50 years later, following in Ali’s fleet footsteps
PARKINSON’S PATIENTS ARE taking to the ring to ease the impact of the disease, which the boxing great has lived with for years
“They feel they have this issue going on in their bodies and they just don’t know how to control it.”
COURTNEY SHELTON
The boxer floats across the floor, gently stinging her prey with pink-fringed gloves. Opposing her is a bobbing, bald-shaved muscleman, Frazier to her Ali.
We are at a storefront in Washington usually given over to Brazilian kung fu. The bruiser in the pastel gloves is Audrey Katz, age 70-plus. A pacifist at any other hour, she is convinced that it is this strenuous regimen of fisticuffs and footwork that is keeping her moving and able.
In Katz’s story, there is irony and history. The 25th of February will mark 50 years since a brash and beautiful Olympian named Cassius Clay left the bilious Charles “Sonny” Liston sitting baffled on his stool to claim the heavyweight championship of the world, in an age when, to me and millions of others, this greatly mattered.
A few days later, embracing Islam — the faith to which he has adhered for half a century — he bade the world call him Muhammad Ali.
Over the next two decades, in inner-city theatres and, seven unforgettable times, in person in coliseums and casinos, I watched Ali defend his title, or be deposed of it, against Joe Frazier (twice), Earnie Shavers, Leon Spinks (twice), Larry Holmes and, finally, Trevor Berbick, the Jamaican-Canadian who ended Ali’s career on an unbearably sad night in the Bahamas in 1981.
“All of us lose in life in some kind of way,” he told me in his bedroom after Holmes mauled him, as mercifully as possible, in Las Vegas. “There is a time for failure. There is a time for success.”
In 1985, I was with Muhammad Ali again at a banquet in Beijing when I saw him tilt a cup of tea into his lap. I wrote back then that he had begun to move “in the slow-motion melancholy of age before its time.” Those were easy words for a kid to write, nearly 30 years ago. Now Ali is 72 and I’m 64.
The episode in China was, of course, the beginning of Ali’s solitary journey through the second half of his life under the shadow of Parkinson’s disease, caused, his doctors have said, by thousands and thousands of blows to the head over three decades of public, Pyrrhic combat.
About three years ago, Katz, a computer expert and grandmother of eight, began to exhibit the same shaking and stiffness that we see in Muhammad Ali.
“I saw the way her right hand was carried — when she walked, it didn’t swing,” her husband, Sheldon, says, when I ask about the first clues. Katz’s physician confirmed the suspicion: Parkinson’s disease.
“How did you react when you heard the news?” I ask the patient.
“I thought, ‘Oh, shoot,’ ” she replies.
By the time Katz received her diagnosis, it had been shown that exercise, as much or even more than medication, could militate against rigidity and tremors in Parkinson’s patients and have an uplifting effect on their spirits. An organization in Indianapolis called Rock Steady Boxing — founded by a former county prosecutor who had been diagnosed with the disease at the age of 40 — began taking this advice to an incongruous conclu- sion, given Ali’s near-total deterioration: What heavyweight fighting had given one person, light sparring might ease in another.
A rower, wrestler, and runner from the Washington area named Courtney Shelton travelled to Indiana to become certified in the Rock Steady regimen. Now he works with Katz and other Parkinson’s patients, here at the Brazilian hall.
“They feel they have this issue going on in their bodies and they just don’t know how to control it,” Shelton says. “They have the tremble. They have the dragging armand the dragging leg. They’re afraid of falling. They’re afraid of hurting themselves. They feel too weak to do anything.”
“My wife is a typical woman of her generation,” Sheldon Katz says as Audrey begins to fling uppercuts and hook-jab combinations at trainer Shelton’s padded hands.
“When she was told she should start exercising, she said, ‘I don’t do that! I don’t sweat!’ But now, she is motivated. She knows that this is good for her. She’s even doing sit-ups. She couldn’t do a situp to save her life!”
“I see a lot of her reaction time coming back,” Shelton reports. “Her large motor skills are coming back. Her balance, her co-ordination, her confidence are coming back.”
When he was a boy in Boston, Sheldon Katz laced on the mitts and engaged in a handful of amateur fights. He was never knocked out, he says, but a couple of his bouts were stopped because of a bloodied nose.
It was a time when every fighter, every American, everyone on Earth knew the heavyweight champion’s name and either adored his bravado or abjured his politics.
“I hated Ali,” Sheldon Katz says. “I loved his boxing, but I didn’t like anyone making a spectacle of himself tearing up his draft card.”
Banned from his livelihood, acclaimed by a new generation, shunned by older patriots of a certain set, indomitable in a ring or outside one, Muhammad Ali would endure four years in the wilderness for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, but he would fight in enough two-man wars to scar himself forever.
Now, 50 years after he burst like a firework onto the global stage, fighters against all of life’s opponents add a third stanza to his credo: Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee. Walk on in dignity.