Triumph and Despair: Whyte & Warrington, Chisora & Frampton

By Tris Dixon

A CRUEL left hook, an early salvo… The margins between success and failure, victory and defeat and a merry Christmas and a rotten one are minute.

Dillian Whyte and Josh Warrington, worthy winners on Saturday night, wake up with ambitions to realise, expectations to fulfil and the biggest fights of their career on an exciting horizon.

Conversely, Dereck Chisora and Carl Frampton – who have invested so much into this business – would have tossed and turned deliberating their futures. Will they still be in the game? Is this the end? Do they need to find something else to do?

From the jubilation of the winning circle to the loneliness and despair of the losing one, two ends of a highly emotional scale.

And having been on the positive side, the negative version feels infinitely harsher.

Frampton and Chisora have tasted the euphoria. We have seen them being high-fived, their backs being slapped with mile-wide smiles having sent another man into the desolate abyss.

Now it is them watching on as their conquerors receive that same adulation.

It is such a cruel sport in that respect.

A loss at any level is horrendous. The ‘0’ on a record has become ridiculously vital in recent years and a defeat in boxing is the same as losing in a cup final match. It’s heart-breaking and inevitably involves a long, hard slog back to the summit.

Look at Frampton’s teammate, Martin Murray. The St Helens middleweight said last week it had taken him three years to get back into a big fight ahead of his match with Hassan N’dam N’jikam last night. He did not know if he lost whether, at 36, he would be able to rebuild again. Then he lost.

Already the trolls will say they have bundles of money to splash in retirement and they contend that will cushion the blow.

But did it help Mike Tyson? How was Oscar De La Hoya post-retirement? And Ricky Hatton? Frank Bruno? You could go on, of course.

And there’s a finite difference being told to retire, actually retiring, accepting retirement and then embracing a future that doesn’t include all you’ve known and trained for.

How many fighters are thinking they will box again, leaving the door psychologically ajar? Only when that door closes, is locked and the key thrown away can a fighter truly move on. No comebacks. No return. Not even the temptation to do it. You’re either in or you’re out. As Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman both said in The Shawshank Redemption, ‘Get busy living or get busy dying.’

You die a slow death if you do not or cannot let go, living with a foot in the past rather than both in the future.

We see it happen all the time.

It is why it is so important to leave everything in the ring, with no what ifs, no maybes and no should haves.

Maybe that is why Frampton seemed to consent that he lost to the better man. He has lived the life, he has trained hard and his acceptance of Warrington being too good indicated that there was nothing else he could have done.

Conversely Chisora, when asked if he was going to call it a day, said, “F*** that s***.”

There have been nights and training camps when he has been guilty of not giving his all. Maybe he will wind up in an obscure wilderness like Danny Williams, fighting on for pride, boxing to rectify any previous ills or indiscretions until there is nothing left to give.

Money neither helps nor fixes that.

Chisora was ahead on two cards despite two point deductions. Frampton never got a real foothold having been rocked in rounds one and two against the phenomenal Warrington.

What if Chisora had managed to avoid that Whyte hook, or if he’d been able to rise from the grave like Tyson Fury had last month? What if Frampton had drawn first blood? Would he be staring down the barrel of retirement?

And as raw as they may feel from the results today, the outcomes will echo through eternity, a history that cannot be unwritten, a result that cannot be overturned and facts that cannot be altered. Those who felt unstoppable had been stopped and their own realities had been distorted.

Chisora will have to plot a route back up the mountain if he feels that, at 34, he can scale it again. Frampton might have to accept that he is ‘one of’ Ireland’s best rather that ‘the’ best.

But Warrington and Whyte, two of the best performers in world boxing this year, are where they want to be, the Leeds man in particular. He talked of unifying the featherweight crowns, of taking on Oscar Valdez, Leo Santa Cruz and Gary Russell. Would he start as favourite? Perhaps not. But he was the underdog against Lee Selby and Frampton and that suited him well enough. And there are always detractors. Some who said Selby was done at the weight may now say

Frampton was on the downside.

Warrington will not care a jot.

Whyte, conversely, may now have more joy as the WBO’s No. 1 than he had as the WBC’s.

The Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury draw meant that those wanting a taste of the WBC’s green belt, including Anthony Joshua and the WBC’s mandatory

Dominic Breazeale – also victorious on Saturday night – has caused that queue to grow, and they will all have to wait if the rematch is first on the agenda for Wilder in 2019.

But one thing’s for sure, as certain as next year comes after this, there will be more winners and losers. The ecstasy will contrast the despondency. There will be tears and smiles, triumph and despair and fight fans will be watching every punch with a critical eye.

But they are not the ones who put it all on the line. Yes, they pay. Goodness do fight fans have to pay, be it subscription, pay-per-view or streaming, but at this time of year spare a thought for those heroes that we pay for and who risk damage, both long and short term, who we route for in battle and who leave the sport in lesser states than they come to it in.

It is why the losers are always worthy of consideration, for they too have sacrificed, only their immediate future is less certain.

They may all think it’s about winning but there’s more to it than that.

It can be a deeply moving sport.

Yes, we have politics, PEDs, punks and pariahs who run the sport and hand down horrific scorecards. That’s boxing. But we also have some of the truest and most honest athletes alive and that, also, is boxing.