Couldn't help worrying about the sensibilities of former Boyle town commissioner Malachy Byrne on Wednesday night when highlights of the first female professional boxing bout to take place in Britain were shown on the late news. Hope for his sake he averted his eyes.
Mr Byrne made the news recently when he expressed concern for the safety of young women who partake in that other fisty-cuffs-fest, Gaelic football. "I reckon that a lady or a girl's body is too precious to be abused, bumped and humped playing football," he declared, echoing sentiments expressed by Archbishop McQuaid, all those decades ago - except he was talking about women participating in any sport.
What Mr Byrne (or the late Archbishop, for that matter) might have made of Jane Couch "abusing, bumping and humping" Sabine Lucik into submission with her fists in the second round of the fight at Caesar's Nightclub in Streatham, god only knows.
"Women are for loving, not for hitting," they might have said, as former boxer 'Enry Cooper put it last year. Couch, of course, was the woman who took a case against the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) to an industrial tribunal earlier this year, after they had rejected her application for a professional licence on medical grounds. She won and Wednesday was the first time she had fought professionally in England, after being forced to fight abroad before then.
Predictably the occasion led to fresh outcries against women's boxing, but other than the claim that "it's just not ladylike", which just isn't good enough anymore, those who shout loudest of all, most of them male-boxing enthusiasts, merely end up, unwittingly, providing arguments to support the ban-all-boxing lobby.
While there is ample evidence to prove that the sport is damaging to the health of boxers, of either gender, to date there is no medical evidence to support the theory that it is more damaging to women.
Jane Couch, like every other boxer, knows the risks, but she is a 30-year-old adult who is mature enough to decide for herself whether or not those risks are worth taking - nobody else has the right to make that decision for her, or any other female boxer, including Ireland's American-based Deirdre Gogarty.
Couch is no different to so many of her male counterparts in the sport, insisting that boxing, which she took up four years ago, taught her self-discipline and rescued her from a life of drink, drugs and trouble with the law. Gogarty, a gifted graphic artist, turned down offers of work from Disney to pursue the sport that first enthralled her when she watched Barry McGuigan's many epic fights on television. If you attempted to protect these women "from themselves", by banning them from professional boxing, you'd receive a booming upper cut to the jaw - and you'd deserve it too. The BBBC sought to bar Couch from making a living in the ring with the most ludicrous set of arguments you're ever likely to hear - including the one about pre-menstrual tension making women more liable to accidents, more emotional, unstable and prone to injury. "I don't even know what PMT is," said Couch at the time, "and I've certainly never had it. They said women were mentally unstable so my barrister said `well, if they're unstable, surely you wouldn't leave defenceless children in their care?'. They had no answer to that. Then she asked: `Was Mike Tyson stable when he bit Holyfield's ear?' and the BBBC guy said `well, he was a man, wasn't he?', like that was okay." Best of all, though, was the argument - that is still used by opponents of women's boxing - that the whole sport might be banned if a female boxer died as a result of taking part in a professional fight. "Should such a tragedy occur when a woman is boxing," argued the BBBC's medical adviser, Dr Adrian Whiteson, "the whole sport would suffer such adverse publicity that the continuation of the sport would be at risk." "Like a male boxer dying is good PR?" asked a bemused Couch.
This argument has echoes of those news reports which state that 25,000 people died after an earthquake in Central America yesterday, including one woman, as if her death was any more tragic than that of the 24,999 men. (Reminds me of a headline in a 1929 edition of the Irish Catholic Standard - "Earthquakes in the Congo - Chapel damaged". It seems there are acceptable and unacceptable `victims').
Yes, let's be honest, the sight of two women knocking the living daylights out of each other in a boxing ring is a little hard to stomach, but only slightly more unpalatable than the sight of two men battering each other black and blue, and that's only because we're more used to it. If you're pro-boxing you just have to accept there are no sound arguments to back up a ban on women taking part. As Barry McGuigan put it: "I wouldn't want my daughter to box, but I cannot speak for every other father - if we are going to defend boxing as a sport then we must allow women to take part too."
Final word to Anita DeFrantz, vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and one of the strongest advocates of equal opportunities for women within sport: "If women want to box then no one should stop them. . . I just thought they had more sense."
