A Blow to the Head

The physics of boxing is slightly less ambivalent. And when the will, the imagination, when thought is removed—that's what we all come down to: physics. It might be said that our lives represent an elaborate flight from the inevitable return to inanimate matter and the laws that govern it. When Ali managed not to drop before Frazier did in Manila, he proved we can buck the trend for a while, despite extreme pressure. He is, after all, the man who kept on going against Ken Norton in San Diego in 1973, even with a badly broken jaw. When Joey Gamache went down in the second round to Arturo Gatti in Madison Square Garden last spring and then sat up, looking about him—a man in bloodstained shorts with the face of a waking child—he was diminished, but on his way back from the fall. The fall, when his head met a dreadfully effective triple combination of punches, when his body dropped beyond his control—that was when Gamache was matter and nothing more, a mindless, tumbling mass. His utter unconsciousness was as plain as a tiny piece of death: as clear as—say—Tommy Hearns's knockout at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas in 1985. Marvin Hagler had worked neatly, methodically, through three vicious rounds, one eye eventually clouded over with his own blood, while Hearns's long arms whipped in at him, increasingly powerlessly. Then, the swagger still in his shoulders, Hagler punched Hearns back into a spin, caught him with a final right and Hearns's face emptied, took on the puzzled look of a post-mortem photograph, while his body drooped over Hagler, fell without a will. Physics.

Various researchers have tried to calculate the force of a punch, placing accelerometers in punching bags, asking boxers to swing at force plates. A more realistic experiment studied the British heavyweight Frank Bruno when he punched a sixteen-pound ballistic pendulum—sixteen pounds is roughly the weight of a heavyweight opponent's head and neck. The punch travelled at a little under nine miles per second and the force it exerted was calculated at 0.63 tons. Naturally, a range of boxers would have to be tested to average out the blows for various weights and levels of ability. Still, it gives us some idea of what one punch amounts to, which is, in this particular case, equivalent to the impact of a thirteen-pound padded mallet being swung at twenty miles per hour.

In a street fight, the swing can connect where it likes; in the ring it has rules to follow, a target area for scoring blows. If the fist is correctly positioned and lands a technically proper punch to the torso or the front of the head, it is deemed 'effective'. Punches to the head, carrying with them the possibility of a knockout, or at least a knockdown, are understandably popular. What happens when the head suffers an impact depends greatly upon the physics of the skull and brain. There is a slim, fluid-filled space between the brain and the skull, which means that, when the head moves violently, the brain can literally twist on its stem inside the skull and can collide repeatedly with the surrounding bone as the skull's acceleration and deceleration fail to match that of its contents. The resultant stretching and shearing within the different structures of the brain can stress neurons beyond their tolerance. Damage to the two membranes (the septum pellucidum) that separate the two fluid-filled ventricles deep inside the brain is thought to indicate other, as yet invisible, penetrating stress. The septum pellucidum is close to the limbic lobe, an area of the brain associated with aggression. Injury here is thought to have links with violently dysfunctional behaviour. For all that the brain has a phenomenal capacity for reorganization and survival, it will always be limited by the fact that nervous tissue cannot regenerate.

A membrane, the dura, designed to hold the brain in place, can be damaged, as can blood vessels inside and outside the brain. Bleeding can increase the pressure inside the skull, even forcing the brain down towards an impossible exit, the point where the brain stem feeds out into the spinal column. Blood clots within the brain, or between the brain and skull, can cause anything from localized areas of dead tissue to coma and death. Dead tissue in the brain can, of course, affect anything and everything that we think of as ourselves: our ability to move, our senses and our personalities.