The enduring attraction of boxing still survives in spite of many problems which have arisen down the years. The sport, which many people would not agree is sport at all, continues to attract attention from young and old and this was confirmed when the National Stadium was virtually unable to cope with the numbers which turned up for the finals of the senior amateur championships a couple of weeks ago.

The interest in boxing, whether amateur or professional, survives. Very large numbers of people who never saw a glove thrown in anger were fascinated by the recent the court case involving Steve Collins and Barry Hearn.

The case attracted enormous media coverage, with television, radio and newspaper attention considerably well beyond the coverage which Collins' activities in the ring ever attracted.

Boxing also has produced some quite marvellous journalism down the years. Writers such as William Hazlett, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemmingway, AJ Liebling, Ring Lardner, Hugh McIlvanney and many others have produced superb descriptions of boxing and its characters. In this respect, The Sweet Science, by Liebling, and McIlvanney on Boxing are classical insights into the craft.

In his introduction to his definitive book McIlvanney, has this to say about the death of a frail young Welshman, Johnny Owen, after a bout in 1980 against Lupe Pintor of Mexico in a world bantamweight title challenge: McIlvanney wrote: "He (Owen) was as it happens an extreme example of someone who wanted desperately to box. His personality was a small cloud of reticence until he entered the ambience of boxing in a gym or in an arena. Once there he was transformed from a 24-year-old virgin whose utterance tended to come in muffled monosyllables into a confident, skilled practitioner of a rough but exciting trade.

"After seeing him disastrously injured in Los Angeles, Johnny Owen's tragedy was to find himself articulate in such a dangerous language. But the people who say he should have been denied access to that language run the risk of playing God. Our society will have to become much more saintly before the abolition of boxing qualifies as an urgent priority." Much of that thinking and writing came back to me in the Stadium last Friday night when a young Scotsman was being treated in the ring by medical people after he was knocked out by his Irish opponent.

McIlvanney's saintly society is still a long way away and if young men feel that they have a right to test themselves in these ways, they must be guided and controlled within accepted limits by wiser and more experienced heads.

Those heads were there last Friday night and ensured that the young Scotsman was given the very best of attention and care, something which would not have been available to him were the "ban the boxing" fraternity to get their way and the sport was driven back into the bare-knuckle underground fights which were prevalent many years ago and, according to some reports, have been making a comeback here and elsewhere.

I have no hesitation in recommending two recently published books dealing with the noble art of self defence. The most impressive of these if that by Pat Myler, a boxing journalist of long standing, whose A Century of Boxing Greats would grace any sporting shelf. He picks his 100 best boxers and, in doing so, sets off many arguments. From Ali though Dempsey, Duran, Hagler, Hamed, Holmes, Leonard, Liston, Louis, Marciano, Ortiz, Robinson, Spinks, Tiger and Turpin, all the way through to Walcott and ending up with one Carlos Zarate, he gives his readers plenty of food for thought. He includes Barry McGuigan, of course, but will annoy some by leaving out Steve Collins. The book is a superb read and will revive many memories of the great fights and the people who were on the fringes of them.

A rather less controversial tome is The Irish Boxing Yearbook, produced for the second year by the indefatigable Gerry Callan. This is a treasury of fact and statistics from somebody who is meticulous in his research and whose book should be in the pocket of everyone who likes to show off his knowledge in The Headline or Christy Carr's as they drift to or from the National Stadium on a boxing night.

Every club in the country is listed, every champion, every international representative. It is truly an indispensable collection for anyone interested in the sport.

A Century of Boxing Greats, by Pat Myler (Robson Books, £18.95).

Irish Boxing Yearbook, by Gerry Callan (Ringside Press, Dublin £7).