Muhammad Ali Punches Back at Parkinson's
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MARCH/APRIL 2006 BY WALLACE MATTHEWS Muhammad Ali Punches Back at Parkinson's Ba}ling the disorder with the same conviction that made him a champion in and out of the ring. Slowly and with great effort, Muhammad Ali eased himself onto a couch in a quiet corner of the museum that commemorates his remarkable life. His once- magnificent body, now withered by age and illness, was virtually swallowed up in the soft leather pillows. He seemed oblivious to the horde of photographers jostling behind an aluminum mesh screen for a shot of the former world heavyweight champion in repose. Surrounded by visions of past glories at home in 2001, Ali fights on. With his twin daughters, Rasheda and Jamilla, kneeling by his side, Ali gazed at a stained-glass skylight in the ceiling. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He was once the most public figure the world had ever known, but these days his words, thoughts, and dreams are strictly private property. The sound and fury have been replaced by silence and tranquility. Muhammad Ali doesn't rumble anymore and he doesn't boast. The fastest man heavyweight boxing had ever seen now shuffles slowly, the once astonishingly handsome face a lifeless mask, the familiar voice stilled. "Muhammad is a man of few words now," Lonnie Ali, his wife of 19 years, had said earlier that day last November at the gala opening of the Muhammad Ali This 1997 portrait reminds us why Ali has always called Center in Louisville. "He himself "pretty." spends a lot of his time quietly, reading and contemplating." It has now been 22 years, and quite possibly longer, since parkinsonism began its relentless march through Ali's nervous system. He was diagnosed with parkinsonism, the umbrella term for movement disorders including Parkinson's disease, in 1984, three years after the last fight of his 21-year boxing career. Now, the increasing tremors in his limbs, the painful slowness of his gait, the reports of balance problems and the whispers of falls have led the neurologist who diagnosed him to suspect Ali may, in fact, suffer from full-blown Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's is doing what none of Ali's opponents could: silencing him and stripping him of his incredible grace. Still, even at the age of 64, there remains a youthful, almost-childlike optimism about Ali. If he could suddenly rediscover his voice, what advice would Muhammad Ali give fellow Parkinson's patients? "He would tell them what he tells me when we're alone and we're talking," says his daughter Rasheda. "He'd say, 'Don't give up. Believe in yourself.'" Of course. What else could he say? If ever there was a consistent thread running through the golden fabric of Muhammad Ali's life, it would be his incredible self- belief. No one believed this brash, skinny teenager born Cassius Clay could go to Rome and win the Olympic gold medal in 1960, but he did. No one believed a loudmouthed 22-year-old belonged in the same ring with the fearsome ex-convict Sonny Liston four years later, but Clay beat him so badly that the heavyweight champion quit on his stool after a mere six rounds. Changing his name to Muhammad Ali and adopting the teachings of the Nation of Islam were widely viewed as career suicide. Refusing induction into the Army based on his religious objections to the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the end of everything. The resulting suspension cost him nearly four years of his athletic prime, but it wasn't the end of anything. And most people, even members of his own camp, were quite certain he would be injured, and perhaps killed, when at 32 he challenged George Foreman—a bigger, stronger, even-meaner Liston—for the heavyweight title in 1974. Of course Ali won, just as he promised he would. Taunting Liston with fists and fury. Now comes perhaps the greatest test of Muhammad Ali's self-belief. This time, Ali believes that even if he can't "beat" Parkinson's, neither should Parkinson's be allowed to defeat him. "Muhammad has the strongest will of any fighter, of any individual, I have ever met, period," says Angelo Dundee, 82, who has guided the careers of more than 100 boxing champions and had trained Ali through every one of his 61 pro fights, right to the dreadful end of his career in 1981. Rasheda Ali, who at 35 can scarcely remember her father without the symptoms of Parkinson's, sees the same quality. "I wish I could take whatever it is in his makeup," she says. "It's just amazing. Mentally, he's always been a very strong person in and out of the ring. He was able to accept it right away and deal with it. He looks at it as just another part of his life." Or, as Lonnie Ali recently told us, "Muhammad always says, 'Never look back, only ahead.'" Anyone who's ever met Muhammad Ali has never forgotten that first encounter, and Stanley Fahn is no exception. He was captivated by Ali's personal magnetism, entertained by his repertoire of card and magic tricks, impressed by his cooperative demeanor. Ali took a pounding to wrest the title from Foreman in'74. But this was no social engagement. Stanley Fahn, M.D., was a neurologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. In September 1984, Muhammad Ali came to him as a patient. Three years removed from his final fight and five years removed from the heavyweight title, Ali was concerned about an array of symptoms. There was some shaking in his hands and an unmistakable thickening of his speech, which once had been as crisp and cutting as his signature left jab. There was an alarming slowness of movement in the man whose ring motto had been "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." And there was some unexplained fatigue; he could, and often did, nod off just about anywhere, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation. After a weeklong evaluation period in which Ali and his entourage turned a wing of the hospital into their own private hotel suite, Dr. Fahn diagnosed parkinsonism. What's more, Dr. Fahn suspected that the head trauma inflicted on Ali throughout his boxing career could be the cause. "There was some evidence that he had taken some hits to the head and so forth," recalls Dr. Fahn, director of the Center for Parkinson's Disease and Other Movement Disorders at Columbia University. "So there was concern on my part that he might have what we call post-traumatic Parkinson's, or 'pugilistic parkinsonism,' from damage to the brain and the brain stem." Ali defends the title a year later against Frazier through the most brutal 14 rounds in history. Despite his unmarked face and his mobile, gracefully elusive boxing style, Ali took a lot more punishment in his career than it appeared on the surface. In a show of machismo, he often lay on the ropes in training sessions, allowing his sparring partners to hit him in the head and body. And even in fights that he won, Ali took some vicious beatings, especially later in his career. He described the epic third fight with Joe Frazier, in which Ali retained his title after 14 brutal rounds, as "the next thing to death." Laila Ali may not be able to talk boxing with her father, but they still speak the same language. Still, Dr. Fahn cannot be certain that Ali's condition was indeed caused by boxing or if in fact Parkinson's would have been his fate regardless of what career path he had chosen. An early Ali complaint of numbness in his lips and face, rendering him unaware of when food needed to be wiped away, indicated damage to the brain stem due to boxing, according to Dr. Fahn. But the steady progression of the disorder over the years, he adds, is more indicative of classic Parkinson's disease. "The proof is only going to come at his autopsy," Dr. Fahn says, "because the pathology is a little bit different between the two conditions." In many ways, Ali's case remains unique among Parkinson's patients and among professional boxers. Although sleep disorders are common in Parkinson's, Dr. Fahn says it is rare to see them so early in the progression of the disease. Ali's age at the time of diagnosis, 42, placed him among the youngest of Parkinson's patients. The average age of Parkinson's patients is 60, with only 10 percent having had their onset before age 40. There is evidence Ali was among that 10 percent, showing signs of parkinsonism when he was 38 years old. "Looking back, I think the kid had Parkinson's his last couple of fights," says Dundee, his career-long trainer. "I didn't know what was the matter with him and I used to give him hell, but nobody diagnosed him. I just remember the newspaper guys had to lean in real close to hear him." Ali himself had noticed similar troubling symptoms in the late stages of his career— slowness, fatigue, slurred speech. He had been mistakenly treated for hypothyroidism while training for his 1980 knockout loss to Larry Holmes, his former sparring partner who had ascended to the heavyweight throne after Ali hung up the gloves in '79. Reporters covering that comeback fight and another ill-fated comeback fight in 1981 were shocked to encounter the normally loquacious and inexhaustible Ali sometimes conducting interviews from his bed, speaking barely intelligibly and seemingly too exhausted to sit up.