Why do hard fights 'taken something' from fighters

It depends how young a fighter is. A 25 year old fighter can take a hellacious beating and totally recover, but it will take years off his prime. A guy who was in grueling fights as a young fighter will probably be shot by 30. Like Erik Morales. He would get into constant wars and it seemed liked his body had an incredible ability to act like it never happened. But then at age 29 all the punishment caught up with him and he was done.

 

First off, a # of major factors go into this: age, hydration, nutrition, any imbalances, blood flow, conditioning, accumulation of damage and years of damage taken. Then, as an educated poster mentioned earlier, cortisol comes into play. Cortisol is the hormone that breaks tissue down. In a fight, a lot of cortisol is being released because the body is being incredibly stressed, include that with taking punches - how hard, how accurate, how well timed, how many - and it can get very messy. If your stressing your body and cortisol is running wild, and your taking punches, your neurons, nerves, nerve endings - all the major components in your brain and nervous system - they too are being stressed and broken down beyond repair. Once they are broken and destroyed, it's almost a 100% chance you will never get them back. This affects everything from speaking, to walking, to punching, to balance, to even being able to get a semi erection, to memory recall, etc., etc. So those two components, mix them together, and the cortisol has now broken down the muscle tissue that the nerves and neurons controlled but were also destroyed........... See how it goes?

 

Bert, have you forgotten that you sadly died last year??

 

I wish I was the real Bert Cooper. I am just an ex boxer and lifetime boxing fan that loved Smokin' Bert.

 

Well in the gatti ward trilogy Mickey got a detached retina, that's got to rank up there.
In the srl Donny lalonde fight the golden boy got smashed in the Adams apple
In the rjj Virgil hill fight some ribs were broken
And margarito received permanent eye damage in the Pacquiao fight.

 

Hey Devon. Ignore some of the characters on here that chat a good game. It is a good question and one unique to combat sports.
In my limited experience, if you win a war it drives you on. You have reached a new realisation of what you can take and what you can achieve. Next time you are in that situation you have tremendous self belief. You have never met the end of your tether.
However, lose a fight like that, live with the pain in your face, your head your ribs for weeks after you lost. That takes something away. You never want to give that much and get that badly hurt again just to lose. Confronted with the possibility of another fight to the edge, you'll be frightened.
Really brave Fighters like Matt Saad Muhammed, Carmen Basillio and Ali can confront it and still put themselves through it again. Most of us mortals tuck up and lose on points. Let it go. It's not worth going there again.
Eventually, even the brave ones are so damaged they can't fight anymore anyhow.
You'll always give Boxing more than you get back. We do it because we love it.