighteen year career that got him to the big fight in the first place are the same one that carried him through to the very end of it.