The unspoken damage of boxing Boxers know they risk injury in the ring. But there’s a more insidious danger they don’t often talk about: the long-term brain damage that repeated blows to the head can cause. Lyra McKee meets the families who are breaking the silence Lyra McKee @lyramckee Monday 21 November 2016 17:15 Click to follow Indy/Life The footage is nearly 40 years old but you can see him clearly: pasty, red-haired, more Irish-looking than Italian. “Some of you may have observed the knee brace on the left knee of Johnny Lira,” says the announcer, Howard Cosell. “That is occasioned by the fact that there are pellets in that knee. Remember I told you Lira had a troubled youth? The pellets are the result of being a participant in a gang war.” He pauses. “Just recording the fact.” Lira, a fierce, determined fighter who has served prison time, darts round the ring as he and the Venezuelan Ernesto Espana exchange blows. Espana is using dark brown Mexican gloves, with stitches sewn in where the leather connects with the skin. In round nine, they will rip into Lira’s cheek and tear a gash above his right eye so bad that his face is doused in blood. But he doesn’t know this yet. It’s only round six. It’s an evenly fought match up to this point, but things start to change in the seventh round. “And in a round like this, it seems to me, the more polished style of Espana becomes more visible,” says Cosell. “Oh! That counter-right by Lira! Knocked Espana down!” Lira’s friend Fred jumps on the table, screaming, as Al Capone’s ex-driver looks on. Ernesto Espana, the world lightweight champ, bested in the ring by an Italian-American street punk. The first knockdown of the fight. Espana gets back up. “We will not be going to a station break,” Cosell says. The seventh round counts down: 15, 14, 13… “Lira’s got a lifetime at stake here. You can understand the hunger in this young man. Boxing, as I said, turned his life around: the troubled youth, involved in gang wars, involved in crimes and then here he is, fighting for a championship!” The bell rings. “There can be no doubt about the scoring in that round. It was Johnny Lira’s round.” In the next round, Espana fights back. He knocks Lira down towards the end. In round nine, both men continue to battle. “But right there – Espana got through with the uppercut and you saw Lira’s head snap upward! A lot of blood gushing out now! The blood we had anticipated earlier, over Lira’s right eye, and Lira is in trouble!” Watch the scene frame-by-frame and there it is: the point at which Lira’s brain must be bouncing around inside his skull, like a snapped elastic band. Concussion? Howard Cosell doesn’t realise it but he’s narrating the beginning of the end of Johnny Lira’s life. The ringside doctor stops the fight. Espana wins by a technical knock-out. But that was decades ago. The crowds are gone now. Cosell is long dead. Johnny’s screwed. He knows it. He’s forgetting things. He’s drinking too much. He’s paranoid, can’t control himself, to the point where, one day, he loses it with the teller in the bank and threatens to blow the place up. His speech is slurred. He’s increasingly reliant on the sign-language skills he picked up while training a young deaf boxer, David Davis, "the Silent Bomber" – whose career ended when he was injured in a car crash. Jerry Lucieno has been Johnny’s best friend since childhood. They’ve worked together, boxed together – when Johnny needed bail money at 3am, it was Jerry he called. Now they’re in Jerry’s car, outside Johnny’s apartment, sorting out Johnny’s affairs. “What’s going to happen to these guys that are pasta brains from taking hits?” Johnny asks Jerry. “You know, these boxers,” he continues, “everybody wants to make money on ’em and nobody puts anything into ’em. They just leave ’em at the roadside. And that’s not right!” He’s talking as much about his own life as anyone else’s. His liver is failing. He’s 61 and running out of time. The boxing community in Chicago rallies round, holds a fundraiser for his medical bills, but when he dies, a few months later, he dies penniless. When the dangers of boxing are discussed, it’s often about what can go wrong during a fight, incidents like the one during Barry McGuigan’s 1982 fight with Young Ali that left Ali in a coma from which he never recovered. In late 2015, Hamzah Aljahmi died in Ohio following his debut professional bout. In 2016, Scottish boxer Mike Towell died after a match in Glasgow, and English boxer Nick Blackwell was forced to retire after sustaining a head injury during a fight. But the boxers this story is about haven’t died in the ring, but years later, when the bloodied noses and split lips have long since healed. At the time Johnny was fighting, it was called “Punch Drunk” syndrome. Now, it’s called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). And while boxers and their brains were instrumental in the research to define the disease, their contribution has, say their families, largely been forgotten. * It happens in a small town in western Canada. It starts years before it ends. Paranoia. Mood swings. Violence. One night, he forgets where he left a piece of machinery. She talks him through it. They figure out that it must be in the next town, at the site of a construction job. He drives there. He calls on the way: “I know I’m here for a reason. I have my trailer hooked up to my truck, but I don’t know why I’m here.” Another night, they’re having dinner at a friend’s house when they receive a phone call. Dayer*, their youngest son, has pulled a knife on Caiden*, their oldest. They go home. She, Maryse, asks Dayer what happened. The boy is under extreme stress. A few days earlier, her husband, Curtis Hatch, waited for him behind a corner near their garage, jumped out, and tried to smother him. Her nephew saw and came running in: “Auntie, Uncle Curtis just grabbed Dayer and he’s hurting him.” Curtis was an ex-boxer, a three-time national champion; if she hadn’t got there, he might have killed him. ___________________________________ Does Boxing Cause Brain Damage? By Ben Mauk | May 14, 2007 10:34am ET MORE Almost certainly. Research has long shown that head trauma— something no boxer cannot avoid over the years—puts one at risk for permanent brain damage. Brain cells generally cannot repair themselves (as can cells elsewhere in the body), so damaged neurons stay damaged. The American Medical Association and British Medical Association have both called for a ban on boxing, citing statistics of brain damage in professional boxers. Now a study to be presented this week at the American Academy of Neurology's 59th Annual Meeting shows that amateur boxing also increases the risk of brain injury. For evidence, researchers puncture a subject's spinal cord to measure the amount of certain chemicals in their cerebrospinal fluid, a liquid that helps protect the brain from shock and sharp pressure changes. The study found elevated levels of markers suggesting brain damage following a bout of boxing. Boxing deity Muhammad Ali famously lives with Parkinson syndrome, a disorder of the nervous system caused by the degeneration of a group of brain cells involved in voluntary movement. There has been no conclusive evidence that Ali's disorder, which causes tremors, slowness of movement and muscular rigidity, is a result of his boxing career. However, his form of Parkinson's is associated with head trauma. You might encourage your Tyson-loving tyke to take up soccer instead. The same study that looked at amateur boxing also investigated soccer players and found no association between repeated ball-heading and brain damage.
I'm no doctor... but there's something wrong somewhere with this cat. That I know. He's a hoot to F with though. I love getting in that big head of his.
He means it as a compliment, you moron. Greatest hits. How this kludge isn't at risk walking down the street is a miracle.
I meagered a glance at what it was... the first line was its "derived from pig brains".... sounded about right to me.