The ugliest word in boxing is “quit”. Muhammad Ali wouldn’t do it when he fought all the way to the finish with a broken jaw against Ken Norton.

Danny Williams wouldn’t do it when he knocked out Mark Potter with a dislocated right arm. Audley Harrison, often derided, came from behind nursing an injured shoulder to knock out Michael Sprott in the final round. Don’t even start with the bare-knuckle boys.

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Ali’s account of his 12-round championship fight with Norton in 1973 is worth recounting: “I think back to the second round, when Ken Norton got in through my guard and crashed a left up, breaking my jaw. I felt a snap and a sudden gush of blood in my throat. There were 13 rounds left. I went through round after round. Why didn’t I stop when I could have got my face torn off? Maybe because I didn’t believe Norton could beat me, even with a broken jaw. Maybe because I’ve never backed off from a fight.”

The surgeon who wired Ali’s jaw said: “I personally don’t understand how he could have gone 11 rounds with that much pain. It was a very bad break. The bone which was broken had three or four jagged edges. The edges kept poking into his cheek and into his mouth. He had so much pain during the fight that he’s totally exhausted right now.”

On Saturday night in Las Vegas, Nicholas Walters, a ferocious puncher from Jamaica, quit against Vasyl Lomachenko, one of the game’s genuine wizards, in the seventh round of their fight for the WBO super-featherweight title. He did not have a broken jaw. Nor was his arm broken or his shoulder dislocated. He had not even been down. He had a punch that might have won him the fight at any point in the remaining five rounds but Lomachenko was simply boxing his ears off.

Beforehand Walters said he would destroy Lomachenko. He was a warrior. He was irresistible. This is what he said later: “I think basically it was inactivity. It has been a while since I’ve been in the ring. Going back into the ring after so much layoff, it wasn’t a warmup fight. He was the champ. He was on target. You could see he was on target more than I was. He was throwing some pretty good shots in the last round and my corner decided to stop the fight.

“Unfortunately, the inactivity, it took a toll on my body. I tried. I tried each and every round to catch him but my punches kept on hitting his guard or he’s off range. If I had maybe one or two warmup fights, then take him on at the end of this year … I wasn’t finding my reach. Everything was off. It was an off night for me tonight.”

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As Barry Jones (who once held the belt Walters and Lomachenko were contesting) said on BoxNation as Walters gazed into the middle distance before the fight had started: “He doesn’t look all there.”

Nor did he. He had been out of the ring since last December – when he drew with one Jason Sosa – and may have had problems getting work. When Walters got it, the work proved not the sort he was looking for.

It was a tough gig, mind. Lomachenko is a one off. He boxes instinctively rather than by the diktats of repetition. His combinations have no pattern, because he mixes them up, riffing like a jazz musician. And Walters struggled to respond to the rhythm.

Walters finally came out of his shell in the sixth round – a last, frustrated gasp of effort to save his pride – but Lomachenko is as organised in defence as he is intuitive in attack. He swerved, dipped, blocked, eased in, eased out, and all the while his buzzsaw fists still tormented his opponent.

The end was as weird as it was unexpected. Walters was soaking up a blizzard of quality shots but did not look like going over. When he returned to his corner, he had a discussion with his seconds and then with the referee, and it was done. Over. Thanks for coming.

The booing punters at the Cosmopolitan took the not unacceptable view that fighters fight. That’s their job. They don’t take the money and then decide the job is too difficult. If that were the case, your garbage would never get collected. This was a classic “no más”, an irreversible draining of the will.

As Barry Jones remarked: “The bigger the risk you take, the more exposed you are against Lomachenko. But [Walters] could have done a bit more. Whatever he could have done, what you don’t do is quit. That is the sign of a bully. Every boxer who is watching this will be astounded.”

Jones knows the dangers better than most. The British Boxing Board of Control took his licence off him in 1997, even though he was a world champion, when a brain scan revealed an abnormality. He won it back and went on to challenge for the title again three years later. After Acelino Freitas, a puncher every bit as destructive as Walters, knocked him down six times and stopped him in the eighth round, Jones retired. It was the right call at the right time.

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On Saturday night, Walters did not get the decision or the timing right. As his conqueror said: “In the beginning he said he was a gladiator, he was going to do this, he was going to do that. In the end, he didn’t show up. He just quit.”

Most fighters have frustrations outside the ring, as Walters clearly did, but they don’t want to quit. Sometimes, maybe, they should.

Even as the nobly tough Eduard Gutknecht lay in a London hospital last week recovering from an operation after his fight against George Groves, Nick Blackwell, who survived a similar scare against Chris Eubank Jr last March and had to retire from the sport, was in hospital for the second time in eight months. Blackwell, who is now a trainer, could not resist the urge to do what he trained all his life to do. Michael Watson, disabled after losing to Chris Eubank in 1991, said years later he would gladly fight again if he could.

The fine judgments boxers make during a fight are not confined to when to punch, slip or duck. They must also know when to acknowledge they have given as much to the cause as might be considered reasonable and safe. It is often beyond their understanding of their circumstances to get that call right, because of their hard-wired refusal to give up, even when under heavy shelling.

No such argument can be made for Walters. His reputation has been seriously damaged. The next time he gets in a ring, his opponent will look across and think the worst of him: “He’s a quitter.”