The very traits that made Quarry a prime contender—his one-two punch of toughness and stubbornness—would also undermine him both in and out of the ring. His opponents knew they had little chance of knocking him down and no chance of battering him into submission; his granite chin could shake off pulverizing punches that had knocked out lesser specimens, his big heart could will him through all fifteen rounds of a title fight despite a broken back. With no quit in this Quarry, the best way to conquer him was to bloody his face so that the referee or ringside doctor would have to stop the carnage for the fighter’s own good. Quarry knew just as well as his foes that his tendency to cut so easily was his Achilles’ heel—the one head injury too obvious for even him to ignore—but that didn’t keep him from fighting with a reckless disregard for his own safety and best interests.
Never was that clearer than in his 1969 championship bout with Frazier. Right from the opening bell, Quarry charged like a bull, inexplicably abandoning the cautious counterpunching style that had earned him the title shot and might have given him a fighting chance against the swarming champion aptly nicknamed Smokin’ Joe. For the entire three minutes of the most savage first round ever fought by heavyweights, the two men stood toe to toe in the center of the ring, like bulls locking horns, and rained blows down upon one another, punch after punch caroming off their skulls. As if it wasn’t astonishing enough that Quarry was taking the fight to the ultimate aggressor, he was also somehow managing to outslug the consummate slugger. By the third round, however, it was clear just how doomed that strategy—of trying to beat Frazier at Frazier’s own game by turning a boxing match into a barroom brawl—had been all along. Frazier proceeded to relentlessly roll over the challenger like a tank, smothering him into the ropes and firing a barrage of blows that pounded his face to a swollen, bloody pulp. When the doctor mercifully stopped it after the seventh round, Quarry was left alone in his protest, stalking inconsolably and blindly around the ring.
The following year, Quarry stepped under the klieg lights in the longer shadow cast by the most famous of all athletes. It was Muhammad Ali’s much-anticipated return to the ring after three and a half years in exile, having been stripped of his title belt and boxing license for refusing induction into the Army as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. In his comeback fight against Quarry, Ali was determined to prove to the world that he was still what he’d always proclaimed himself to be during his undefeated reign as undisputed heavyweight champion: “The Greatest.” Though obviously rusty, Ali picked up right where he’d left off, using the canvas like an artist, dancing circles around Quarry, flicking sharp left jabs, rifling left-right combinations. In the middle of the third round, Ali snapped a cracking right that split a deep gash over Quarry’s left eye. Like a shark scenting blood, Ali peppered the cut with twisting jabs that intensified the rivers of red pouring into Quarry’s eye and down his face. At the end of the round, as the referee examined the cut slicing right down to the bone, Quarry begged him, “No, no, don’t stop the fight!” While his own trainer pleaded with him to quit, the ref stepped in and did what Quarry never would, waving the fight over.
Minutes after the cut had been closed with eighteen sutures, Jack Quarry—the hard-nosed patriarch who’d forged and hammered home the family motto, “There’s no quit in a Quarry”—beseeched his tearful son to quit for good. “Jerry, you can’t go on like this or pretty soon you’ll be walking on your heels,” Jack Quarry lectured in the darkness outside the Atlanta arena. “It’s going to be another cut or another punch in the head. You’ve got the money now. Go do something. Buy yourself a service station or an apartment house or a McDonald’s or something. Anything. Just get out of it.”
But Jerry Quarry had learned his father’s hard lessons too well to quit now at the age of twenty-five. He angrily parted ways with his father, who had also served as his co-manager, and kept right on fighting. In rematches, Ali surgically carved him up through seven rounds and Frazier brutally bludgeoned him through five. After that 1974 Frazier fight, Arwanda Quarry caressed her son’s bloody face and pleaded with him to “get out of it.” Jerry sobbed and promised his mother he would. But nine months later, he was back in the ring absorbing yet another five-round bludgeoning. That one would finally convince Quarry it was time to hang up the gloves at twenty-nine.
He retired with a bittersweet legacy as “the best heavyweight never to win the world championship” and found a safer way to stay in the spotlight. His Hollywood good looks—the mop of dirty blond hair, the twinkling blue eyes, the mischievous smile—helped land him a regular gig as a network boxing commentator as well as guest-starring roles on such hit TV series as The Six Million Dollar Man. But none of that could challenge the fame and fortune that prizefighting had brought him as the most popular of fan favorites. After two years he was back in the ring basking in the adulation of the crowd. Moments after rescuing himself from a defenseless drubbing with a lucky knockout punch in the ninth round of his comeback fight, he grabbed the ring microphone and shouted, “Let’s hear it for the old Quarry!” In his heart, though, he recognized the fallacy of those words and reluctantly faded back into retirement.
This time he stayed out of the ring for nearly five years. It wasn’t just the Quarry family motto that made it impossible for him to quit for good. It was the fatal flaw known as the prizefighter’s curse: the inability to resist the siren call of the boxing bell despite the mounting toll on body and brain.
While training for that latest comeback in 1983, Quarry got a call from Sports Illustrated asking him to undergo neurological testing for a special report the magazine was preparing on brain damage in boxers. Decades before Quarry turned pro, the occupational hazard of his chosen profession already had been formally described and named by doctors: “dementia pugilistica” or “punch-drunk syndrome,” depending on which medical dictionary you thumbed through. Call it what you will, the definition was the same: degenerative brain damage that resulted from repeated head blows, leading to cognitive decline, memory loss, bouts of confusion, slurred speech, wobbly gait, poor coordination, tremors. Studies showed that up to 90 percent of boxers eventually developed some degree of brain damage, many of them warranting a diagnosis of dementia pugilistica years after retirement. For its special report, Sports Illustrated wanted to take advantage of a new scanning technology that would allow doctors to look inside the brains of longtime boxers like Quarry and Ali.
Given Ali’s transcendent fame and feats through a glorious pro career that spanned twenty-one years, sixty-one fights, and an unmatched three reigns as world heavyweight champion, he was naturally the magazine’s first choice. It had been barely a year since he’d announced his retirement with a simple explanation: “I don’t want to be one of them old fighters with a flat nose saying ‘duh-duh-duh’ before a fight.” By the time Sports Illustrated invited him to join Quarry and two other boxers for neurological testing, rumors were swirling that Ali was indeed becoming punch-drunk. The finely tuned athlete whose ring motto had been “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” was now so fatigued that he would sometimes nod off in the middle of a sentence; his movements, once so catlike and graceful that his fists and feet were all a dazzling blur, had become slow and tremulous; his speech, once as crisp and cutting as his signature left jab, had become thick and slurred. Still, Ali wasn’t about to let some magazine go rummaging around for more signs of brain damage. “Why do you want to check my brain?” he railed at a Sports Illustrated reporter with vintage Ali loquaciousness. “They want to say I have a brain injury, that I’m crazy. I won’t be no guinea pig.”
In contrast, Quarry was as willing to step into the lab as he was into the ring. He was experiencing no noticeable symptoms, and he expressed confidence that nothing would be found amiss. At his rural training camp north of Los Angeles, he passed a neurological examination but performed poorly on neuropsychological tests, which exposed problems with short-term memory and hand-eye coordination. What was worse,
his CAT scan showed abnormalities commonly found in longtime boxers. Dr. Ira Casson, the neurologist retained by Sports Illustrated to conduct the testing, showed Quarry the scan, pointing to the atrophy of the cortex and to the tunnel-like hole in the septum between the cerebral hemispheres. After explaining that CAT scans could reveal brain damage as it developed and before it manifested in symptoms, Casson urged Quarry to abandon his comeback plans and hang up the gloves for good.
Quarry, who never did know when to give up, was not about to do so now. Facing financial ruin from failed business ventures and failed marriages, he needed the money prizefighting afforded. But more than that, he craved the accolades. He’d go around proudly announcing to friends and family, “I’m going to be a hero again.” Trouble was, he no longer possessed the tools that had made him the latest contender to be dubbed “The Great White Hope” in a weight class dominated by black champions. He had always hated that label—“I’m not a white hope, I’m just a fighter”—but now he was barely even a fighter. His reflexes dulled, he managed to win both of his comeback bouts against no-name pugs and then retired once again.
Over the next few years, Quarry began to show the obvious effects of brain damage from his sixty-five professional fights and his more than two hundred amateur bouts, not to mention all the rounds he’d sparred in sweaty gyms and the brawls he’d fought in beery bars as a youth to win his father’s grudging approval. He was now walking on his heels, just as his father had predicted after the first Ali fight, using ring parlance for the unbalanced stagger characteristic of dementia pugilistica. And his short-term memory problems were becoming pronounced enough to worry his mother.
None of that could deter him, of course. If George Foreman could come out of a ten-year retirement on his quest to recapture the heavyweight crown that he’d won from Frazier and lost to Ali, then why couldn’t the only challenger he ever admitted to ducking—Jerry Quarry? In 1992, nine years removed from his last fight, Quarry decided to stage a comeback of his own at the age of forty-seven. Some friends had talked him into believing they could get him a movie deal, a book contract, maybe even another title shot—if he could just beat a couple of palookas.
Twenty-three years after he’d challenged Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden, Quarry agreed to fight a trivial six-rounder at a glorified gym in Colorado, the only state with no regulatory commission to deny him a boxing license on medical grounds. So it had come to this: Jerry Quarry, the popular crowd favorite who’d once fought Muhammad Ali for $338,000, taking on a ham-and-egger named Ron Cranmer for a paltry $1,050. For the few hundred hardcore fans in attendance, it was a sad sight. His reflexes shot, Quarry was battered and bloodied by a clumsy club fighter through all six rounds, losing two teeth and a one-sided decision, then requiring a hundred stitches to piece his face back together.
The next morning, Quarry woke up and couldn’t remember anything from the night before. Overnight, he had plummeted into the shadowy throes of full-blown dementia pugilistica. The last fight had triggered the latent time bomb that had been ticking in his brain for decades, launching him on a three-month plunge into oblivion and incapacitation. He was weepy, dazed, confused, unable to recognize familiar faces. He was hallucinating, hearing voices no one else heard, talking to people who weren’t there.
No longer able to care for himself, he moved in with his big brother, Jimmy, who became his full-time caregiver. Jerry needed help showering, shaving, combing his hair, putting on his shoes and socks. Mealtime became a particular problem. He had to be coaxed to eat anything other than the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios he loved for breakfast. At dinner his meat had to be cut into little pieces so he wouldn’t choke on it. He was lost and disoriented, often unable to find the bathroom in the small house. He would wander off four or five times a day, sometimes necessitating the police to search for him through the rural roads in the shadow of the San Jacinto Mountains and bring him back home.
The magnitude of the change over such a short time was stunning. By his fiftieth birthday, Quarry was smiling like a little boy but shuffling like an old man. His speech was slow and slurred. The steely blue eyes that once stared down Ali and Frazier during prefight instructions now appeared alternately vacant, scared, and bewildered. His thoughts were random, his memories muddled. He remembered he was a boxer, but thought he’d won all his fights. He would sit on the couch watching videos of his flickering past, the memory of those unforgettable fights lost in a haze caused by too many punches from the likes of Ali and Frazier.
A neurological examination showed just how much devastation those punches had wrought. Quarry couldn’t tell the doctor where he was, what month it was, what year it was. His CAT scan showed why: a severely atrophied cortex and a gaping tunnel-like hole in the septum. With each succeeding exam, the worsening results mirrored the relentless march of the disease through his shriveling brain.
Every once in a while, the fog would roll out just long enough to yield a flash of lucidity, of the old Quarry. When people recognized him, his face would light up like a little kid’s, his eyes smiling beneath thick slabs of scar tissue, and he’d extend the beefy right hand with the battered knuckles of his lethal trade. He had always loved shaking hands and signing autographs, but he could no longer pen his name. At the black-tie dinner celebrating his 1995 induction into the World Boxing Hall of Fame, he tried signing his autograph on a boxing glove but had to give up after one letter. Surrounded that night by other ex-fighters shuffling slowly and slurring their words, the undersized heavyweight with the big heart reflected on what boxing had given him and what it had taken away. “I’d do it all again, same way,” he’d later tell a reporter, his speech so slow that the words would become intelligible only when speeded up on a tape recorder.
His $2.1 million in ring earnings long gone, Quarry was broke and living on a $614 monthly Social Security disability check. As he regressed through a second infancy, his mother took him in so she and his sisters could care for him in shifts, supervising him round the clock to keep him from wandering off. It wasn’t long before he could no longer recognize his parents, his four sisters, his three brothers, his three children, his five grandchildren, or even himself.
When he died in 1999 at the age of fifty-three from complications of dementia-related pneumonia, Jerry Quarry left a legacy that extended far beyond the confines of the ring and the sport that destroyed his brain. His losing fight against a foe that looked a lot like Alzheimer’s disease was a grim echo to Muhammad Ali’s parallel struggle against a condition that looked a lot like Parkinson’s disease.
• • •
On May 10, 1928, Harrison Martland stood before a rapt audience in New York City and delivered a blow as devastating as the punches Jack Dempsey himself threw during his long reign as the most menacing heavyweight champion the world had ever seen. Martland wasn’t a boxer; he was a beefy, bespectacled, middle-aged scientist from New Jersey. He had come to the New York Academy of Medicine, fifty city blocks north of the boxing mecca named Madison Square Garden, to introduce his fellow pathologists to something that fight enthusiasts had long known but dismissed. The mere title of the landmark paper he presented that day should have jolted the medical community: “Punch Drunk.”
“For some time, fight fans and promoters have recognized a peculiar condition occurring among prizefighters which, in ring parlance, they speak of as ‘punch drunk,’ ” he began. “Fighters in whom the early symptoms are well recognized are said by the fans to be ‘cuckoo,’ ‘goofy,’ ‘cutting paper dolls,’ or ‘slug nutty.’ The early symptoms of punch drunk are well known to fight fans, and the gallery gods often shout ‘Cuckoo’ at a fighter. I know of one fight that was stopped by the referee because he thought one of the fighters intoxicated.”
Thus did Dr. Martland usher his colleagues into a netherworld populated by pugilists and other colorful characters right out of a Damon Runyon yarn. Though not much of a fight fan himself, Martland had managed to blend right
in at the smoke-filled arenas and sweat-filled gyms where he’d recently taken to hanging out. Chain-smoking cigarettes and appearing somewhat disheveled with necktie askew, the renowned forensic pathologist cut a figure every bit as gruff as the Runyonesque eccentrics he encountered in the fight game. Even in the relative refinement of his Newark City Hospital office, he would think nothing of urinating into a hand basin during staff meetings and then explaining to scandalized interns that “any guy who pisses into a toilet is a sissy.” Unlike most pathologists, he performed his autopsies—all thirty thousand of them—without gloves, fishing organs out with his bare hands as a lit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Dubbed “The Sherlock Holmes of Medicine” by newspapermen because of his uncanny ability to solve sensational murders with forensic clues, he once delivered a scientific lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine dressed like the famous fictional detective right down to a deerstalker hat and a calabash pipe.
For his “Punch Drunk” lecture at the academy, though, Martland was all business. Just the year before, he had been vexed by the lack of attention accorded another important paper he’d presented on concussive brain trauma. As chief medical examiner for Essex County, he had begun that investigation by autopsying all 309 persons who died of closed-head injuries and wound up at his Newark morgue over a two-year period. The resulting paper advanced the medical literature on the mechanism of nonpenetrating head injuries but garnered no headlines. Pondering what it might take to get publicity for such significant research, Martland needed only to open his morning newspaper and read all about heavyweight kings who were held in higher esteem than royal monarchs and presidents. Through the Roaring Twenties, “The Golden Age of Sports,” nothing was bigger than baseball and boxing and nobody bigger than Babe Ruth and the only superstar capable of dwarfing even him in worldwide fame and fortune—Jack Dempsey. It occurred to Martland that prizefighters, especially sluggers like Dempsey who punched and were punched with mayhem in mind, often developed symptoms similar to those suffered by brain injury survivors. Martland saw the ring as not only the perfect vehicle to get publicity for his brain injury research, but also the perfect lab to study the impact of repeated concussions and to extend to the living what he’d observed in the dead.
The Concussion Crisis Page 23