Jerry Quarry fought Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson as a hard-punching heavyweight before too many shots to the head blurred his mind and twisted his memories, making him a confused, childlike man whose family had to dress and feed him.
Quarry, 53, died Sunday in Templeton, Calif., after being taken off life support. He was hospitalized Dec. 28 with pneumonia and then suffered cardiac arrest.Family members directed doctors to remove life support after being told that Quarry would be bedridden and have to be fed through a tube, according to Claude Sutherland, a longtime family friend.
"He won the last fight of his life by going home to God," Quarry's mother, Arwanda, said through Sutherland.
Quarry earned $2.1 million in purses as a top contender in the 1960s and '70s but later lost it all through drug and alcohol use and three marriages. By age 38, he had been diagnosed with early signs of dementia and lived on Social Security checks.
The medical name for his condition was dementia pugilistica, severe brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head.
A neuropsychologist who examined him five years ago said that boxing had aged Quarry 30 years and that he was at third-stage dementia, similar to Alzheimer's disease.
But he couldn't resist the siren song of the ring.
In 1992, Quarry fought for the last time. Believing he could make a comeback as George Foreman had, he took a bout in Colorado, a state where no boxing license was required.
But Quarry was battered for six rounds by a club fighter. He earned $1,050 for absorbing the beating.
"He was missing the accolades," Quarry's brother, James, said three years ago. "In making those comebacks, Jerry would walk around saying, 'I'm going to be a hero again."'
In addition to his two fights with Ali, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, Quarry's career highlights also included two fights against Patterson, the former heavyweight champion who now has significant memory loss.
Both bouts against Patterson were in Quarry's hometown of Los Angeles. The first ended in a draw, and he won the second on a controversial split decision.