THE good news is that the boxer Spencer Oliver, who received emergency surgery after being knocked down in the 10th round of a fight at the weekend, is now said to be recovering. He had suffered a blood clot to his brain.

Once Oliver was off the ventilator and showing good recovery signs, his manager and promoter, Jess Harding, was quoted as saying: ''How and why this tragedy happened no-one understands - it just did.''

With the best will in the world to Mr Harding and the young boxer's family, there really is no mystery surrounding what happened.

According to his doctors, the blood clot was caused by a torn blood vessel at the back of his brain. And what tore the blood vessel? The blows to the head that he took in the course of the fight.

This was not a brutal battering - everyone seems agreed on that. In fact, that is what makes the case all the more frightening and ominous for other boxers, young and old.

My fear is that Oliver's recovery will allow the boxing world to heave a collective sigh of relief and turn round and tell the British Medical Association and the other would-be boxing abolitionists: ''See, it's

all right. We've got better safety regulations now, trained doctors

at the ring-side, swift

emergency procedures.''

However, Oliver was lucky. The next boxer to suffer a torn blood vessel at the back of the brain may not be so fortunate - and the same thing will happen all over again.

The BMA will renew its call for a ban on boxing, the Boxing Board of Control will say that its safety procedures will again be reviewed, and if the current Sports Minister, Tony Banks, is still in office, he will repeat that the vast majority of fights take place in total safety.

Mr Banks is a former boxer himself. He is a fan of the sport. He is not a fan of foxhunting and has backed a motion to ban foxhunting.

This week, he said: ''When two fighters get into the ring, they don't set out to kill each other. When you go and hunt foxes, the idea is to kill the fox, so it isn't the same.''

Much as I disapprove of animal cruelty, I can't help feeling that he has got things the wrong way around and that our first concern as a society should be to protect the youths entering this sport.

While the Minister is correct in saying that two boxers do not set out to kill each other, they do set out out to target each other's heads, and to hit that target as hard as they possibly can.

I was taught at university that if one man hit another over the head with a weapon and his victim had a so-called ''eggshell skull'' which shattered on impact, causing him to die, then the assailant had acted with such recklessness that this was tantamount as having the intention to kill. A boxer may not set out to kill his opponent, but he fights to win, and he may very well kill the other man in the course of that fight.

Let me quote one doctor writing on the subject: ''The brain has a semi-solid consistency and weighs about a kilogramme: imagine it as a largish blancmange floating in a small quantity of milk in a Tupperware box. Hitting the corner of the box - or the jaw causes the blancmange inside to swirl and hit the inside surfaces.

''Unfortunately, unlike blancmange, the brain has a complex internal arrangement of nerve fibres and blood vessels, which tear as the swirling brain impacts on the sharp internal edges of the floor of the skull.''

He adds: ''Pre-fight brain scans may help to reduce the risk of haemorrhage, and psychological tests can detect early signs of chronic brain damage. The risk of long-term injuries is proportional to the number of blows the brain receives, so reducing the number and length of rounds might help, though more damage is inflicted during sparring than in the contests themselves. Reverting to bare-knuckled boxing would reduce the weight of the punches - the bones of the hand break more easily than the skull. Or you could just ban boxing.''

But they won't ban boxing. They won't even cut the number of rounds, change the size of glove, or even revert to bare-knuckled fighting - because they, the British authorities, are frightened that such moves would place them out of step with the rest of the international boxing community and that British boxers would simply cross the Atlantic to fight.

Let's end the hypocrisy. Boxing does not exist as a popular sport because it offers poor working-class boys - and now girls - an alternative to a life of crime, drugs and hopelessness. It thrives because of the money and publicity attached to the sport.

Labour's Scottish Health Minister Sam Galbraith, when he was a Shadow spokesman on sport, was right when he said of boxing three years ago: ''Before the television deals, it was dying on its feet. It only recovered because of the huge money pumped in by television.''

Banning boxing might well drive it underground, but it would involve only a minority of the fighters it does now, and surely it should not be beyond us to detect such illegal activities. Making it illegal would certainly kill off the financial backing it currently attracts, thus changing its status overnight.

As for the argument that boxing saves countless youngsters from lives of unemployment or hopelessness at best, then we are surely an apology for a nation if we cannot find other equally physical and mentally challenging sports for young boys to practise, but ones that do not

force them to use their skulls as

jelly moulds.