BOXING PUNCH-UP CONTROVERSY:DERECK CHISORA and David Haye live in the Land of no Consequences. It is a strange place, peopled by cossetted individuals who refuse to live by the rules the rest of us take for granted. They have for neighbours footballers, politicians, various Z-listers, singers and wannabes waiting for a next headline.

But Chisora and Haye are different from all of those. They trade in life-threatening skills. They are trained to inflict damage and do so willingly and for lots of money. They left their innocence at the door a long time ago and they have responsibilities to themselves and each other to help preserve the little dignity professional boxing has left.

None of that, of course, entered their tiny minds in Munich in the early hours of yesterday morning.

When these two men-children confronted one another with violent intent in a press conference at the Olympiahalle, less than an hour after Chisora’s sanctioned brawl with Vitali Klitschko, they knew exactly what they were doing.

They knew the cameras were rolling, the microphones on and the writers watching and listening. “It was a very charged atmosphere,” Chisora’s promoter, Frank Warren, said, “and it just got out of hand.”

You could say that.

Haye might not have thought when he gate-crashed the party that he would end up lamping Chisora. That is the mindset of people from the Land of no Consequences. Nor did he think, probably, that he would then hear his fellow pugilist scream at him: “He glassed me! F***ing pussy . . . David, I’m gonna shoot you. I swear to God, David, I’m going to f***in’ shoot you. I’m going to shoot you. I’m gonna shoot David Haye. I am going to shoot David Haye. He f***ing glassed me . . .”

Haye had left the scene of the crime by now but his friend, trainer and manager, Adam Booth, was still there, blood streaming from a wound on his head.

There were no bottle scars on Chisora, apart from a little blood about his mouth, but Booth had his obvious battle scar. “I want to know who glassed me,” he said to Chisora, who by now was in a conciliatory mood, wiping the blood from Booth’s head with his towel. That is another trait of the cossetted self-delusionists: they are as quick to forget as they are to “move on”, as the expression goes. They wait for no judgment but their own.

Those who know Chisora best might have seen this coming. When the district judge Quentin Purdy gave Chisora a 12-week suspended prison sentence in November 2010 for assaulting a former girlfriend, he gave him a warning he should have heeded.

“You clearly have a problem with violence,” the judge said, referring to Chisora’s previous convictions for public-order offences, assaulting a police officer and possession of an offensive weapon, “and that has got to stop or your career will be over.” On Saturday night the 28-year-old heavyweight, whose professional business is violence, again lost control of his volatile emotions. Baited by Haye, he snapped. Unable or unwilling to trade verbally, he turned to the language in which he felt most comfortable, the one whose alphabet can be sounded out in the crunching of bone and muscle.

In a pre-emptive strike he probably had not counted on making, Haye crashed a right hand on to Chisora’s jaw and instantly joined him in infamy.

Both were culpable: Haye of pushing an emotional man too far, Chisora of resorting again to the sort of physical problem-solving referred to by judge Purdy.

People were quick to blame the unseemly fracas on boxing. Boxing was not to blame for what happened, Chisora, Haye and all those indulged by them were culpable.

Boxing teaches discipline and respect. It is the core of the sport. Without it, the exercise descends into what we witnessed in Munich after the real fight which, incidentally, was worthy of the world title attached to it.

Chisora, in fact, fought as well as he ever has done, and lost. And then he lost again.

If he’d maintained his dignity, ignored the tumult around him and walked away – as his blessed trainer, Don Charles, would liked him to have done – he would not have had to endure the humiliation of being arrested at Munich airport and dragged to a police station for further questioning yesterday.

- Guardian Service