(JULY 14)  It is only when someone you know or someone close to someone you know comes home from a war in a land far away, that the unspeakable horror that is war becomes something more than the abstract concept it seems to be to the overwhelming majority of Americans.

The sheer joy of welcoming home a warrior, one who has risked a life in defense of our way of life, is one of the great moments of parenthood, brother and sisterhood and friendship. Likewise, the sorrow of mourning someone who won't get to come home, someone who remains

forever young on a battlefield far from that home. is well beyond the ken of mere words.

That's why I cringe every time I hear a writer, announcer, manager, promoter, athlete or anyone associated with games that children also play, blithely make analogies to war and warriors when rhapsodizing about games and athletes. I will grant that no disrespect is intended and, it could even be argued, that those making such inane analogies think they are, in some way, paying homage to the bravery and courage of both the men and women in military uniform along with those safely clothed in athlete's garb. In truth, however, the false elevation of athletes to warriors and games to war is obscene. Sports are not war. Athletes are not warriors.

And nowhere, in sports, is this breach of decorum and decency more rampant than in the sport of boxing. Let me be very clear. I have followed boxing from childhood, I have even attempted the sport with what was, in retrospect, a comical ineptitude. I have no greater respect for any group of athletes than the men and women who combine the courage to pull on boxing gloves, climb up ring steps and walk forward to face an opponent whose sole aim is to cause them bodily harm.

The physical skills needed to compete in a professional boxing ring are a combination that few, if any, athletes in any other sport need to possess: the hand eye coordination necessary to hit a constantly moving foe; the physicality to go, all out, for 20 or 30 minutes at a, literally, heartbreaking pace; the ability to absorb ill-intentioned blows, to an unprotected head and body, meant to bring about a loss of consciousness. No other sport requires such a combination of conditioning and courage. Boxers are special people, and possess a mindset unlike any other athlete in any other sport. But, despite the fact that boxers compete in the most dangerous of sports, boxing is, in the final analysis, just that, a sport, a game, a dangerous game, one that requires an overload of fortitude and courage, but, in the end, a game.

There is nothing of a game about war. The penalties of war are not a loss on a record or even the concussive impact of being knocked unconscious. The penalties of war range from a loss of limbs to the loss of life and, often, a lifetime of horrific images seared into a mind that is never again carefree.

To those who have never experienced war, to those to whom it remains that abstract concept, the impossibility of explaining war and it's effect, is as difficult as explaining the concept of eternity to an agnostic. But, for boxers, they need only to think of their toughest fight, the one where they were the sure the round or the fight or the time trapped in a corner or on the ropes would never come to an end. Then that boxer need only multiply that feeling of atrocity ten fold and then they will have just begun to edge into what it is to be involved in war.

For the boxing fans, writers, managers, hangers-on, conjuring the feeling of involvement in a combat situation, from the periphery of boxing, is, simply, a sheer impossibility. A boxer may, momentarily, get close to a feeling of war, but will never, in the boxing ring, cross the line of what it is to be in war.

A line from Willie Dixon's wonderful old blues ballad "Gonna Study War No More," promises "We're givin' it up, we're gonna let it go." My fervent, probably naive, wish is that the aforementioned writers, announcers, fans, promoters and even boxers, everyone who persists in making war analogies about the sport of boxing, "give it up, let it go."

The next time that the opportunity to call a boxer a warrior and to call a boxing match a war arises, think of someone you know or someone close to someone you know who at that very moment may be encased in body armor or in a tank hoping to avoid land mines and would trade places, in a blink of an eye, with any boxer up against any opponent.

Do I think that utopian absence of analogy is going to happen? No, not a chance, certainly not as a result of a bunch of words on a page that most readers, who get this far, will probably label a screed. No, those "warrior" analogies will continue, they sound too good, too glamorous, to "cool" to pass up. But just keep in mind, the next time you misuse warrior or war when you mean boxer or boxing match that, basically, you're admitting you know nothing of war, and, in truth, not that much about what boxing really is. Bernie McCoy

(Photos: Iraq)