Why has rugby taken so long to wake up to what boxing has long known?

New research points to small, repetitive blows damaging rugby players’ brains, but boxing established this decades ago

They hanged Del Fontaine at Wandsworth prison early on Tuesday 29 October 1935, three months and 19 days after he shot his girlfriend Hilda Meek having overheard her arranging a date on the phone and convinced himself she was seeing another man. Protesters picketed the prison the day they killed him, one told the papers that “they’re hanging an insane man”. Fontaine was a boxer, and had been a good one, twice the middleweight champion of Canada, but that was behind him. He had lost 11 fights in the last year, in the last he was knocked down four times in the first round.

When he was arrested Fontaine told the police “don’t think I’m crazy because I’m not”. But his lawyers argued that he was deluded. They called doctors, who said he had double vision, depression, insomnia, a loss of balance and that he had been bleeding from his ear. The welterweight world champion Ted “Kid” Lewis testified that Fontaine had “received more punishment than anyone I’ve ever seen”. The Guardian reported that their defence argued he was suffering from “a condition known as ‘punch-drunk’” which meant he didn’t know what he was doing.