I DIDN'T see the EubankWatson fight, but I remember it with absolute clarity. The pub on the corner was showing the fight live on TV. The hype was enormous - Chris Eubank was a local hero of sorts - and the pub was packed.
When the match started we could hear the excitement, as the first punches were landed cheers went up, and when Michael Watson went down for what would be the last time there was a roar, followed by a terrible hush. Watson hasn't recovered from the brain damage he received that night.
I have always loathed boxing and when Watson lost his ability to think in that fight, I probably would have supported a ban. But I never watch the fights and hadn't thought about boxing in years.
And then Bradley Stone died after a fight. Days later the racing drivers Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna died in accidents on the Imola circuit. The jockey, Steve Wood was killed in a fall on the flat at Lingfield.
'Boxing is no more dangerous than motor racing and horse racing' This standard response to calls for boxing to be banned was being horribly illustrated on the TV and in the papers.
There are the statistics, manipulated by each sporting body, and repeated by the enthusiastic sportsmen themselves, to show their sport to be relatively safe.
And then there is the persuasive argument of watching sporting heroes transformed into ordinary mortals who bleed, talk peculiarly, spend months at a time in hospital and sometimes die.
I read the coverage of the three days national mourning in Brazil, where Senna lay in state. I saw Bradley Stone forgotten by the media in the same three days.
I wanted to say 'Ban it all'. That people should die for the sake of entertainment is barbaric, no matter how low the risk. Ban the whole lot - boxing, motor racing, the horse races and all the other sports where promoters line their pockets at the expense of life and health. And then my brain began to work again.
I thought about the world gymnastics champion, little Shannon Miller, and the long term severe skeletal damage routinely suffered by female gymnasts as a result of punishing regimes which delay the onset of menstruation. remembered how difficult it is to draw the line.
Most of us would like to die peacefully in our beds after a long and healthy life. Some people - Ayrton Senna, Shannon Miller, and Steve Woods -among them, would rather risk death or permanent injury than not compete to win.
Improvements are being fought for in most sports by the competitors themselves, against the commercial pressures for more 'excitement' and less spending on safety. But changes to the sports themselves are not the only answers.
Bradley Stone was born and grew up in the East End, the most Ayrton Senna he ever made from a fight was £8,000. He became a boxer because, in his own words 'If you haven't got a sport, there's nothin' else to do.
'There's no jobs around here. I probably would have ended up in prison. Fighting's the main thing. I can't do nothin' else'.
Richie Wenton, the man who killed Stone, has decided he can no longer box. But, like Barry McGuigan and Chris Eubank who have also been responsible for terrible tragedies, he will almost certainly get back into the ring.
Whatever the emotional cost to him, the fact remains that Wenton, like Stone 'can't do nothin' else'. This, more than the images of death and injury, is the true horror revealed by boxing.
Boxing is a brutal sport, produced by a brutal society in which young men lack educational and employment opportunities.
Added dangers
But that in itself is not a reason for boxing to be criminalised. Prostitution equally thrives on lack of opportunities, but criminalisation poses added dangers in itself.
Senna never suffered from lack of opportunity. His wealthy father funded his obsession with go-kart racing from the age of four.
When Senna grew up he built his own business empire, including the Brazillian dealership of Audi. He could have got out if he had wanted to. Not all sporting tragedies are social tragedies. And some boxers are sporting heroes not tragic figures.
One such is Cuban heavyweight Teffilio Stevenson. He could have emigrated, gone professional and competed for a world title.
But he stayed amateur and won Olympic gold for Cuba three times in row, an incredible feat and the stuff that sporting legends are made of.