Where Have You Gone, Sugar Ray Robinson?

I have been around gyms and pugilists since the early 1960s. I have seen the greatest fighters end up living in rooming houses, picking up cans to get the deposits. I have seen champions who are now indigent, depressed, deranged, emotionally troubled, in need of professional help.

It almost seems like a curse of the gods, or maybe a message. The three greatest champions who ever lived all ended up with the most tragic medical problems. They all boxed too long. All three made ill-advised comebacks; they got hit too much at the end.

Joe Louis suffered from paranoia and dementia, and was confined to a mental hospital for a time. His declining years were spent hearing voices and covering up the air vents in hotels.

Sugar Ray Robinson suffered from Alzheimer's disease the last fifteen years of his life. Fans cherished the memory of his knockouts of LaMotta, Graziano, Turpin and Fullmer, but he had no memory of them. He could not recognize his sister or his grandchildren and stared at the wall with a faint smile on his lips.

The causal relationship between thousands of blows to the brain and diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is accepted by most doctors involved in sports medicine. In 1993, a detailed report was published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that analyzed all the existing information on brain damage to boxers. The study concluded that "dementia pugilistica" (the scientific term for the layman's "punch drunk") afflicts 9-25 percent of all professional boxers. The symptoms include tremor, memory loss, inattention, impaired hearing, paranoid ideas and "a decrease in general cognitive functions." Doctors believe that repeated blows to the head are one of the triggers of Alzheimer's.

"Dementia pugilistica" is more likely to affect boxers with longer careers because they absorb more punches, and heavyweights because the blows arrive with greater force. It is less likely to affect amateur boxers, who wear headguards and box fewer rounds.

We have all seen Muhammad Ali and winced. We saw his trembling hand light the Olympic torch in Atlanta. The Greatest has become our mute, iconic, bloated Buddha. The man with the fastest hands and legs in sports now moves as slowly as though he were under water. The wittiest athlete now whispers inaudibly. His body is ravaged by Parkinson's, a disease that is degenerative and will never get better.

Watching Ali on a dais being lovingly fed by his wife, Lonnie, hurts my heart and makes me question my own fandom, my own complicity in his debilitation. Seeing a tape of his epic fight with Joe Frazier in Manila has become a bittersweet experience for me. While it was happening in 1975, I was drenched with sweat, hoarse from screaming and emotionally spent from the ebb-and-flow drama. But today, seeing the aftereffects on both men has made the greatest fight I ever saw no longer such a powerful argument for the sport it once exalted.

If this is the fate of the greatest boxers, what happens to all the local club fighters around the country? What happens to the tough kid from Mexico or Philly who has thirty hard fights over six years, and never becomes famous or a champion?

How does he take a vacation? What chance do his children have of going to college? Who pays his medical bills? Who pays for his funeral?

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