So maybe that's why the allegations surprised me. Mel Christle, he's the top guy in the Irish Boxing Union and he's very switched on. If there was anything suspicious , he'd be on the ball. I've great respect for him. But I'd obviously be very disappointed if I thought for one second that Michael Gomez was involved in something unscrupulous.

This sort of controversy touches every sport from time to time and it would be callow and naive to believe that it wouldn't happen in boxing. It happened in cricket with Hansie Cronje, and there has been the same in soccer and in racing. However in my entire life in boxing I have never ever witnessed anything like this. Gomez's heart has never been in question.

I'm not saying he's not guilty, I don't know, but if he is, then he's responsible, not boxing, and the sport shouldn't be damaged by it.

But if in fact Gomez wanted to do something like the allegations suggest, why wouldn't he have chosen a return match with Alex Arthur when the stakes would have been 10 times higher and pull off some sort of a swindle like that? RTE don't pay anything like Sky and ITV, so why not do it on another Arthur bout? There are a number of mitigating reasons but only Gomez knows.

He can give the impression of being a nasty guy, but at the end of it all, he's a good kid. All the journalists in Ireland were surprised at his belligerence at the weigh-in, but that's the way he is. He's aggressive and anything that challenges him in life, he faces with anger.

But there comes a stage in someone's career when they say, "I'm not taking anymore".

We're in the hurt business and he is an aggressive comeforward fighter. You walk through the pain, you bite on your gum shield, it knocks you right to your toes. But one day you just say, "That's enough". Maybe that was just it and it was just coincidental that it happened in that round.

There is a thin line between bravery and insanity. You look at Michael Watson, you look at Paul Ingles, you look at Gerald McClelland. So many cases over the last 40 years.

There comes a stage when you turn and walk away. For example Nigel Benn sat it out against Steve Collins. You had Alexis Arguello, one of the greatest fighters of all time, who sat on his arse in the early 80s against Aaron 'The Hawk' Prior. I'll never forget that. He had beaten up on The Hawk and he couldn't get rid of him and Prior just kept coming and coming and wearing him down and then he knocked him down.

Arguello got up and tried to fight back. He went down again and he just sat on his ass and the count got to six. Prior looked at Arguello and he just shook his head and said I'm not getting up anymore.

Maybe it just happened the kid didn't want to take anymore.

And I worry particularly for him now. I'm the president of the Professional Boxers' Association. We're working very hard with fighters and I think the kid needs to speak to our people. He really needs help because he's a kid whose life can turn to nothing and he really is one of the very sad cases because he's a lovely kid and a fighter.

Anything he got in life, he had to fight tooth and nail the whole way and I just think it's terribly ignominious for him to finish this way because the Michael Gomez I know is a guy who ripped the title from Alex Arthur when everyone thought he was finished. He proved us all wrong. He was a phenomenal fighter and life has been a bitch for him.

I don't know if we'll see him again. Don't forget Roberto Duran, my favourite fighter of all time. He walked away against Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980 and he came back and redeemed himself. But I'm not pointing the finger at Nigel Benn or Alexis Arguello or countless others and maybe we shouldn't be doing the same with Gomez. I really hope for him all the allegations aren't true.