“One week ago, the doctors say he has 100 percent chance to die,” his manager, Boris Grinberg, said 10 days after Abdusalamov entered the ring. Since then, his condition has improved, and there is talk of bringing him out of the coma, his representatives said.

Abdusalamov fought Mike Perez at the Theater at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 2. He expected a tough bout, perhaps even a bloody one, the kind of televised fight that could propel him to greater heights.

The fight lasted 10 rounds, and Abdusalamov took the worst of the exchanges. Blood dripped from his nose and from cuts above his left eyelid. He fought most of the match with a broken hand. He kept asking his team, in Russian, how his face looked.

His promoter, Sampson Lewkowicz, said in the diner that he considered trying to stop the fight in the eighth round. Security stopped him.

After the fight, sportswriters and promoters gathered at a nearby bar and recounted the match. I was among them. The consensus: great, action-packed fight.

At around the same time, Abdusalamov left the arena and vomited on the curb. A cab dropped Abdusalamov at the hospital. Doctors asked his brother to sign off on surgery. Abdusalamov, they said, had a half-hour to live.

A brain scan showed swelling and a blood clot. Doctors induced a coma and removed a portion of his skull. While in the coma, Abdusalamov had a stroke.

His family set up in the intensive-care unit, where they have remained since. His brother slept on two chairs pushed together in a corner. His wife flew up from Florida with their three daughters, ages 8, 4 and 11 months. “Da-Da,” the youngest kept saying.

Abdusalamov’s manager described him as a quiet man, “always thinking about his future, about his goals.” He added, “He is dying to be champion of the world.”

During the fight, I sat 10 feet from the boxers, in the first row of the news media section. I saw Abdusalamov’s face, swollen and disfigured. What a warrior, I thought. What a fight.

In the weeks since, I have wrestled with questions over why we cover this brutal sport, in which so many combatants end up dead or neurologically impaired.

Bernard Hopkins, a boxer known as The Executioner, talked it over with me. He discussed the opportunities boxing offered, the prospect for the kind of fortune and fame that he had enjoyed. He elaborated on the risks involved, and gladiatorial sacrifice made for the entertainment of others. He could not explain to an outsider why boxers box, or why a Russian heavyweight lay unconscious in a Manhattan hospital. But he tried.

Hopkins remembered visiting a fellow boxer, Leavander Johnson, as he lay in a coma after emergency brain surgery after a title fight gone wrong. Hopkins stood on one side of the bed. Oscar De La Hoya, a man Hopkins once leveled with a devastating body blow, stood on the other. They prayed, and when they lifted their heads, their eyes met.

“Man,” Hopkins said he told De La Hoya, “see what we put our bodies through.”

Johnson died, and yet neither man considered retirement. Hopkins, 48, fought last month.

Boxing, Hopkins says, saved his life.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said. “I mean, how many people go to work and say, literally say, ‘I might die tonight.’ But that’s boxing. Whenever there’s a fight, there’s a possibility of death.”

Hopkins could not explain why boxers box, but since they do, he wants to help.