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Ray Mancini poignantly recalls the moment he discovered his opponent had died

Thirty five years ago, former WBA lightweight champion Ray Mancini was involved in an unenviable ...



Ray Mancini poignantly recalls...
Other Sports

Ray Mancini poignantly recalls the moment he discovered his opponent had died

Thirty five years ago, former WBA lightweight champion Ray Mancini was involved in an unenviable and horrifying situation.

Aged just 21, the US boxer had fought South Korean challenger Duk Koo Kim at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, only for the latter to collapse, fall into a coma, suffer a subdural hematoma on his brain and pass away days later.

The tragedy would have a profound impact on Mancini who joined us for a brilliant in-depth chat about his career in and out of the ring.

But touching on the sad events of November 1982, he discussed the realisation that Kim was not going to make it, having not been aware that Kim had been stretchered out of the ring.

Find the full interview below: 

Ray Mancini poignantly recalls the moment he discovered his opponent had died

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

"People said, 'How insensitive', that we were jumping and celebrating. If I'd have known that, we wouldn't be doing that," he said.

"I went over to see him after going to his corner like every fighter, he was sitting there. I was swollen, he was swollen. That's it. I just seen him sitting there. I didn't realise when we were celebrating over on my side of the ring, that he slid to the floor and they brought a stretcher. I didn't know that or else I wouldn't have kept doing the celebrations."

Following the after-fight party and after exiting the shower in his room, his trainer delivered the bad news about Kim being in bad shape in the hospital and that he may not make it.  

"It just took all the wind out of me. I didn't know what to do," he recalled of that moment when he was told about Kim's status.

He tried to go to see Kim in the hospital but "the doctors wouldn't let me see him", in the sense that wouldn't be a good idea.

"They knew he wasn't coming out of [the coma] and that it would be a matter of time," Mancini explained.

But it wasn't until he returned to the US as the press waited for him that it really began to truly dawn on him what had happened.

And of some of that reaction towards him in the media, he added, "It hurt bad!" 

He also added that in the months that followed, the "guilt was severe", while he also was on the end of insensitive questions like "what's it like to kill a guy?'

And to this day, he continues to pray for Kim and he sees him in his dreams.

Before the fight, there was an element of foreshadowing of Kim's death when the South Korean fighter had made a miniature coffin for his training camp which was intended symbolically for his opponent, which Mancini wasn't aware of pre-fight.

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