CTE in early boxers

Ad Wolgast, almost certainly.

 

Largely if not wholly undocumented, as with all concussive sports whose lineage stretches back a century or more (as neuroscience was only murkily understood in prebellum times, and it wasn't until between WWI and WWII that it began to coalesce into a global academic discipline on par with other areas of health research - and even then, a connection with athletics wasn't immediately drawn).

Old-time journos did make pretty liberal use of phrases like "punchy/punch drunk" describing a good many veteran pugilists, though, so we can make a few educated guesses about just how prevalent it was.

 

Here’s a piece on Billy Conn who suffered Pugilistic Dementia in later years, the first signs of which began to show at age 69/70.

I remember Billy appearing on an HBO boxing series many years back.

I can’t say that it was def. related to the condition but I did note Billy appear to drift while the compare spoke - and he also appeared a bit agitated while looking into space.

When it came time for the compère to ask Billy a question, on several occasions Billy initially snapped out his answer, as if a bit angry but then he quickly settled down.

When I first saw the HBO special I wasn’t aware that Billy suffered from PD later in life - but the slight glitches in behaviour were still noticeable in their own right, at least to me.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1992-11-05-1992310123-story.html

 

Very few and far between, unfortunately.

 

Spot on!

 

Getting hit in the head produces cognitive decline. The average person does not get hit in the head very much if ever. They have the amount of knocks to their head in total for a lifetime that a boxer may take in one sparring session. The hardest knock they ever take, a boxer may take a hundred times between sparring and fights. As a modest everyman trainee, I had absorbed more than an average person ever would. Multiply that times the amount of training needed to be a pro, times amateur fights beforehand, times pro fight after pro fight. A brain needs significant rest after trauma to recover, well past fighting or football schedules. Years. Regarding people I've met, I've seen a pro boxer of 3-1 with significant decline due to boxing damage (mostly incurred during a long amateur career). I've seen a pro MMA fighter with 10 KO losses with no observable decline. Both around their early 40s. Boxing is dangerous and always has been and there is no safe way to do it. It's the cost of doing business and at the bottom line, part of the reason we watch. Because there are mortal consequences.

Boxers have always been getting bad brain damage regardless of ruleset. Tom Molineaux comes to mind, a great boxer who died at 34 (in 1818) with no money, dependent on alcohol. Even though he had tuberculosis, I think damage incurred had a role in how he ended up. Not sure, though. I don't think it's ever been safe, but maybe it could have been safer because it allowed for more grappling and had less refined punching techniques. Early boxers from this period had fewer fights in general, Cribb had 16 fights, Richmond had 19. That doesn't mean people of this era didn't suffer. Where it started to be an epidemic though? I'm not sure. An epidemic of this kind has to be documented and observed as a problem first. I think dying younger was more common during this time and probably speaking poorly was as well. I wasn't there.

Multitudes of boxers from the 1900s on seemed to show cognitive decline and lived out their last years in squalor, usually because they couldn't secure work due to their physical and mental decline. Ali's favorite fighter comes to mind, a middleweight from the midwest (Chicago?) who died young but I can't remember his name right now.

But MMA is not safer, the knockouts are just as brutal and so are the hits on the feet. The data just isn't there, 90% of high profile fights in MMA have occurred past 2007 or so. Recently Phil Baroni lost his mind completely due to CTE and murdered his girlfriend in Mexico (RIP, incredibly sad story), reminiscent of Carlos Monzon. Stephan Bonnar, who has recently died, RIP, struggled with lucidity and addiction. Diego Sanchez was insane and manipulated by a weird Yoga instructor who became his manager. Spencer Fischer has memory issues and has very pronounced cognitive decline for a fighter who peaked around 2008. Many fighters such as Chuck Liddell sound absolutely horrible, with the distinctive nasally speaking issues consistent with CTE. Gary Goodridge developed intense issues from CTE. Nam Phan, a scrappy MMA featherweight who has issues, the list goes on and on. There are current, recent title fighters with significant slurred speech issues that are still fighting on with 0 scrutiny.

I can say one aspect MMA is for sure much safer than boxing in, and it's a huge aspect. MMA has a greater tolerance for flow sparring, I think this is the main difference I've observed in gyms for the sport. Boxing gyms are often doghouses and encourage fight-style sparring. Rarely have I seen an MMA gym encourage this. MMA still has hard training and hard sparring but I have found it to be more purpose driven/as needed. Of course fights still break out and many gyms go really hard, but that's the main factor to me. In the competition I sincerely don't believe that it's safer--just that the data hasn't had time to marinate on MMA's side. I've been out of the loop for some years now, though, so who knows.

 

Micky Walker had a sad last decade or so with what was diagnosed as Parkinson's. He was also a habitual drinker which probably didn't help.

 

This