Many hands make tragic work

IT WAS a low-key fight for what is regarded within the sport as a fairly meaningless title, but last weekend a kickboxing match at the Glengannon hotel in Dungannon cost 18-year-old Sean McBride his life.

A popular youngster who also played Gaelic football with his local Killeshill club, McBride was fighting for the first time since the death of his friend Kieran O'Hagan in a car accident. He had been driving the car in which O'Hagan died and having lost interest in most things in his life for a spell, his parents were delighted when Sean said he felt like taking to the ring again.

Last Friday night's fight was supposed to be for the World Kickboxing Organisation Northern Irish welterweight title, but the WKO says that it had withdrawn its sanction from the bout before it got underway because it learned that there would be no doctor present.

McBride still believed that he had won the belt at the end of the five round contest (most amateur fights last only two rounds), but he never had the opportunity to enjoy his sense of achievement. Within moments of the final bell, he collapsed. He was rushed to hospital in a coma from which he never emerged, leaving his parents and three sisters, who had all been at the fight, devastated and the sport he loved in turmoil.

Immediately after McBride's death on Sunday, Billy Murray laid the blame for the tragedy at the door of the Northern Ireland Sports Council. He claimed that by its refusal to recognise the sport and place the power for regulation in the hands of one body, it had contributed to the loss of the Dungannon teenager's life.

Murray came across as an impressive figure. The representative of the International Sport Karate Association in Britain and Ireland, he is from Belfast and holds the ISKA's middleweight world title. When he said that the sport had been treated disgracefully, it was not difficult to believe him.

However, the ISKA, it turns out, is not well regarded even within the sport. The Sports Council's task - to award recognition to a single body in a terribly splintered sport - is not at all an enviable one.

In kickboxing, which originated in the US during the 1970s, there are three main codes involving differing levels of contact (McBride's death occurred during a `full contact' contest) and very different ways of scoring.

In one discipline, hitting an opponent hard enough to knock him/ her down would warrant a disqualification. The sport has a seemingly endless number of organisations which claim to be the true governing body.

Of these, though, the World Kickboxing Association, the International Amateur Sports Kickboxing Association and the World Amateur Kickboxing Organisation appear to carry the most weight.

"This fight couldn't have happened under the rules of any of these bodies. We wouldn't have allowed it to," says Roy Baker, secretary of the All styles Kickboxing Association of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland's recognised governing body.

"At every level of our competitions safety is the main factor. We have all our fighters checked regularly. During a fight there has to be a doctor at ringside, headgear is mandatory, an ambulance must be standing by, and the nearest neurological unit has to be informed that the fight is going on. If those conditions aren't met, then we wouldn't sanction any of our members to take part."

In Britain and Northern Ireland, however, such control is rarely exerted - Regulations on, for example, headgear, gloves and shin pads vary wildly between organisations. McBride was not wearing protective headgear and is believed, in advance of the post-mortem results, to have died as a result of a blow to the back of the head.

Phil Mayo of the WKO claimed this week that his organisation had severed its involvement with the Dungannon promotion when it learned that no doctor would be present. Others are sceptical about this claim, arguing that many organisations are simply set up to earn sanctioning fees for meaningless title fights at which safety is all but ignored.

"These bodies spring up all the time," says Birmingham-based WKA president Paul Ingram, whose organisation claims to be the largest worldwide with affiliated bodies in 76 countries. "They put the word "world" in their title and hope that at some point somebody from Dubai or somewhere who knows no better gets in touch to give them some money for a sanction.

"If you look at the WKO, they were called the British Kickboxing Organisation until recently and they have only been operating for a year or 18 months (Mayo denies this, claiming that although his organisation has changed its name more than once, it is 13-years-old) while ISKA is a promotional company, they don't care about the sport, what they care about is money.

ISKA's claim to credibility is certainly not helped by the fact that their web site allows anyone to become a registered ISKA promoter by filling out a form that includes a request for three credit references - but no details of qualification or knowledge of the sport - and 50 dollars.

The situation is a mess. While the Republic of Ireland is relatively well-regulated, Northern Ireland isn't. Up north, AKAI have been negotiating with the Sports Council to become the sport's central body. However, the affiliation fees of the sport's approximately 2,000 enthusiasts (the figure in the south is roughly 7,000) are chased by around a dozen rival bodies.

In a non-contact sport where the risks are negligible none of this would matter much: after all there have been rivalries in several sports in this country without any genuinely serious problems arising. But, as Chris Pidgeon, a consultant neuro-surgeon at Beaumont hospital, says, "roughly speaking a brain has the consistency of blancmange and the inside of a skull has sharp edges so if you take blows there are going to be problems".