Around the same time as Mike Towell was losing his fight for his life on Friday night the man who has been described as the greatest sportswriter in the English language was undergoing a public interview at Stirling’s Albert Halls.

Now well into his eighties Hugh McIlvanney was as captivatingly erudite as ever, that laconic growl delivering thoughtful and insightful observations on his greatest sporting loves, football, horse racing and, of course, boxing.

Since I have repeatedly, ever since Chris Eubank hospitalised Michael Watson with a near lethal blow, expressed deep concern about the legitimacy of boxing as a sport - most recently following the death of Muhammad Ali http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/14544791.Ali___s_beauty_and_brilliance_should_not_still_blind_us_to_boxing___s_brutality/ - it was strangely reassuring to hear this journalistic hero registering his ambivalence given the part it played in his own career, not least because of his relationship with the man we both consider to be the greatest sportsman of all time. This peerless authority on the subject has the very same reservations about boxing, for the very same reasons.

Dismissing the statistical arguments regarding comparative death rates with other sports that are trotted out by boxing’s advocates, McIlvanney rightly recognises that the key difference is in the objective, the intent to deliver what Spanish fighters refer to as ‘the little death’ when knocking an opponent out. In reinforcing his point he also took the opportunity to drive home the message that Muhammad Ali was not a victim of Parkinson’s disease, as was too often reported for many years, but of Parkinsonism, a direct consequence of the blows he absorbed so effectively in the ring in the second half of his career in particular.

He spoke poignantly, too, about the death in the ring of Johnny Owen, a bantamweight fighter he observed as having a physique that was such that most who met him had to resist the urge to wrap a shawl around him and take him home for a bowl of soup. He expressed both his pre-bout misgivings about the prospect of Owen’s world title meeting with Lupe Pintor, a typically brutal Mexican slugger and his deep distaste for the environment in which he died, a grubby, hideously badly policed Los Angeles auditorium.

It would also misrepresent McIlvanney to fail to include his admission that he still has a huge love of the sport, but in saying so he concluded by observing: “maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

There is, of course, no contradiction between the intelligent understanding that boxing is morally questionable at best, if not indefensible, while admitting to both primitive arousal at the thrill of mano a mano bouts between brave and powerful men among whom many of the finest carry themselves in a manner that can only induce admiration.

It would, too, be a knee jerk reaction to seize upon the death of this fellow Dundonian as offering some sort of conclusive evidence that it is time for the towel to be thrown in by those defending boxing’s corner.

Even so, the timing could hardly have been more cruelly ironic for those of us who were hanging on the words of the man whose tribute to Ali earlier this year was little short of a work of art. Albeit inadvertently so in this instance, the characteristically timely reflections of this octogenarian colossus of sportswriting invite us all to pause for further thought about the implications of boxing’s place in our society following the loss of a healthy 25-year-old who should have had so many more years to share with his family and friends.