DALE Butler's nothing if not a good sport.

Donning gloves, boots and headguard, and exposing a frame perhaps not best suited to the job at hand, the Sports Minister leapt into the ring this week to help throw his support behind a new boxing facility opened by long-time coach Forty Rego.

It was a nice gesture, raised more than a few chuckles and likely provided our photographer Tamell Simons with some of the most amusing pictures he's snapped in a while.

Butler, of course, will have been well aware of the monumental contribution Rego has made to boxing over the past five decades or more.

And he will have appreciated that in that time both the coach and the sport itself simply haven't had the recognition they deserve.

In effect, the opening of Forty's new sparring ring served as thundering left hook flush on the nose of both this and the previous Government.

While successive administrations have dilly dallied over a National Sports Centre, they've done absolutely nothing to help promote a sport which, after all, brought Bermuda its only Olympic medal.

Clarence Hill's bronze at the 1976 Montreal Olympics arrived at a time when boxing on the Island was thriving.

Dozens of young kids were involved in a programme at Pembroke Youth Centre, and fight nights a regular and hugely popular feature at the BAA gymnasium.

Since then we've produced the likes of Troy Darrell, arguably Bermuda's most successful professional, Olympian Quinn Paynter and a number of others who showed enormous promise.

But sadly, despite the efforts of both Rego and Darrell, the sport spiralled into an almost uncontrollable decline.

Lack of cash, and more significantly the lack of a suitable facility pinned boxing firmly on the ropes.

And nobody in successive sports ministries has done much to stop the rot.

Not everybody, of course, endorses the fight game. It's been vilified in some medical quarters as "unacceptably dangerous" and there have even been calls for it to be outlawed.

Supporters, however, would point out that properly regulated fight cards carry no more risk than any other contact sport.

And what, almost universally, remains indisputable is boxing's enormous popularity.

World championship fights attract more TV and closed circuit revenue than any other event.

Just here in Bermuda, whenever a fight night is arranged ? regardless of the fact that the standard these days can be painfully poor ? there's never a shortage of customers at the gate.

Despite the absence of a properly equipped gym, fighters such as Theresa Perozzi (the Island's only pro) and Caribbean Championship medal winners Trace Easton and Sharieff Wales have shown that the sport still has enormous potential.

Thanks to the veteran coach's initiative to set up a facility in his own backyard, there's every reason to believe that potential might now be developed.

If boxing can be hauled off the canvas, there's no better man to do it than Forty Rego.

Hopefully, he can get the support he's long deserved.

ASSISTANT Sports Editor Matt Westcott works his last day at this weekend before returning to his native England.

We'll miss him and the considerable contribution he's made to these pages in a relatively short time.

But, Bermuda sport as a whole might miss him more.

There's hardly a sport he hasn't covered, and covered with a thorough professionalism which sadly isn't always evident in the local media.

We wish he, his wife Karen and their newborn all the best.