[ExI] old time pugilistic memories

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 4 15:21:59 UTC 2016


It feels to me like football is now where boxing was in about 1970.



spike



*Ali had what used to called encephalopathy of pugilists; disguised in his
case as Parkinson's.  He was a great athlete, no doubt, but what got him
his fame was a thick skull and please don't take that as a racial comment.
He just absorbed too many hits to the head without going down or out.*


*But love for this sport will never die.  Have you seen the ads for pay per
view barefisted fighting, in a cage?  It makes me sick.*


*As for football, as one ex Green Bay Packer put it, they'll have to put
skirts on the quarterbacks.  Oddly, you don' t see major head injuries in
rugby, where they don't have any protection at all.  They play smart.  The
super strong football helmets seem to invite hard hits, using the head as a
weapon - now illegal, but still having produced hundreds of future cases of
"Parkinson's", including the ones doing the hitting as well as the ones
getting hit.  The trouble is, you can't make a helmet that stops the brain
from smashing around in the skull when hit.*


* No, I don't watch it now and have not for years preferring tennis and
golf - individual sports.*


bill w

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:31 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
>
> Fun story for a Saturday morning.
>
>
>
> We read that a former heavyweight champion Ali (Cassius Clay in the old
> days) perished yesterday.  In 1970 when I was the age my son is now, they
> were having a big match for the heavyweight boxing championship between
> Clay and Joe Frazier.  In those days, boxing was a big deal.  So they tried
> to get a former heavyweight boxing champion to contribute to the
> commentary.  Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson had both perished (one was a
> doper we heard, the other was in a plane crash as I think I recall.)  They
> couldn’t find Ingemar Johansson but they found Floyd Patterson, who was
> only about mid-30s at that time.
>
>
>
> How-ahd Co-sell had an interview with Patterson on the phone.  He sounded
> drunk to me, but afterwards plenty of people had to wonder if the sport had
> perhaps contributed to his condition.  They had a hard time finding a
> former heavyweight boxing champion who could hold a sustained intelligent
> conversation.  Now we know more about the cumulative effects of multiple
> concussions.
>
>
>
> The popularity of boxing faded, to the point where in the late 1970s, you
> couldn’t do varsity high school boxing (my school didn’t even have a
> team.)  Golden Gloves league was gone from campus.  The high school no
> longer had a boxing ring, no boxing coach, only a few mats and a locker of
> mostly unused gloves and headgear.
>
>
>
> It feels to me like football is now where boxing was in about 1970.
>
>
>
> spike
>
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