Three young professional sportsmen died this weekend. One, a Swedish ice hockey player killed when a teammate's skate slashed his throat, was a freak accident. The other two deaths were not. They were boxers.


James Murray collapsed after a British bantamweight contest in Scotland and never regained consciousness. Restituto Espineli died of a brain hemorrhage three days after a junior flyweight match in Manila. He was just 19 years old.


For a reason that boxing's supporters never seem to see, fatalities in the ring will always be different from those (in fact, more numerous) in other sports. The very essence of boxing is to do the maximum physical damage to your opponent. That is why fighters aim for the head.


Thus, in one sickening sense, a death in the ring is but the ultimate extension of the logic of the sport. As logical, and occasionally inevitable, as boxers who do not die but who later suffer the crippling effects of repeated rattlings of the brain inside its cage.


When these things happen, the first cry that goes up is that boxing should be made safe -- a ludicrous concept, a bit like saying that the world would be a less dangerous place if beer was nonalcoholic or airplanes incapable of flight. Make boxing innocuous by outlawing blows to the head, and it is no longer boxing.


The only thing that can be done, and in most civilized nations is done, is to enforce the strictest of medical tests of those who about to get their heads hit. But this is only partly done to protect the would-be basket case; its prime function is to cover the backs of boxing authorities so that when the inevitable happens and some poor devil fails to rise from the canvas, innocent hands can be raised.


These hands -- rarely as clean as claimed -- have had some powerful support down the years, especially from certain hairy-chested sections of the literary community. Pens as normally fine as Paul Gallico, Westbrook Pegler, Damon Runyon, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer have all made misty-eyed contributions to boxing's library of romantic bullshit.


Very little of this has had the desired effect on me. As far as I am concerned, professional boxing is an ugly sport which is staged for the amusement of those who get a buzz out of watching two men trying to do brain damage to each other. It is a world inhabited by far more than its fair share of hucksters, shysters, twisters, hoodlums and wife-beaters.


But that does not mean I think boxing should be banned. You could say much the same thing about the nightclub trade, or real estate agents, for that matter. No one suggests that those two activities should be outlawed, but otherwise sane voices persist in calling for a ban on boxing.


They are wrong, and for two main reasons. First, those who do it, do so fully aware of the risks. No one who has ever spent more than a serious five minutes in a ring is anything other than acutely conscious of the fact that if you don't do it right, it can hurt, and hurt bad. The image of the young hopeful being hoodwinked by the wily manager into thinking he is being trained for a pillow-fight is a myth.


Second, boxers (in the ring at least) harm only themselves. Unlike motor racing drivers and motorcyclists, they do not propel themselves into crowds and incinerate innocent spectators. Nor do they, like mountain climbers, hikers and sailors, expect others to risk their lives to rescue them when in trouble. Very few boxers ever get so disoriented that the coast guard has to mount a search. And no child is forced to box in school, unlike those pressed into compulsory games of rugby. Every year a dozen or more schoolboys around the globe are paralyzed from the neck down in a rugby match.


And when those who would ban boxing have considered all that, they should ask themselves why young men are prepared to enter a ring and jeopardize their brain cells. The answer, of course, is for much the same reason that they try to become rock stars, wheeler-dealers, comics or criminals: it offers a possible route from tenement to penthouse.


The Filipino boxer who died last weekend was fighting a 10-round bout for a purse of just $240. He was almost certainly doing that to fuel a dream that one day he would fight in a smoky spotlight and be paid 10,000 times that sum. He didn't make it; but enough do to populate the hopefuls' fantasies of wealth and fame. And eradicating dreams like that will take something a Iot more forceful than a gloved fist.