Dereck Chisora's brawl with David Haye ruins boxing's fragile dignity I attended that so-called press conference, and the room was electrified. Reporters breathlessly recited to their desk back at home what they had witnessed and demanded big licks in the following day's papers. Tyson-Lewis, already a major attraction, grew in scale, after a brief spell of hand-wringing in which Lewis contemplated pulling out (or claimed to). Tyson was playing the desperado role he had perfected under King's tutelage. He was America's nightmare and played up to it. Again, the relationship between stagecraft and audience-alienating thuggery is not fixed. It shifts. In America fighters have thrown glasses at one another and punched each other full-on without the kind of dismay we see emanating from the Haye-Chisora hoo-ha. Because the Munich episode was so malicious and tawdry and needs to be seen in the context of Chisora's behaviour in the build-up. The face-slap on Vitali Klitschko was a violation of boxing's fragile dignity and spitting a full mouth of water in Wladimir's face was vile and endlessly disrespectful. Most prize fighters understand the basic etiquette of a brutal business. Respect for the opponent is one of the rules of the gym. Those who deviate from that principle tend to pay the price in popularity. Britain's Naseem Hamed alienated many by directing an obscene hand gesture at a fallen opponent. Haye had already offended the cognoscenti by wearing a T-shirt showing the Klitschko brothers with severed heads. People will diagnose hypocrisy in the attempt to impose a moral order on a sport in which the aim is to punch the opponent in the face. But it is precisely because boxing is "controlled aggression" (to use Chisora's handy PR phrase) that it survives. Without limits it might as well take place outside a nightclub on a Saturday night, which is more or less where Haye and Chisora took it. Life bans and jail sentences for assault were among the possible outcomes from a donnybrook that both men might have profited greatly from had they confined it to a ring and a set of ancient rules. An easily promotable all-British bout would now be seen as a reward for nastiness should the two fighters, by some miracle, escape sanction and be allowed to climb through the same set of ropes. Most collisions of this type occur before a big fight. Often they reflect poor sales and are sometimes choreographed by both camps. Or one side decides to pull a stunt. A prime example was Bernard "The Executioner" Hopkins grabbing and throwing down the Puerto Rican flag in the build-up to his bout with that country's Félix Trinidad. The shock on Trinidad's face was genuine. Haye v Chisora erupted to promote a notional fight moments after the real one had ended with perhaps the finest performance of "Del" Chisora's unwholesome career: a points defeat to the world's best heavyweight, Vitali Klitschko. Her Majesty's representative completely devalued his display with these antics. The shame is that British fighters were the authors of these scenes. For generations heavyweights from these isles have laboured against American ridicule. Frank Bruno and Lewis restored the pugilistic credentials of big British fighters. Now they are in tatters again for a new set of reasons. On review, Haye is guilty of boorishly invading the Chisora-Klitschko post-fight press conference and droning on with beer in hand, while Chisora's march towards his enemy was plainly menacing and likely to incite a fight. Why security failed to intervene is anyone's guess. Maybe they expected a face-off. If so, they forgot the face-slap and the water spit. In a sense, we see in both fighters the modern need to be noticed. Haye, who was dreadful against Wladimir Klitschko last year, is even worse as an agent provocateur. As the desperation for fame intensifies, so does the inability to distinguish between gangster posturing and boxing's need to observe some basic rules in order to keep itself alive.