By Tris Dixon

It turns out that it is not just Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, who can’t handle the truth.

Kell Brook can’t either.

The former IBF welterweight world champion was dethroned, stripped bare, his left eye puffy and broken and his thousands of previously jovial supporters left Bramall Lane forlorn – and some even booing – after Errol ‘The Truth’ Spence ended his title reign.

It all finished with Brook, who’d been blinking his left eye while trying to shield it from the increasingly nasty punishment it had been sustaining, calling it a night in round 11. Referee Howard Foster counted to 10 when Brook took a knee to stop the barrages that were causing the optic to close. Sheffield’s ex-champion was adrift on all three cards and needed a knockout to win.

Critics will say his corner saved him against Gennady Golovkin last year but he saved himself against Spence last night.

The sport is a jigsaw of paradoxes. Should he have gone out on his shield, stretched out, exhausted and broken in front of his family, friends and fans? In this, the hardest game, some insist that is a requirement.

The ring is a lonely place. It’s even more sparse when you’re asked questions and have no answers, when your tired mind can’t tell your arms to lift themselves, when you can’t feel your feet for the weight of your sticky legs and when your lungs feel like they will catch fire if you make another move in an attempt to engage an engine that is running on empty. However, just because Brook fought back with such great character in round 10, having been dropped, it doesn’t give him a free pass for choosing not to go on in round 11.

We now know there was another fractured eye socket. The right went against GGG, the left went against southpaw Spence. The unfortunate detail for Brook is that far more gruesome injuries have been fought through, be it Chuck Wepner looking as though a blade had been taken to his eyes and, of course, Arturo Gatti routinely battled with heavily battered features.

Are comparisons unfair? Perhaps, but they’re inevitable as the precedents have been set, be it Danny Williams stopping Mark Potter while suffering with a dislocated shoulder and even more recently, David Haye going out on a sorry shield with a torn Achilles tendon against Tony Bellew. He continued until the final nail was battered into that fight.

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And this is not to detract from Spence or his superb and highly-significant achievement. He came to the lion’s den. He took the belt. And he did what Anthony Joshua did, nay, had to do against Wladimir Klitschko. He learned on the job. Early on versus Brook he found the Sheffield man hard to figure out, as he should – a highly competent reigning champion in his prime boxing at home – but he stayed true to what he wanted to do. He maintained his principles of investing into Brook’s leaned down and shredded torso, shoveling in crisp and intelligent blows with both hands. He was banking money ahead of the late withdrawal. He didn’t deviate from that, either. When movement wasn’t working he tried to take control of the centre of the ring. He stopped allowing Brook to have the last word in the exchanges. He became harder to hit, too.

The debate will roar on, for those willing to have it, that Brook was always going to wear out as the fight wore on, that the weight loss from the Golovkin moneymaker would take its toll on a man in his thirties who’d never had to cut so much muscle mass before. And what of the GGG loss? Yes, Brook was rescued before it became truly ugly, but those middleweight bombs would have done little for his longevity even if they’d set him up financially.

Again, we are deviating from Spence, which is partly inevitable when it was someone’s surrender that swayed the final verdict rather than the glove of the victor.

Spence won’t care. He doesn’t. He and fellow leading welterweight Keith Thurman immediately traded promises on Twitter that fight fans pray are genuine and will be delivered upon.

WBA and WBC ruler Thurman called him out, but needs to recover from elbow surgery and might not box again this year.

And you can’t have a welterweight conversation without mentioning Manny Pacquiao, however inconvenient that may be for some.

Spence has options, and bringing a belt to the table he will now be in more demand than he was pre-Brook. Yet it’s one thing wanting to fight someone, it’s quite another being able to defeat him.

We have a new champion with deft balance, proven fitness, the skill and intelligence to adapt and he’s now armed with some priceless experience. Oh, and he can hit a bit, too. And at 27 he’s at the peak of his powers. Kell might have been special. He might still be, although he will need more than the Shawn Porter win on his record to solidify his legacy as one of Britain’s better world champions of recent years. Perhaps the long-awaited Amir Khan fight will help in that respect, should it finally happen.

But for now, The Truth is out, and there might not be too many who can handle it.