Old loves are a long time dying. They can survive deceptions and separations, petty cruelties and fleeting passions. But, eventually, they give way to the grinding erosions of time. And suddenly, one cold morning, they are dead. For too long a time, I loved the brutal sport of prize fighting. But I've arrived at last at that cold morning. You cannot love anything that lives in a sewer. And the world of boxing is more fetid and repugnant now than any other time in its squalid history.

Every month, in this era of multimillion-dollar purses, of cable television and pay-per-view, prizefights are legally fixed through matchmaking. There are bogus champions in every weight division. Brave kids make Faustian bargains to get title shots and are then robbed and exploited by rapacious promoters. When their brains are mauled or their eyes beaten into blindness, they are treated like derelicts, mocked and abandoned. In this country, old dogs are treated better than old prizefighters. I don't want to look at that filthy world anymore or contribute to its further existence. Not the way it is now.

When I was young, growing up in the tenements of New York in the years after World War II, prizefighting was the great dark prince of sports. Baseball was our secular religion, of course, but it was played in sun-splashed glades where it was big news if anyone got hurt. Few people in blue-collar America were passionate about professional football or basketball.

But boxing exuded the dangerous glamour of the urban night. We traveled on Friday evenings by subway to the old Madison Square Garden. Before the fights, the lobby was jammed with neighborhood tough guys and off-duty cops, old fighters with crumpled faces, gamblers with dead eyes and pearl-gray hats and velvet collars on their coats. There were a lot of pinkie rings. Some guys brought their women with them, great fleshy creatures with blinding hair and glistening scarlet lips. Everybody smoked. And the very air seemed charged with the coming blood rite. We were all there to see violence transformed into art.

And at its best, boxing was art. For my generation, the great master was Sugar Ray Robinson, who as welterweight and middleweight champion displayed every quality that marked great fighters: superb boxing skills, blazing combinations of punches, knockout power in each hand. He understood tactics and strategy. He practiced guile and deception. He set up spectacular, elegant ambushes.

That was why so many of us would jam the Garden and less-grand arenas in other American cities. We wanted to see another Robinson. Not only for the skills he displayed but for the other huge quality he brought before us: heart. This wasn't simple courage; we knew that any man who tied on gloves and entered a ring had a degree of courage. More than most men. But to say that a man had heart was a more complicated matter. The fighter with heart was willing to endure pain in order to inflict it. The fighter with heart accepted the cruel rules of the sport. He must not -- could not -- quit. He might be outclassed and outgunned, but he never looked for an exit. That is why the Muhammad Ali of the Thrilla in Manila will be remembered long after we are all dead; he had gone through the savage purgatory called Joe Frazier and emerged proud and triumphant.

At its glorious best, a prizefight was not a movie, in which every action was choreographed and the good guy always won. When we saw a fight, we knew that the damage was real. The blood was real. The pain was real. When there was a script, when the outcome was known before a punch was thrown, the fight was fixed.

In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan's Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap. The goal of these fixed fights was the gambling coup. A fighter was given money to lose. If you knew that a 3-to-1 underdog was certain to win, you could make some money. Everybody in boxing knew what was going on. Sportswriters knew, too. Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post called boxing "the red-light district of sports."

The exposure of those fixed fights almost killed boxing. Older fans turned away; if they wanted fiction, they'd go to the movies. The young took their ritualized violence from pro football or hockey; they found their models of elegance in basketball. The young didn't start going to the fights until the rise of Muhammad Ali.

As the fight racket lay dying, there were calls for reform, of course. There were investigations, a few indictments. A dwindling number of fight fans shrugged in a fatalistic way. It was futile to rail about the corruption in boxing; it had been there from the beginning, and only a fool could believe in complete redemption. Such fans hoped only that the beauty of the art would somehow survive, like flowers blooming in a garbage dump. They were looking for another Robinson. I was one of them.

Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I'd have paid my own way. I've been thrilled at fights in Mexico City and Dublin, Tokyo and San Juan. When the old Garden was torn down, I kept going to fights in the antiseptic new Garden. Eventually, the pearl-gray hats and pinkie rings vanished. The lush blond molls gave way to anorexic models. I kept going to the fights.

Along the way, I came to believe that fighters themselves were among the best human beings I knew. They were mercifully free of the macho bullshit that stains so many professional athletes. They were gentle in a manly way. It is no accident that for almost forty years now, one of my closest friends has been Jose Torres, who was light-heavyweight champion of the world in the 1960s and later chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. We used to discuss big fights with the passion of enthusiasm.

Not anymore.

Finally, after too many years, I've reached the point of revulsion. The sport as it's now conducted is disgusting. My objections are not to its inherent brutalities. Americans can't make much of a claim about being too "civilized" to sanction boxing when they accept the highest murder rate in the developed world and their politicians toady to the gun nuts in the National Rifle Association. We are a very violent country.

My revulsion is much simpler than that. I don't want to be entertained anymore by sport whose participants are being systematically robbed, permanently injured, and killed. I don't care about managers, promoters, or the various television suits who transmit the fights to the safety of American living rooms. If they were all on board an airplane that crashed into an alp, I would shed no tears.

I'm talking here about the fighters. About those young athletes who rent us their courage, who come out of the meanest streets of the worst towns and for a few brutal seasons earn more money than all the generations of their families combined. Those who hold the gold in their hands for a few sweet seasons and then have it looted by thieves. Those veterans with the scrambled brains. Those prematurely senile kids walking on their heels.

If those brave young men can't be protected, boxing should be banned.

II



The most obvious hazard to the prizefighter is the one that is most unavoidable: brain damage. Fighters know that when they engage in a boxing match, they are risking everything, up to and including their lives. That is part of the deal. Their most attractive personal quality is their fatalism. They are players in the only major sport whose supreme achievement is smashing an opponent into unconsciousness. Every fighter, even the very best, knows that someday it could happen to him.

Few fighters, and not many fans, know what is really happening. In a 1993 report published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, the Swedish doctors Yvonne Haglund and Ejnar Eriksson summarized recent medical studies of boxing injuries. They acknowledged that there are fewer injuries in boxing than in football, rugby, soccer, ice hockey, skiing, or motor racing. But, they wrote, "boxing differs from other sports because the boxer is exposed to repeated blows to the head."

Repeated blows to the head, in prizefights and gymnasiums, have consequences. The technical language of the Haglund-Eriksson report has a chilling objectivity:

"The most common acute brain injury is a cerebral concussion, defined as an impairment of neurologic function secondary to mechanical forces that results either in unconsciousness or at least a groggy state. Dizziness, memory loss, and nausea may follow a knockout."

That's why so many fighters have no memories of what happened to them in their defeats. And then: "The severity of acute damage varies from transient alterations of cognitive function to irreversible brain damage and death."

I was in Madison Square Garden years ago when a brave Cuban welterweight named Benny "Kid" Paret was hammered into unconsciousness by Emile Griffith. He suffered a subdural hematoma, which one of Paret's doctors described to me this way: "The brain is slammed up against the wall of the skull again and again, and damage is devastating." A few days later, after an operation to ease the swelling of his battered brain, Paret died.

Other fighters are not as fortunate. They end up punch-drunk. The scientific label is "dementia pugilistica," or "chronic progressive traumatic encephalopathy of boxers." According to the medical literature, this syndrome afflicts 9 to 25 percent of professional fighters. The most common victims are heavyweights, whose heads are pounded with more force than those of lighter-weight boxers, and mediocre fighters, particularly sluggers without refined technical skills. The latter, of course, are usually the opponents in the modern fixed fights.

The Haglund-Eriksson report describes the three stages of the punch-drunk syndrome:

"The first stage is manifested by affective disturbances and mild incoordination. In the second stage, the psychiatric symptoms increase; paranoid ideas, mild dysarthria, and resting tremor may appear. The third stage is characterized by a decrease in general cognitive functions, memory deficits, impaired hearing, hyperreflexia, dysarthria, intention tremor, and incoordination."

That is, the speech is slurred, and gaps appear in sentences like rips in a film. The ex-fighter begins walking in a jerking, oddly dainty way. Often, he retreats from the world, as if hearing private conversations or secret orchestras. The studies also indicate that the punch-drunk begin acting immaturely and aggressively, suspicious of all around them. And there can be other consequences. Studies suggest that boxers suffer more than others from Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and frontal-lobe tumors. Blows to the head are also believed to be one of the triggers of Alzheimer's disease. The punch-drunk syndrome doesn't happen quickly; sometimes it shows up as soon as seven years after the beginning of a career, sometimes as late as thirty-five years; the average is sixteen years. It is virtually unknown among amateur fighters, whose careers are much shorter. One thing is absolutely clear: The longer a fighter fights, the more likely he is to get punch-drunk.

III



On the night of the Tyson-Bruno fight, I went to a place called the Official All Star Cafe in Times Square. There was a huge private party to honor the twentieth anniversary of the first Rocky movie, and crowds packed the sidewalks for a glimpse of Sylvester Stallone and the celebrities he might draw. One of those celebrities was Muhammad Ali.

Ali was already there when I arrived, dressed in a dark-red long-sleeved shirt, seated at a table with his wife and young son. To his right was a movie-size screen on which the preliminary fights were being broadcast from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The room was crowded with citizens of the fight racket: Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis, Ray Leonard and Willie Pep, managers and promoters, wives and girlfriends. Everybody tried to avoid looking at Muhammad Ali.

His head was bowed and he was trying to eat. But his right hand was shaking so hard that he could not get the piece of chicken to move two inches to his mouth. His wife, Lonnie, put her hand over his to quell the shaking and gently guided the chicken to its destination. Ali chewed diligently but did not raise his head.

Across the evening, people came over to the table to lean down and speak to the ruined fifty-four-year-old man. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he whispered a reply. Sometimes he rose to pose for pictures. But then he would be back in the chair, the once lithe and powerful body sagging, the eyes wide and wary, a plastic strew clenched in his mouth, all of him shaking with the Parkinson's disease, with the damage caused by the fierce trade he once honored.

The disease, caused in Ali's case by repeated blows to the head, is insidious, degenerative, humiliating, a thief of will and memory. I know: My mother, who was hit in the head by a mugger in 1979, is now eighty-five and trapped in its silent prison. I've fed her, as Lonnie feeds Ali.

Only when the fight started and Mike Tyson came down the aisle in Las Vegas did Ali's eyes focus intensely. We'll never know what now moves through his mind. But he had made that same walk so many times, with entire arenas and stadiums roaring the chant Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee.... When young, he had been among great throngs where half the audience hated him, and had stayed long enough to convert them all. For Ah-lee, Ah-lee wasn't about celebrity or even success; it was about excellence and heart. And it was about personal defiance: of odds, of skeptics, of racists, of the American government, and of pain. Along the way, Ali became myth; most myths, alas, are also tragedies.

The younger fighters were focused on Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno, fighting them in their imaginations. They didn't once look at Ali; Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis are still young enough to believe in the lie that swears, It can't happen to me. Once Tyson had hammered Bruno out of the championship, Ali rose, was hugged by Stallone, took Lonnie's arm, and trudged off through the crowd.

Ali paid the price for his valor, and so did Jerry Quarry. We don't see much of Jerry Quarry anymore. He was the best white heavyweight of his time, a distinction he resisted. "I'm not a white hope," he said to me once, training in the 1970s in a hotel in the Catskills. "I'm just a fighter."

He was more than that. He could box with skill. He had a good, hurting left hook. Above all, he had heart. But it was his bad luck to be good in the time of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and they each beat him, cutting him up badly. He fought twice for the heavyweight championship and lost to Frazier and Jimmy Ellis. But he won a decision over Floyd Patterson, who twice had been heavyweight champion of the world. He knocked out the fierce puncher Earnie Shavers in one round. In a twelve-year professional career, Quarry won 53 professional fights, lost 9, and fought 4 draws; before turning pro, he won 170 amateur fights. There were a lot of rounds in front of screaming fans. There were ten times as many rounds in the gym.

Today, at fifty-one, Quarry is a shell of a man, his mind gone, lost to dementia pugilistica, his millions of dollars in earnings long vanished. Steve Wilstein of the Associated Press found him last year in Hemet, California, where Quarry was living with a brother on $614 a month from Social Security. Wilstein wrote: "He needs help shaving, showering, putting on shoes and socks. Soon, probably, diapers. His older brother, James, cuts meat into little pieces for him so he won't choke and has to coax him to eat anything except the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios he loves in the morning. Jerry smiles like a kid. Shuffles like an old man. Slow, slurred speech. Random thoughts snagged on branches in a dying brain. Time blurred. Memories twisted. Voices no one else hears."

Wilstein talked to Dr. Peter Russell, a neuropsychologist who examined Quarry last year. Russell said: Jerry Quarry now has the brain of an eighty-year-old. He's at third-stage dementia, very similar to Alzheimer's. If he lives another ten years, he'll be lucky."

I could fill the pages of this magazine with the names of the other casualties of boxing, none of whom were as famous as Quarry or Ali. Consider only one: Wilfredo Benitez. For a few years, he was a splendid welterweight, a boxer/puncher with talent and heart. He was trained by his father, Gregorio, who turned Wilfredo pro in 1973, when the boy was fifteen. Benitez won his first world championship at seventeen. He called himself the Bible of Boxing, which made all of his friends laugh, because that was the slogan of The Ring magazine. Wilfredo kept fighting for seventeen years, going up against the best fighters in several divisions. In sixty-two fights, he was knocked out four times, and after his last fight, a lost decision in Canada, the authorities recommended a neurological examination because he lacked coordination. He didn't take the test. He simply went home forever.

Today, Wilfredo Benitez lives with his mother in Puerto Rico. The $8 million he earned in the ring is gone. His wife is gone. His own house is gone. Even the furniture was hauled away at the end. When my friend Jose Torres went to visit him last year, to have him come to a dinner for all the former Puerto Rican champions, Wilfredo's mother greeted him at the door and burst into tears.

"I'm so glad you came," she said. "He won't go out of the house. He won't do anything. He just sits in his room in the dark."

Torres went into the room and Benitez smiled in a sweet way and shook his hand. There was nothing else to say.

IV




The debate about saving boxing has been going on for years. Twelve years ago, the American Medical Association called for its ban. So have the British, Canadian and Australian medical associations, the World Medical Association, the American Neurological Association, and the American Academy of Neurology. But the sport goes on. The money is bigger than ever, thanks to revenue from gambling casinos, cable television, and the pay-per-view system. Kids from poor backgrounds continue to walk into gyms in hopes of hitting the jackpot. They don't examine the fine print in the contracts. It doesn't bother them that, unlike all other professional athletes, they will have no health or medical plans and no pensions. They are willing to give as much as 50 percent of their earnings to managers and sign long-term deals with the scummiest promoters. Unlike basketball, football, and baseball players, they have no union. When it's over for a fighter, it's over.

That shouldn't be allowed to go on. If boxing continues to be sanctioned in this country, then certain reforms should be mandatory. Here are some possibilities:

1. Create a national governing body for the sport. In most sports, the governing body is composed of the owners of teams, who have commissioners and administrators to regulate the sport. Boxing's governing body should be composed of the people who bear the responsibility for its existence: the TV networks and the gambling casinos. These are the most powerful entities in the boxing business, the equivalents of the major movie studios. If they all stopped showing boxing, and paying huge sums to its individual promoters, the sport would vanish. So they have the power to clean it up. Obviously, it's in their own interests to stop blaming the sport's evils on Don King and Bob Arum. Such individual promoters could still function, the way individual producers work with the movie and television part of the entertainment business. But promoters would be subject to much tougher industrywide rules and regulations. The major TV outlets and casinos can end legal fixed fights by refusing to show them. They can insist on establishing -- and enforcing -- competitive standards. But they must be united. And they must have control of the quality of the product. For the sake of discussion, call this entity the American Boxing Organization.

2. Establish a union of prizefighters. As soon as a boxer turns professional, he should be required to take out a union card. The union could be divided the way many motion-picture unions are split up, into East Coast and West Coast locals. Useful models: the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. The union's leaders would negotiate with the American Boxing Organization to establish minimum payments for fights. They would help police box-office receipts, particularly in the pay-per-view racket. They would control medical and pension plans.

At the very least, a contract shaped by this union/management combination would have to do the following:

* Ensure that a full medical team is at ringside for every fight, with appropriate technical support, including ambulances.

* Insist on MRIs or CAT scans for each licensed fighter every six months, with mandatory tests after knockouts or multiple knockdowns. Purses should be withheld until these tests are performed. Only doctors certified by the American Boxing Organization could give these tests; they could not be left to corrupt friends of the individual promoters.

Place any fighter who had been knocked out on a form of probation. Suspend for ninety days any fighter who has suffered a clean knockout. Ban for life any fighter who has been knocked out three times. The bans should include boxing in gymnasiums.

Insist on mandatory retirement at thirty-five. All studies show that the longer a fighter works at his trade, the greater the chance of permanent damage. The damage is also cumulative. If a fighter hasn't made his fortune by thirty-five, he'll never make it. (George Foreman would seem to be the exception, but he had a ten-year layoff and in recent fights has been getting pounded.) It's obscene to let Roberto Duran and Larry Holmes continue to be punched in the head for the entertainment of strangers.

* Require mandatory tests for HIV before every fight. As Tommy Morrison reminded the world in February, after he came up positive, boxing is a blood sport.

* Test for steroids and other drugs before every fight. A drug-enhanced fighter is engaging in consumer fraud.

* Limit the manager's share of any purse to 10 percent. In states like New York, a manager is legally entitled to one third of a fighter's purse, but in other states managers grab as much as 50 percent. A prizefighter is an entertainer; he should not have to pay a higher percentage than an actor pays an agent. Sylvester Stallone is paid $20 million for a movie; he doesn't give half of that sum to his agents at William Morris.

* Contract with a top accounting firm to verify all financial records. Any promoter caught demanding kickbacks from fighters or managers would be banned for life and subjected to prosecution for extortion in the states where the demands were made.

* Negotiate a lifetime medical and disability plan for fighters, one that would cover them long after they've hung up the gloves. Since dementia pugilistica can kick in late, they just get the best care available for as long as they live. This would be financed by contributions from individual promoters and the American Boxing Organization, along with small contributions (say 1 percent) from active fighters.

Establish a pension plan, one based on actual earnings. This is only fair; a fighter who retires after ten fights should not get the same pension payout as a man with sixty fights. But today, with one exception, there is no pension of any kind in professional boxing. A utility infielder who averages .208 for five seasons in the major leagues gets a pension; Roberto Duran will not. The exception was designed by Randy Neumann, a referee and former boxer who worked out a pension plan for the International Boxing Federation. It calls for mandatory 2 percent contributions from IBF champions and challengers, with a retirement age of thirty-five. It is the only pension plan for boxers, and it is, of course, inadequate. The IBF is a self-created organization that sanctions title fights and deals only with champions and challengers. As a result, the plan doesn't cover the ordinary fighter, the preliminary boy, the sparring partner, the man who has an honorable career but never gets a shot at a championship. After two years of existence, there are only one hundred participants in the plan and $400,000 in assets, with no provisions for medical or disability care. Still, it is a beginning, and Neumann should be applauded.

Force promoters -- not fighters -- to pay sanctioning fees. These are now grabbed by such thieving outfits as the World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Organization (WBO), World Boxing Association (WBA), and the rest of boxing's alphabet soup. Under the current system, a champion must pay one or more of these self-appointed organizations for the privilege of defending his own title. These fees should not be paid at all, and they certainly shouldn't be paid by the fighters. The present system is like asking every player in a World Series to pay 3 percent of his share to organized baseball for the privilege of becoming a champion.

* License professional-boxing gymnasiums. At present, they exist in a state of anarchy. A middleweight who is knocked out on Friday can be boxing a heavyweight in the gym on Tuesday. Amateur kids are sometimes thrown in with hardened professionals. Boxing gymnasiums should be treated as schools. The schools and their faculties should be licensed and made responsible for what happens within their walls. Gym knockouts must be reported to the commissions along with signs of punchiness. Every professional fighter knows that the heaviest physical damage takes place in the gym. If the fighters are to be completely protected, the gyms must be included.

* Computerize boxing records for all fifty states and insist upon verification of records from foreign countries. These records should not only include wins and losses; they must provide details about knockdowns suffered, bad cuts, signs of poor reflexes. These records would eliminate the "tomato can," the fighter who has lost more than he has won and is used to create bogus records for frauds like Peter McNeeley. Computerized fingerprinting would ensure that fighters banned in one state didn't turn up under fake names in other states.

* Provide free legal services for all fighters. Boxers must be able to read the contracts they are signing. If they are illiterate, they must have the legal documents carefully explained by neutral lawyers. If they don't speak or read English, the contracts must be translated and explained in the fighter's native language. Failure to do so, in the presence of witnesses, would make the contracts null and void if challenged.

*Separate the role of manager from the role of promoter. In the movie business, agents can't simultaneously be producers. Those roles are by definition adversarial. In New York and some other states, it is against the law for a manager to serve as his fighter's promoter. It is also against the law to be the actual manager and hire a front man. That's why Don King won't ever bring Mike Tyson to box in his native New York. Such laws should be national and enforced with indictments and prosecutions.

* Eliminate the "options" clauses in contracts. The promoter/manager has made this standard practice. This encourages some managers to feed their fighters to people who will beat them. It also rewards winners with a form of indentured servitude. It's absurd and must go.

Maybe none of these reforms can be made. And maybe they shouldn't be made. Looking at the casualties, I've come to believe that boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore. But if professional boxing continues to exist, then its organizers must choose: They can clean it up, or shut it down. It's too late for Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry and Wilfredo Benitez. They inhabit a sad, silent limbo. But they should be the last. No more kids should be reduced to zombies for the entertainment of people who lead safe, well-defended lives. People who still hear the roar of Ah-lee, Ah-lee! People like me. People like us.