Tris Dixon

This book is a very inconvenient read for a boxing fan.

For many years, I have enjoyed boxing more than any other sport. Having read Tris Dixon's book, I will probably continue to be fascinated by the "sweet science," but will feel somewhat hypocritical about it.

Tris Dixon is not a physician; he is a sports journalist who was briefly a professional boxer himself, and who was an editor of "Boxing News." Over the years, he conducted a lengthy, continent-jumping study of the damage that boxing does to the brain, and this book is the result.

The fact that prizefighters are prone to becoming mentally impaired in their later years is nothing new, and Dixon is not the first to study it. Originally, the deterioration of a fighter's brain was described as "punch-drunk syndrome:" in 1928, Dr. Harrison Martland, president of the New York Pathological Association, published a study entitled "Punch Drunk" in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Punchy" had always been a term thrown around within the boxing world, but now "punch-drunk" was an official, recognized medical diagnosis. Later, the condition would receive the more dignified designation "dementia pugilistica," and would finally acquire the current definition: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Whatever term is used, the disorder is well known to anyone who has observed the tragic mental decline of such figures as Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Thomas Hearns, and Muhammad Ali, who is known as the "poster boy" for CTE. (Ali's survivors insist that he suffered from Parkinson's disease, but these are the words of a proud but unrealistic family.) CTE and Parkinson's disease (or syndrome) have very similar symptoms, but very different causes.

The book is full of interviews with neurologists, boxers themselves, and, heartbreakingly, with "CTE widows," whose brave husbands have, at the age of 30 or 40, been turned into very old men (or have died). Dixon aches along with these people, and reports the doctors' findings in detail: such as the influence of the tau protein that is triggered into overdrive with repeated blows to the head, and begins to attack parts of the brain. Or the destruction of the "septum pellucidum," the wall dividing the two sides of the brain. In many fighters, this wall has been utterly dissolved, like the nasal septum of a longtime cocaine user. CTE is not fatal: it is more cruel than that. It can start as early as the age of 30 or 40, and last for another fifty years. Its only cure is death by other causes.

Boxing aside, Dixon spoke with neurologists who warned of CTE occurring in other sports. (One journalist wrote a report on the condition and submitted it to the National Football League: the study was buried, and the reporter banned from all NFL events.) Any game or sport that involves repeated blows to the skull can cause CTE: the girl playing high school soccer, with its "headers," can be affected as well as the biggest, toughest boxer.

The book is fascinating, but also eye-opening and tragic. Some few boxers, such as George Foreman, spend a life in the sport, and never develop it. Others display much milder symptoms. CTE is cruel in another way: it doesn't become evident immediately. A boxer or football player can retire at forty, and the symptoms might not begin for a decade or more. But, as in any form of dementia, once the symptoms start, they never improve.

Tris Dixon has done the sports world a great service with this book. Sadly, too few young fighters will read it.

Highly recommended.… (meer)