Article: The Tragic Truth of Haye-Harrison

The Tragic Truth of Haye-Harrison

Audley Harrison, a mentally unhinged man, was humiliated by David Haye for the entertainment of a baying mob.

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/16112010/58/pugilist-tragic-truth-haye-harrison.html

David Haye, before the fight, predicting what would happen at the opening bell:
“When Audley is left there on his own with a pair of 10oz gloves, me across the ring looking like a caged animal and a referee who he knows can count to ten, you’re going to see a man who is petrified.”

Two days ago I blamed David Haye for the pitiful heavyweight title fight that occurred in Manchester on Saturday.

Comments came flooding in and at least 95% were telling me how wrong I was. Undoubtedly I had misjudged the mood of boxing fans. I realise I was basing my thoughts on a very different set of assumptions to most people, assumptions I need to explain.

On Saturday I found the Haye-Harrison fight a disquieting spectacle. Having defended the event last week I was sickened by what I saw. Although I never argued that Haye-Harrison was likely to be a competitive fight, I still thought it would be a fight, not the ritual humiliation of an affable but emotionally fragile man.

It was perhaps only when I saw Audley in his dressing room at the end of the night, a completely broken man, that the full horror of what had occurred hit home. I assumed that anyone who saw those pictures could do little other than feel sorry for Harrison.

I was wrong. Many people wanted to see Harrison given a good beating because they consider him a joke, a man who talks the talk but can’t back it up. Perhaps Audley is guilty of those charges but he is also a human being, not the villain in a WWE pantomime.

Long ago life played a cruel trick on Audley Harrison. He was an excellent amateur boxer and everyone told him he would succeed fellow Olympic champion Lennox Lewis as heavyweight king, and earn tens of millions as a result.

However, as soon as Audley removed the amateur headgear and donned professional gloves it became clear that he is scared of being punched. The confident, aggressive, talented boxer of Sydney 2000 has not been seen in the professional ranks.

Consequently Harrison could never fulfil his amateur potential but Audley, now 39, has tragically never been able to let go of his dream. Even after Saturday night he refused to retire and said, “This is mission incomplete; it's not completed.”

Harrison did not make all those big predictions about himself because he is deliberately deceitful. The truth is that Harrison exaggerates his talents and his potential because he is completely delusional.

Audley is unable to resolve his belief that he is destined to be heavyweight champion with the reality that he is scared to fight by the professional code. Frankly, he is mentally unwell.

Haye-Harrison was not a boxing match. What we witnessed was the psychological meltdown of Audley Harrison. And the crowd cheered. And fireworks were fired in exaltation. And Harrison was booed one last time.

Deep, deep, down, Harrison knows the truth. The closer he got to the ring the less he believed his own hype. He remembered his four professional defeats to fighters a class below Haye. He remembered getting knocked out by Michael Sprott, a far less explosive puncher than Haye. He remembered his fear of being punched. By the time the first bell rang on Saturday, Audley was petrified.

Perhaps Audley Harrison should never have accepted the offer to fight Haye. But how many boxers with wives and children to support would refuse such a hefty payday so late in their careers? For Harrison, a delusional man once promised the heavyweight title and big money fights, it seemed that destiny had come calling at last.

Even though Harrison is not cut out for professional prizefighting, certainly not at David Haye’s level, he faced his fears head on. Those fears got the better of him. Harrison was terrified but he got into the ring and got beaten up, all to provide for his family. Is that really contemptible?

Personally, I find Haye’s actions far more troubling. Haye did not have to fight Audley Harrison. This was a voluntary defence of his WBA title. Haye was not fighting a man put before him; he was fighting an opponent of his choosing.

Boxing champions, from time to time, can be afforded fights against big name, low risk opponents to earn themselves a good payday, provided those opponents are not so old or shop-worn that their health is at serious risk.

Harrison has not taken many beatings, he is not a fighter long past his prime, so I did not fear for his physical health. Only too late did I realise that it was his mental health which was imperilled.

Haye questioned Audley’s sanity before the fight, calling Audley, “mentally weak…delusional…a little bit crazy,” but this could then be dismissed as typical boxing trash talk.

However, the way Harrison psychologically unravelled in the ring, exactly as Haye had predicted, suggests that Haye had grasped the extent of Harrison’s mental problems all along. Making that realisation sickened me to my stomach.

Haye, once a close friend of Harrison, understood better than anyone that Audley was psychologically unstable and would freeze on the big stage, which he did, allowing Haye to knock him out at will.

There have been mismatches before which have misled the public but rarely have they been this tragic. Bruno-Bugner was another rather farcical British heavyweight fight, but it was still thankfully free of such pathos.

That is because Joe Bugner, the man paid to lose in 1987, was under no illusions about what was going to happen, nor was he scared. He came in overweight, defended cagily for a while and then fell over in the eighth round.

Bugner returned to his adopted home of Australia with a smile on his face and a fat paycheque. Perhaps the British public was deceived back then that the fight would be more competitive than it was. If so, Bugner was in on it.

If a deception was perpetrated on Saturday then Audley Harrison was the biggest victim. After the fight, crying in his dressing room, he did not look like a man who had just swindled a pot of money. He looked like a man who had suffered a nervous breakdown. Whatever he was paid, it was a small sum for a man’s dignity.

Haye knew that he could make himself over £5m for this because, in his words, “there's enough people in Britain who want to see Audley get completely destroyed and annihilated.”

Audley Harrison is a kind-hearted guy. He may have talked himself up but he is not in the habit of talking his opponents down. Haye didn’t care. Haye knew that Harrison would be a flailing naïf on Saturday and yet, because Harrison is unpopular, Haye thought it was okay to take advantage of him.

Haye, having destroyed the cowering Harrison, celebrated as though he had done something worthy of praise. He bragged:“At the weigh-in I could see him trembling…the fight was going to be short and sweet.”

To recap: a mentally unhinged man with a fear of being hit was offered a large sum of money to take a beating from one of the world’s hardest hitting men, and all because ten years before, in a different sporting discipline, he had been a champion.

This man, fighting his fear by deluding himself, spent two months trying to psychologically prepare himself for a bout he knew, deep down, would be his worst nightmare.

He then returned from exile to his native country, where he has long been a pariah, to meet his younger, hard-punching opponent, an opponent pandering to a baying mob who paid just to see him humiliated.

The crowd laughed at him. They booed his entrance. They cheered his destruction. Then they chanted, “You’re **** and you know you are.”

I wrote about boxing and business before the fight but on Saturday night such topics were irrelevances. This was barbarism. This was not about boxing or business. This was about right and wrong.

If I had realised just how tortured Audley Harrison was going into this fight I would never have advocated it.

In a less analytical article on Sunday, not having fully processed what I had witnessed the night before, but having realised that it was just plain wrong, I said, “David Haye, shame on you.” I say it again.

James Garner / Eurosport