What Boxing Did to Muhammad Ali

At 22 he was not supposed to win. The champion was thought close to unbeatable, and the bookmakers had the challenger at seven to one.

He won. The next morning he announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam and was changing his name. Newspapers refused to print it. Some opponents refused to use it for years.

The fighting was never the controversial part.

He said no

Three years later he was called up to fight in Vietnam and refused, loudly, on religious grounds.

Within hours the boxing authorities stripped his title. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, and his passport was withdrawn. He was 25. He did not fight again until he was 28.

Those are the middle years of a heavyweight's best window. They were removed.

What those years took

Ali was a heavyweight who moved like a much smaller man. He did not block much, because he was rarely where the punch was. His defence was his legs.

Speed is the first thing an athlete loses, and it does not come back. The man who returned in 1970 was still brilliant. He could no longer avoid being hit.

Winning by being hit

What followed is one of the great runs in sport. There were three fights with one rival, the first of which he lost. He regained the title at 32 against a far harder puncher.

He won that fight by leaning on the ropes and letting himself be hit for seven rounds until the other man tired. Then he knocked him out in the eighth.

It is taught as genius, and it was. It was also a man choosing to take several hundred punches on purpose. His own trainer shouted at him to stop. Both readings are true.

The third fight with his great rival, in the heat of Manila, went 14 rounds. He said it was the closest thing to dying he knew. He was 33, and he fought for six more years.

The fights that should not have happened

By the late 1970s he was slower, and his speech had changed. His doctors, his family and reporters had all noticed.

He fought anyway. He came back at 38 in a fight that his own corner stopped. He fought once more at 39 and lost.

The man who had built a career on not being hit took the most punishment of his life in those years.

The diagnosis

Three years after his last fight he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. He was 42.

In Parkinson's, cells that produce dopamine die off. Dopamine lets a movement start smoothly and stop cleanly. Without enough of it, movement becomes slow and stiff. There may be a tremor at rest, a face that shows less, and a quieter voice.

It does not have to touch thinking. He stayed sharp for decades. What went was the machinery that let him show it.

Did boxing cause it?

His neurologist described it as related to boxing. So did his family, and so did he. Medicine still cannot prove it in one man.

• Ordinary Parkinson's happens to people who never took a punch.
• Repeated head trauma raises the risk. That is established across whole populations.
• He took an extraordinary amount of it, mostly in his last years.
• A diagnosis at 42 is very early.

A population is not a person. The evidence points one way and does not close the door.

Why he was bigger than boxing

He chose those three lost years. He knew what refusing would cost, and in 1967 it made him one of the most disliked men in America. His conviction was overturned unanimously in 1971.

Athletes had been famous before. Very few had spent the fame on something.

He lived 32 years after the diagnosis. In 1996 he lit the Olympic flame with a shaking arm in front of the world.

What changed in the sport

• Championship fights were cut from 15 rounds to 12 in the 1980s, after a fighter died.
• Medical suspensions after knockouts became standard.
• Brain scans before fights became routine in most places.

None of that would have stopped his last two fights. A licensed fighter with normal scans who wants to fight is still allowed to.

The short answer

He paid for what he believed, and then he paid again for having paid. The fights were the smaller half.