It's a name that might have belonged to some washed-up South American crooner singing for a few Yankee dollars in Havana's Tropicana nightclub when the Mob ran Cuba: Edwin Valero. This Valero came from another page in the book of Latino cultural cliches. He was the poor kid from the barrio who discovered he could punch like a mini-Tyson and live like Mike, too – until he ended it all, hanged by his own knotted trousers in a police holding cell in Venezuela, just hours after stabbing his pretty wife to death in a hotel room, it is said.

Moralists quickly characterised Valero as a psychopathic misfit, the child of a wicked, exploitative business, a beast who represented all the evils of the fight game. Boxing was to blame, they said, because it encouraged his violent tendencies and did nothing to save him from himself. Greedy promoters who knew he was unstable and addicted to alcohol and cocaine used him up nonetheless because, in his hands, he carried enough dynamite to blow up a mountain. They called him El Dinamita. Certainly the 27 opponents they put in front of him all crumbled like dust, the first 18 before the bell sounded for the end of round one. "Tricycle drivers" Valero called them.

Everyone knew he had suffered brain damage nine years ago in a motorcycle accident; he should not have been licensed to fight for a living, some said – although no alternatives were mentioned for this marketable savage whose education pointed him more in the direction of Manny Pacquiao than Wall Street.

They'll crucify him, I thought, the minute I heard the news of his death. They will ignore the many thousands of kids from the margins for whom boxing has provided their only source of pride and dignity, not to mention food, because that's not a story. They will say, instead, that he's like Alexis "The Explosive Thin Man" Argüello, the great Nicaraguan of the 70s and 80s who shot himself with a 9mm pistol on 1 July last year, a prisoner of substance abuse and depression. He will be compared with Arturo "Thunder" Gatti, often similarly junked up and confused, found dead 10 days later in a hotel room while on holiday with his wife in Brazil. That case remains unsolved.

The wise guys will also point to Vernon "The Viper" Forrest, not crazy but foolhardy when he confronted a killer who gunned him down at a petrol station in Mechanicsville, Atlanta, also in that bizarre month of July. They will even compare Valero to the Irish super-middleweight Darren Sutherland, who took his own life last September.

The vultures trawled the archives for others among the fight game's tragic losers down the years: Billy Papke, who shot his wife and killed himself in 1936; Papke's bete noire, Stanley Ketchel, shot dead by a crazed ranch hand; Carlos Monzón (pictured left), among the best middleweights of them all, who threw his wife out of a hotel window to her death and years later, after being allowed out of prison to see his children, died when he crashed his car into the prison walls on his return.

Opinions flowed like cheap wine.

At Copenhagen airport, en route to see Carl Froch fight Mikkel Kessler in rural Herning, the new young editor of Boxing News, Tris Dixon, put some perspective on it. He reckoned boxers often struggled with their calling, because there is no sport that simultaneously makes such demands on the body and spirit.

Over dinner that night in Silkeborg, Richie Woodhall, the former world super-middleweight champion who now works a microphone for the BBC, hit a poignant note: "They'll make a movie about him one day." They probably will. Valero, in the last few hours of his 28-year-old life, even wrote the perfect, macabre exit line. "I feel so alone," he said to the police who led him to the cells. "I need to talk to somebody. Don't leave me alone."

Like a lot of boxers, Valero had been alone most of his life. Nobody did his fighting for him. Nor did they share his anxieties or hear the buzzing in his troubled head. They were not there in the morning when he ran or in the ring when he threw and took the punches. Nor were they there for Valero when he missed his flight to Cuba recently – not to sing in the Tropicana, but to get help from the country's expert psychotherapists, courtesy of his friendship with Venezuela's socialist leader, Hugo Chávez. Had he made it on to the plane, Edwin and his wife, Jennifer, might be alive today. Nobody knows.

When it was over, though, Valero had for company a battalion of wise media analysts not previously conspicuous by their concern for his welfare, but who were happy to dwell on his demise and take cheap shots at his left-wing politics, as if the two were somehow connected.

Did boxing kill Edwin Valero? I don't know. I doubt it. His mental problems would have surfaced had he been a bank clerk or a cricketer. All I know is this: boxing doesn't have a conscience, it has a turnstile.

Murray's belief to bring gland slam reward

To observe Andy Murray at close quarters is to witness an athlete wrestling with the fragile buds of genius. As he has grown physically, so his self-belief has strengthened, never more so than in a surge last year that led on through the Australian Open in the new year to what he hoped would be a defining collision in the final with Roger Federer.

But the man who can claim with more authority than most to be the best who has ever played the game was imperious. Murray broke down in tears. His game had disintegrated in his biggest test and it would get worse. Yet after his fourth quick defeat in a row since Melbourne, in Monte Carlo this month, Murray did not give the impression he was a broken man.

I did not recognise in him the resignation written about elsewhere. I saw an angry and frustrated young player, heading straight for the practice court. I saw someone who still believes he can take Federer in a grand slam. I saw a boy turning into a man. Murray may not win Wimbledon this year. But I will be having a quiet bet on him winning at Flushing Meadows, a breakthrough that will be the making of him.