No red flags in review of boxer’s fatal bout
The blood was probably pooling inside Maxim Dadashev’s head as he began to stumble Friday night, minutes before he collapsed and vomited on the stretcher rolled out by emergency medical personnel.
The 28-year-old boxer had just stepped down from the ring in the Theater at MGM National Harbor in Oxon Hill, where he’d sustained the first loss of his career, a technical knockout that came after his trainer stopped the fight. Within minutes, Dadashev was in an ambulance, and about four hours later he was lying in a hospital bed, with layers of gauze covering the opening the surgeon had cut in his skull, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to save his life.
The Maryland State Athletic Commission, in a statement Wednesday, said it was reviewing the circumstances surrounding the fight and Dadashev’s death, the second tragic outcome to a boxing match in the Washington region in four years. But unlike that earlier fight — in which a lawsuit alleges the ringside doctor missed warning signs of developing brain damage that left Prichard Colon in a near vegetative state — there have been no indications or allegations that fight officials failed to spot signs of the brain hemorrhage that led to Dadashev’s death Tuesday.
“There wasn’t anything there to lead me to believe the fight should’ve been stopped earlier,” said Donald Muzzi, president of the Association of Ringside Physicians, who has reviewed the video of the fight between Dadashev and Subriel Matias.
The first signs of a problem came late in the 11th round, according to Muzzi, when Dadashev — who had fought mostly even with Matias through the first nine rounds — nearly slipped and fell to the canvas after taking one punch, and swayed slightly as he tried to maintain his balance.
“He was staggering a bit; he seemed a bit distant and, at that point, it did look like something was going on,” Muzzi said.
Dadashev never came out for the 12th round, after James “Buddy” McGirt, his veteran trainer, told the fighter he was stopping the match. Minutes later, Dadashev was in an ambulance, headed for University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly.
Ringside, there was some confusion among reporters getting information from Dadashev’s camp that the ambulance was initially headed to another hospital — either Washington Adventist in Takoma Park or MedStar Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia — before settling on U-Md. Hospital Center. This information was incorrect, according to Michael Butler, vice president of Special Events Medical Services, the private company hired for Friday’s fights by promoter Top Rank.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Butler said he and his crew decided before the fight even started that they’d be taking any boxer suspected of a brain injury to U-Md., and they alerted emergency room personnel there of the possibility, in line with safety protocols set by the Association of Ringside Physicians. The facility was the closest level I or II trauma center — meaning neurosurgeons are either on site or on call 24 hours a day — that didn’t require driving into the District and dealing with city traffic, Butler said. (MedStar Washington and George Washington University Hospital, the other two hospitals with adequate trauma centers, are roughly the same distance from National Harbor as U-Md.)
“There was never any discussion about taking him anywhere else,” Butler said. “Everything went very smoothly. He got to the hospital very quickly, and we gave him every chance … the whole thing is so sad.”
Dadashev arrived at the hospital about 10 minutes after he departed the MGM, according to Butler, which would have been about 11 or 11:15 p.m. Friday. At about 2:30 a.m., the neurosurgeon, Mary In-Ping Huang Cobb, walked into the waiting area in search of Dadashev’s family, but instead found his manager and his trainer.
There was no family there, explained Dadashev’s manager, Egis Klimas. The Russian-born fighter’s wife was en route from Saint Petersburg, Russia, where they lived with their young son.
There had been massive bleeding, Cobb told Klimas, and she had removed a portion of Dadashev’s skull above the right side of his forehead to try to relieve the pressure on his brain. The boxer’s lean physique had presented a bit of a challenge, Cobb explained, because surgeons typically store the removed skull in the patients, between pockets of fat and muscle along the abdomen, but she couldn’t find any fat on Dadashev.
The skull section sat in a freezer, and Cobb expressed hope Dadashev would rebound, and within a few days or a few weeks she would be sewing it back into place.
At nearly 3 a.m. Saturday, as Dadashev’s manager and trainer searched for an unlocked hospital exit, they encountered Dadashev, lying on a bed, his head wrapped in white bandages as hospital staffers wheeled him to a different room. The boxer’s manager and trainer watched for a few moments as Dadashev rolled past them, and through a set of double doors, until the doors closed behind him.