Two hours before Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota would enter the ring last Friday night, I ran across Dr Ferdie Pacheco in the press room in the concrete bowels of The Palace at Auburn Hills in Michigan. Although a physician by trade, Pacheco in his best-known role worked the corner of Muhammad Ali for many years.

The "Fight Doctor" recently retired from a second career as a television pundit.

A renaissance man, he is also a painter and author of some note.

That night in Michigan, Ferdie signed and presented me with a copy of his latest book, The 12 Greatest Rounds of Boxing: The Untold Stories, which I slipped into my briefcase after thanking him. It wasn't until I was on an aeroplane the following evening that I began to leaf through it, and found myself reading an account of Jack Dempsey's 1919 fight against Jess Willard in Toledo, Ohio - barely a stone's throw from the Tyson-Golota venue of the previous evening.

Dr Pacheco included a gruesomely clinical dissertation on the injuries Willard incurred in that fight: "In the first round Willard's zygomatic arch (cheekbone) was broken in 12 places. In the same round the champion sustained a broken nose, a jaw that was broken in 13 places, and eight avulsed teeth. In addition to the facial fractures, he suffered two fractured ribs."

Despite this litany of pain, Willard answered the bell for the second round, and when that was over he reported for and finished the third as well, a circumstance which seemed to acquire even more significance in light of Golota's timid showing against Tyson.

Three minutes into the bout, the Polish enigma, who was being paid $2.2 million, attempted to retire following a first-round knockdown, only to be dissuaded by his veteran trainer Al Certo.

And after two rounds against Tyson, Golota did run up the white flag. Resisting Certo's attempts to reinsert his gumshield for the third round, Golota stomped across the ring to a neutral corner, where he was intercepted by referee Frank Garza. When Garza tried to steer him back to his own corner, Golota said, twice, "I quit".

There followed the liveliest exchange of the evening, between the 6 ft 4 in, 240 lb (17 st) heavyweight and the 74-year-old Certo, the latter trying to shove the mouthpiece down Golota's throat and the former shaking his head from side to side like a stubborn baby refusing its bottle. Then, when the bell rang to announce the third, Golota stormed out of the ring, climbed down the steps, and strode off toward his dressing-room, being pelted with beer, popcorn and refuse as he did.

Golota's display of cowardice - and there is no other way to put it - is all the more noteworthy because of two other events which did and did not take place an ocean apart the same evening.

The latter refers to the plight of Wayne McCullough, the former bantamweight champion forced to withdraw from his scheduled bout at the Ulster Hall after a brain scan showed irregularities. McCullough's reaction to this terrifying news was pretty much what one would expect from a warrior - he went out searching for another doctor who would give him another test in the hope that he could still fight.

In Boston, a 26-year-old featherweight named Bobby Tomasello battled, literally, to the death in his fight against Ghana's Steve Dotse. Tomasello picked himself up off the floor after knockdowns in the ninth and 10th rounds and finished the fight. He lapsed into a coma in his dressing-room and was rushed to a hospital, where he died yesterday.

When Golota quit against Michael Grant his handlers blamed an "anxiety attack". When he quit before he ever started against Lennox Lewis he had supposedly suffered a seizure.

In their eagerness to assemble a retroactive defence for the indefensible this time, Golota's connections released ever-escalating medical bulletins which had him suffering from everything from a concussion and a herniated disk to a broken jaw. If you didn't know better you'd think it a wonder he's still alive.

"Had he had sustained another serious blow to the head, he could have become paralysed," gravely reported one Chicago doctor after examining Golota - who, incidentally, never complained to the ringside physician, either in the ring or in his dressing-room, on Friday night.

One could not help but be reminded of Dr Edward Ryan, the surgeon who performed laser surgery on Sugar Ray Leonard's retina eight years ago. Although the doctor pronounced his patient's eye "better than ever", he responded to a reporter's question by adding that he didn't think Leonard should ever fight again.

Only following more direct line of questioning did it subsequently develop that Dr Ryan was philosophically opposed to boxing in any form and didn't think anyone should ever fight in the first place.

The point is this: when he quit against Tyson, Golota didn't say "my head hurts", he complained that Tyson had repeatedly head-butted him. (From a vantage point not 10 feet from the ring, I saw just one headbutt, that in the second round, after Golota had already tried to quit once - and that one missed!) He didn't say "My back is sore", he said "the referee no do his job".

And he never mentioned his jaw. He said: "I quit!"

Am I saying here that Golota should have risked his health to continue? No. I'm only saying that, given his fragile psyche, he never should have been in the ring in the first place. Wayne McCullough wouldn't have quit against Tyson. Neither would Bobby Tomasello. Andrew Golota, quite simply, chose the wrong line of work.