It’s No Game : Boxers Face Severe Effects From Head Blows

Several years ago, in an outdoor stadium in the parking lot of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, a boxer was knocked out. When he climbed back to his feet, a doctor asked him where he was. Frantically, the boxer scanned the scene, searching for a clue. And 200 yards away, in mammoth, glowing, blue neon lights atop the hotel, he found his answer.

“Caesars Palace,” the boxer said confidently.

“Which one?” the doctor then asked.

A look of panic crossed the fighter’s face.

“Atlantic City?” he guessed.

“Wrong,” the doctor said. “You are in Las Vegas.”

In 1988, in a fight he was winning easily, boxer Marlon Starling heard the bell ending the sixth round, dropped his gloves and was devastated by a crushing right hand thrown by Tomas Molinares.

Starling fell like one of the buffaloes in “Dances With Wolves.”

His leg twitched. He did not get up for nearly 30 seconds. And when he did, TV broadcaster Larry Merchant was waiting with a microphone.

“Marlon, you seemed to be winning the fight easily. How did the knockout happen?” Merchant asked.

Starling, wearing a classic deer-in-the-headlights look, didn’t understand.

“I knocked him out?” he asked Merchant.

“Uh, no Marlon. You were knocked out,” Merchant told Starling.

“I wasn’t knocked out,” Starling protested loudly. “I wasn’t even knocked down. What are you talking about?”

What Merchant was talking about was a knockout, the single most dramatic moment in boxing. It is baseball’s grand slam, basketball’s thunder-dunk and football’s 100-yard kickoff return.

The one-punch ending.

It leaves the puncher feeling like the toughest man in the world and wondering who his next victim will be. It leaves the punched wondering where he is. Or who he is. Or just what the heck happened to him.

And it is more than a little bit dangerous.

“A heavy blow to the head moves the brain,” said Frederick Flynn, a neurologist and a consultant to the California Athletic Commission, the state’s governing body of boxing. “And when the brain hits the inside of the skull, damage occurs.

“And in boxing, where getting repeatedly hit in the head very hard is simply a fact of life, the net effect is dementia (severe mental impairment).”

Brain damage does result in some cases, but for boxers who deliver heavy, brain-jarring punches much more often than they receive them, the subject of knockouts is a joyous one.

“Nothing like it in the world,” said John Bray of Van Nuys, the reigning national heavyweight amateur champion. “No feeling on earth to match that one- or two-punch knockout.

“You just can’t describe the feeling you get when you land that perfect punch and the guy goes down and out. You feel like you own the world.”

Is Bray a madman? Hardly. Growing up in a gang-plagued area of Van Nuys, he used boxing to escape the drugs and violence that swallowed most of his neighborhood friends. He is soft-spoken, intelligent and polite. And he has often helped an opponent back onto his feet after knocking him out.

But he is a bit tougher than the average guy.

Earlier this year, he accidentally discharged a 9mm handgun loaded with a hollow-point bullet while he was cleaning the gun. The bullet went into his open mouth--”Luckily, I talk a lot,” Bray said--and exited high on his cheek. The bullet hit nothing except the soft flesh, the wound took only about a dozen stitches and four weeks later he was back in the ring, exchanging heavy punches with sparring partners.

“And they said I couldn’t take a good shot,” Bray said recently.

For Bray, the knockout is the ultimate.

“As a boxer, you dream of knocking the other guy out,” he said. “Knocking him out cold. You don’t want to permanently hurt anyone, but you do want to hit him hard enough to knock him out. That’s the name of the game.”

Greg Haugen, a two-time world champion and the only fighter to defeat the flamboyant Hector Camacho, takes it a step further.

“It’s you or him,” Haugen said. “And it’s always better when it’s him. And after you knock a guy out, you can’t feel sorry for him, not even a little sorry for him. If you do, you’re in the wrong sport. When you knock a guy out, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. You feel strong, and you know the fight is over and there’s no more risk.

“Well, there’s no more risk for you. “

There is, however, plenty of risk for the victim. A blow to the head hard enough to cause unconsciousness is dangerous, even if it only happens once in a lifetime. When it happens several times, and is coupled with an almost daily head-battering that is not quite hard enough to cause a knockout, great danger looms.

Flynn said that even a moderate blow to the head causes a tearing of the long nerves that run from the top of the brain down into the brain stem, nerves that control the electrical impulses of the brain and maintain a person’s consciousness.

“When those long nerves are damaged, the electrical impulses don’t work as well and a knockout results,” Flynn said. “Much suggests that there is a definite cumulative effect from boxing as those long nerves and related brain cells become more and more damaged. The result is always a deterioration of mental functions. Talking, walking, thinking, you name it.

“Having a head injury once, like a one-time concussion from an accident, the damage might heal itself. But boxing guarantees repeated head trauma, even for the very best boxer.”

The loss of memory that nearly always accompanies a severe blow to the head is what afflicted the fighter who was knocked out in the Caesars Palace parking lot and, more recently, Starling. Those who have been in the boxing gyms for years have many similar stories.

“I knocked a guy out in 1988, a guy named Charlie Brown,” said Haugen. “After he woke up, the referee asked him what his name was and he gave the referee his age. I said to myself, ‘Man, I must have really hit this guy.’ ”

Rafael Ruelas of Arleta, a 5-foot-11, 140-pound fighter with several one-punch knockouts to his credit, has seen that scene, too.

“I knocked a guy out once and he didn’t make sense for a long time,” Ruelas said. “He was on the mat calling out, ‘Momma! Momma!’ ”

But unlike Haugen, Ruelas said he did feel sorry for the guy.

“Oh, definitely,” he said. “I really felt bad. It was kind of sad. I knew it was my job, but I felt bad about that one.”

Flynn said the loss of memory is easily explained.

“The temporal lobes of the brain are very susceptible to injury when there is any head trauma,” he said. “The temporal lobes serve the short-term memory, so a blow to the head can easily cause relative amnesia. After a knockout in boxing, it is very unusual for the fighter to remember what happened to him, to recall the events leading up to the knockout. And after they regain consciousness they might talk to you for an hour. But the next day it’s likely they won’t remember talking to you.

“In most cases, there is a time zone around the actual knockout, a time frame, that will never come back to them.”

Most fighters, even the successful ones, don’t dwell on the negative thought, the thought that even though they are dishing out most of the punishment, they are very likely receiving some, too.

Bray, however, says he thinks about it.

“I’m 21 and I’ve been boxing for 10 years,” he said. “And already I worry about it. Some mornings I can’t remember things. I have headaches. I wonder what’s happening. I know there’s brain damage from boxing. We all know it. My thought is to do it for a little while longer, turn pro, make some money and get out.”

In the meantime, though, he will try to knock out everyone who gets in the ring with him.

It is an ability, Bray believes, he was born with.

“I always had the ability to punch hard,” he said. “Even before any coaching or training, I could punch harder than the other kids and harder than a lot of grown men. The knockout punch is all natural. You have it or you don’t.”

Joe Goossen of the Ten Goose Boxing Club, a trainer who had former middleweight champion Michael Nunn, believes a powerful punch springs from proper technique.

“It’s entirely in the balance, the leverage,” he said. “Technique and form do the damage.”

Heavyweight Rocky Pepeli of Burbank, who has knocked out many opponents, said knockouts only happen when a fighter is not trying for them.

“Just like baseball,” he said. “When you try to hit a home run, you’ll pop it up or foul it off every time. My knockouts have always come when I was relaxed and not trying to knock a guy out, not even thinking about it. The punches actually seem easy.

“Later, when I watch the films, I realized they weren’t easy punches at all. They just felt that way.”

To him.

The more times a fighter is hit on the head, the easier it becomes for him to be knocked out, according to Flynn. The common boxing belief that an aging fighter’s “chin is shot” is based in fact.

“The cumulative effect of repeated blows to the head is that the damage to the brain becomes worse,” Flynn said. “It becomes easier and easier to shut down the electrical signals in the brain.”

And, the natural aging process robs all of us of brain cells on a regular basis. Combined with the blows to the head that a boxer takes, the older a boxer gets, the more damage the brain has sustained and the easier it is for him to suffer a knockout.”

A combination of bone structure, conditioning and the strength of the long nerves in the brain make some boxers less susceptible to being knocked out.

Randall (Tex) Cobb, a heavyweight of little boxing skill but a classic “iron jaw,” was not knocked out in more than 30 pro fights.

There was one unofficial KO, however.

“Just knocked out one time in my life,” he once told an interviewer. “And that was by a 135-pound guy in a barroom.

“Of course, it doesn’t really count. Someone was swinging him by the heels at the time.”