Isn't it strange when people go to the pantomime and confuse the dancing cows and the rosy-cheeked dames with real life.

Every time Naseem Hamed fights a fight, the aftermath is clamorous with solemn bells ringing their grave consternation. Naseem Hamed is a pup who, for disfiguring boxing in a manner unprecedented in memory, deserves the ultimate sanction of being planted on the seat of his leopardskin pants.

Sure. And Daisy the cow is an insult to bovine history and boxing needs to attract more humanities graduates.

The point about Naseem and the strutting the posturing and the bragging is that there is nothing new under the sun and those journalists who throw up their hands in horror should know better than to become part of the PR machine. Is anyone in Sky Sports telling Naseem that he needs to come across as a bit more of the boy next door?

Naz is a mouth and the only point worth making about him is that in the long lineage of gabby braggart boxers he can hold his place with the best. He pours on the spiel without bothering to tip us the wink, he gets innocent folk genuinely wound up and for all the talk about how his grinding win over Wayne McCullough would hinder his American push he enjoyed the highest ratings HBO have had all year. Better than Oscar De La Hoya, in whose saintly mouth butter wouldn't melt.

When it comes to panto, Hamed knows his lines and he knows his boxing history. He knows that from Jack Johnson to Sonny Liston, from early Ali to middle and late Tyson, the box office has hummed and sung when the bad guys have been in the ring. Boxing's bad guys come and they go and most of the time they are just spinning us a line, conforming to their profession's need to present itself as a morality play.

Sonny Liston was a genuine bad guy, a thoroughly troubled soul, but his drift across the dark sky of the heavyweight boxing scene was no less filled with pathos for that. He was a bad man, forlornly trapped in the world's view of himself and his story puts Hamed's in its lighthearted context.

"There's got to be good guys and there's got to be bad guys," Sonny Liston said ruefully. "That's what people pay for - to see the bad guys get beat. So I'm the bad guy. But I change things. I don't get beat."

Is there a sadder story in boxing than that related by David Remnick in his wonderful new book King of the World. Liston, having beaten Floyd Patterson in just over two minutes, was on a plane back to Philadelphia talking earnestly with one of the few journalists he could trust. He had just beaten Patterson in Chicago to become world heavyweight champion, a title which had some genuine social resonance back then.

And on the plane Sonny spoke. Sonny was going to make himself a black champion that black people could be proud of. He was going to reach his people and tell that that they didn't have to worry about Sonny Liston disgracing them, that he wouldn't be stopping their progress. He spoke of his own heartbreakingly tough and lonely life and how he was going to reach out to kids and tell them that if he could make it anybody could. His experience would be the currency of change.

And they got to Philadelphia and there wasn't a soul at the airport to greet the new champion. Liston gave a shudder, "adjusted his tie and put on his hat, a trilby with a little red feather in the band". And he got on with his lonely life.

"I didn't expect the president to invite me into the White House and let me sit next to Jackie and wrestle with those nice Kennedy kids," he said later, "but I sure didn't expect to be treated like no sewer rat."

Redemption came for Sonny Liston right at the end, when the boxing public found somebody to hate more. If white America feared a big dark brooding former thug, it found it feared a confident beat poet like Ali all the more. The late Murray Kempton captured the transition beautifully in The Champ and the Chump his report on the changing of the guard.

"I am a great performer. I am a great performer." said Clay . . .

"Suddenly everyone in the room hated Cassius Clay. Sonny Liston just looked at him. Liston used to be a hoodlum. Now he was our cop. He was the big negro we pay to keep sassy negroes in line and he was just waiting until his boss told him it was time to throw this kid out."

The morality play with sassy lippy negroes stretched back beyond that. Jack Johnson was the great black devil come to pillage white America. Joe Louis was reviled. Generation after generation turned harmless pug after harmless pug into that lucrative form of loser - the great white hope.

And then came Ali. This column wouldn't be alone in hoisting him high as the greatest sportsperson this century has known, somebody who changed the face of sport, changed the way we think of black people, retired with an enduring heroism which has made him the most loved sports figure of our time. They should have stopped boxing when Ali finished. Just before then in fact.

And yet, seldom has a boxer taunted and humiliated with such devastating combinations of lip and glove. Pumping Ernie Terrell who refused to recognise his new Muslim name around the ring. Bam. What's my name Ernie? Bumph. What's my name? Jab, jab. What's my name?

It was Ali who dropped into Floyd Patterson's training camp with arms full of lettuce and carrots to drive the scaredy rabbit back into his hole.

And subsequently Patterson was humiliated like few fighters before or since, beaten so badly by Ali that he later admitted that he hoped to be knocked out, freed from the humiliation. Ali carried him for 12 rounds, taunting him. White American. Uncle Tom. White man's nigger.

Seeing Naseem, a Muslim kid from the East End of Sheffield coming over all mouthy uneases some people. Ten generations of deferential black boxers wouldn't have made the impact for their race that Ali made. One visible and mouthy Muslim is such a jarring change from the cultural stoicism that informs the Asian experience in Britain that some people can't stand it.

It was Naz who said no to having the names of his beaten opponents painted onto polystyrene tombstones. It was Steve Collins who went to Millstreet in the wake of Michael Watson and Gerald McClellan and fooled an opponent into believing that he had been hypnotised into feeling no pain. One is pure brown panto. One is pure white cynical.

Maybe Naseem Hamed isn't a nice guy but since when did men who are paid to beat each other up have to be nice guys?