‘It’s a huge issue in boxing. We need to change this attitude where it is okay for injured fighters to keep going...’
A harrowing book on the long-term effects of brain injury in the ring is the wake-up call the sport needs
BARTLEY MADDEN was knocked out only once in more than 200 professional bouts. The great Gene Tunney, on his way to becoming world heavyweight champion, put the Roscommon man on the canvas in 1925 and later called Madden ‘the gamest opponent’ he ever faced. That gutsy quality ensured the Irish fighter was never short of work – and absorbed plenty of punishment.
Born in the Galway village of Caltra in 1890, Madden grew up outside Ballygar and won a Connacht football title with the Rossies in 1912. At the outset of the First World War, he enlisted in the British Navy, where he was taught to box, eventually settling in New York and making the fight game his profession.
Madden met a tragic end, falling down the steps of the Treasury Building in Washington. He was just 40 but was already paying a price for his fortitude inside the ring. In the parlance of the time, Madden had become ‘punchy’.
Tris Dixon came across Madden’s name while researching his important new work, Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing.
The teak-tough Irish heavyweight was one of 23 fighters that participated in Dr Harrison Martland’s 1928 study into the effects of the fight game. In the paper he published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Martland coined the term ‘punch-drunk.’
Martland reckoned as much as half of all boxers would suffer from the condition if they stayed in the sport too long. He urged more research and for a greater public awareness of the damage caused. But his appeal fell on deaf ears. Boxing largely looked the other way.
‘It was the biggest issue in the sport almost a century ago and it is the biggest issue that the sport faces today,’ Dixon explains. Four years in the making, his book should be essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in boxing. For all the issues in the pro game, evident this week with the announcement of the Anthony Joshua-Tyson Fury heavyweight title fight in Saudi Arabia, there remains a sense that not enough is done to safeguard the health of fighters.
A long-time boxing journalist, Dixon had ghostwritten Ricky Hatton’s autobiography and was planning a project on why so many fighters struggle in retirement when he read League of Denial, the seminal examination of the NFL concussion crisis.
‘Reading it, I started wondering about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and why it wasn’t an issue in boxing. When I looked into it, I discovered CTE wasn’t an NFL phenomenon, it was from boxing. It was called dementia pugilistica and before that, punch-drunk syndrome. So, why wasn’t it being talked about?’
Dixon hopes his book can go some way to starting that conversation. We talk a couple of days after Canelo Alvarez had forced Billy Joe Saunders to retire on his stool after shattering his eye socket with a vicious uppercut. The Englishman was criticised by the DAZN commentators for not carrying on. It is that kind of attitude that needs to change. ‘A few years ago, I might have been one of those saying that Saunders should have went out on his shield. But not any more. We need to change this attitude in boxing where it is okay for injured fighters to keep going, because they are being brave.
‘It is okay for us to get up at half four in the morning to watch the fight, or 73,000 to pay in to watch it in Texas, but at the same time what are we doing to make sure that these fighters live long and happy lives, once they step away from the ring?’ His trawl through the damage caused by boxing begins in the psychiatric unit of a London hospital where he meets Herol ‘Bomber’ Graham, that hero of the 1980s, and ends by spending the day with the late Leon Spinks, who died last February, and his wife, in what is the most affecting part of the book. ‘When I sat down to do this, I thought of Leon Spinks as a boxer that everyone knew was suffering from CTE. So, I went and spent a day with him, someone who is remembered as this gregarious character, to see how boxing has affected him.’
It is a heart-breaking chapter as Dixon skilfully charts how Spinks’ mood can swing and his memory can fail him. Spinks wasn’t the only great heavyweight to suffer from brain trauma. From the golden heavyweight era of the 1960s and ’70s, Dixon drew a long
list of a number of big names who had long-term cognitive damage. It included the Greatest of them all.
Neither Muhammad Ali nor his family ever admitted to CTE, they said it was Parkinson’s disease, which they insisted he could have developed regardless of his chosen profession. Many of the voices in the book are critical of this stance none more so than Frankie Pryor, wife of legendary light-welterweight Aaron who died in October 2016. She criticises Ali and his family for not using his condition to highlight the risk of CTE in boxing.
Pryor believes that if the most famous sportsperson ever had admitted to CTE, it could have shone a light on the problem much sooner. Dixon, though, wonders whether that would be the case. The condition has only come to prominence in the past decade, mainly through neurologist Bennet Omalu’s research into former Pittsburgh Steelers players.
‘Frankie wished Lonnie Ali acknowledged the reason behind Ali’s demise because she believes it would made everyone more aware of CTE and allowed countless more fighters to admit it had happened to them. If boxing could do that to the Greatest, it could do it to anyone,’ Dixon says.
‘But we are looking at this now from the perspective of having the concussion and CTE crisis in the NFL when, at the time, maybe they didn’t know what they were dealing with, maybe they believed it was Parkinson’s. And then there was Ali himself. He has awed the world with his elegance, the man had given so much to the sport, the idea of calling a man like that “punch-drunk” just wouldn’t have seemed right.’
Dixon argues that the terminology has been part of the problem with ‘punchy’ and ‘punch-drunk’ carrying such stigma. With the more widespread use of the term CTE, there is a chance of eradicating that stigma.
Boxing faces a more pressing problem. When sports like American football, rugby and soccer were forced into addressing the concussion issue, it was known who had responsibility for the safety measures with the NFL, World Rugby and FIFA in the spotlight respectively. In boxing, the one sport where competitors are actively trying to inflict a concussion on their opponent, there is no ultimate governing power.
As Frankie Pryor explains, talking of her husband’s sad demise, there was nowhere for her to go and register a complaint against the sport. The four main governing bodies (WBC, WBA, IBF and WBO) compete against each other. Every jurisdiction has different protocols for obtaining a boxing licence. It is truly the Wild West of the sporting landscape, not ideal when you want a co-ordinated response to a delicate situation.
‘It is a huge issue,’ Dixon agrees. ‘Even when John McCain tried to overhaul the sport in the US Senate and introduce a national commission, that would have only worked for the States and wouldn’t have been a worldwide body. Because everyone has their own rules. Fighters will always find somewhere to fight. They will always find someone willing to give them a licence, the most vivid example of that was when Ali fought Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas because no commission in the States would sanction it.’
Almost everyone that Dixon talked to brought up the lack of an umbrella organisation, an ultimate governing body. But there has to be the will within boxing itself to allow themselves to be governed. Just as it is up to the sport to come together and address the issue of brain injuries.
A number of solutions are proffered. An upper age limit for professional boxers, young fighters restricted to body shots until they are 14. A key element may be to lessen the sparring that fighters do. Mickey Ward, immortalised in the Oscar-winning movie The Fighter, told Dixon that 90 per cent of the brain trauma and concussion he had suffered was in preparing for fights. ‘There’s no way they can stop concussions in boxing. The only thing you can do is probably minimise the sparring,’ Ward tells Dixon at one point.
Ward has been working with Chris Nowinski, the former NFL player and WWE wrestler, who is now part of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Between them, they want to make boxers aware of continued head shots in sparring.
‘They both suggest that maybe you could lower the volume of head sparring by 50 per cent, and concentrate more on body sparring. And lower the frequency of sparring before fights, focus more on conditioning work. But it requires buy-in from fighters, trainers, promoters. Everyone. And there will be nobody to police it.’
And that’s the biggest issue with boxing’s effort to make its fighters safer. The thing is that the sport will always be dangerous. Brain trauma is simply going to be part of it. It is why some may see this landmark book as a godsend for boxing abolitionists out there.
‘I hope not. Boxing still saves a lot more lives than it takes, despite all of this,’ Dixon insists. ‘It has saved an awful lot of lives, and has done so in the most deprived of areas. It gives trainers a sense of purpose in their life, having a boxing club in an area gives kids a sense of structure they might otherwise not have. The sport does a lot of good, it remains a path out of poverty and trauma for thousands of men and women around the world.
‘And it is quite a quantum leap to talk about a problem like this to go and call for the sport to be banned, rather than it made safer. With CTE in the NFL and dementia in soccer, they talked about how they can make the sport safer. That is the conversation we need to have in boxing.
‘We have to make sure that the fighters in the future are aware of brain trauma and CTE, because ultimately it is the fighter’s choice to get in the ring. And so many fighters, even when they are suffering later in life, they say they wouldn’t change anything if they could turn back time,’ Dixon suggests.
‘But what I am trying to do here is to peel a scab off boxing and once that scab is gone, maybe we can start to heal and maybe boxing can stop ignoring its biggest problem, confront it and start to address it.’
As is pointed out in the book, the three greatest boxers of all-time – Sugar Ray Robinson, Ali and Joe Louis – all struggled with cognitive problems later in life. The sport has had many wake-up calls. But with this excellent, if at times distressing work, perhaps boxing will finally accept that it has to face its most pressing problem.
‘IF CTE COULD DO THIS TO
ALI, IT COULD DO IT TO ANYONE’