Boxing Champion Donald Curry Fights Disease

It does seem a peculiar coincidence that former Texas Gov. Charles Culberson and Donald Curry currently reside within 3 miles of one another. The man who literally did all he could within his powers as governor to ensure that a boxing match never took place on the sacred soil of the land of Stephen F. Austin, and the boxer who quite possibly exemplifies each of his fears. “Donald Curry is on the precipice of greatness,” referee Mills Lane said one night in 1985, the night the “Lone Star Cobra” conquered Milton McCrory with a stunning left hand in a second-round rout in Las Vegas. “When history tells the story of him, he may go down as one of the greatest.”

Jake LaMotta, the “Raging Bull,” said Curry was the best fighter since Sugar Ray Robinson.  

Greatness certainly seemed to be Curry’s destiny. Many believed he was a certain gold-medal winner in the Moscow Olympic Games the U.S. boycotted in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Curry indeed rocketed to the top of his profession, but history’s story turned out a far different one than prophesied for a variety of reasons. Greed, which decimates like the most aggressive cancer, was forefront among them. 

In the social media parlance of our day, it’s complicated.

Still, the big wheels of the International Boxing Hall of Fame three years ago admitted him to the place of vaulted ceilings where the legacies of the greatest of his sport in the modern era sit for posterity. That weekend Curry joined the sweet science’s most elite upper crust, taking his place alongside the likes of Ali, Arguello, Camacho, Cesar Chavez, Duran, Foreman, Frazier, Hagler, Hearns, Holmes, LaMotta, Leonard, Liston, Louis, Marciano, Norton, Patterson, Spinks, and Tyson.

In Fort Worth, his hometown, Curry was a hero. He had become the city’s first world champion as a welterweight. Two years later, he unified the division with the knockout of McCrory, the first unified welterweight champion since Leonard. Curry was the toast of Fort Worth when he scored a second-round KO against Eduardo Rodriguez in March of 1986 in front of a standing-room-only crowd of 8,864 at Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum. The first defense of his undisputed title left Curry at 25-0 with 20 knockouts.

He embraced his heritage, reminding whoever would listen that he was a proud son of Fort Worth and a 1980 graduate of Paschal High School. He was feted publicly — the City Council proclaimed a Friday in February 1985, “Donald Curry Day,” and a banquet followed — he spoke and encouraged children to be their best, to overcome obstacles, and echoed Nancy Reagan’s directive to “Just Say No.” He willingly signed autographs, staying until the last in line got his signature. 

It’s not even a slight overstatement to say that in Fort Worth, Curry is as legendary as the Stockyards, the Acre, the Hawk, or even the camp Ripley Arnold’s men staked into the ground at the banks of the Trinity in June 1849.

Jim Wright, the future Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and boxing fan, was a big admirer. 

“Everyone was proud of him. He was up-and-coming,” says Michael Mallick, a Fort Worth developer who knew Curry at Paschal. “A lot of us followed his fights. He was the ‘Cobra,’ he was from Paschal, we were all proud of him.

“If the fight was in front of a hometown crowd, the roof would come off. Everybody went berserk. Everyone loved this guy.”

To his closest associates from those days, however, Curry is not the same person.

No one within his sphere knows for sure how to explain the tragedy of Donald Curry, today a seeming wayward, broken soul who can’t find an escape from his long walk in the wilderness. Worse than the millions earned and lost long ago are the relationships fractured and ruined from aggressive mood swings and impulsive control problems. 

Curry’s is a sad and tragic tale that goes far beyond coming up short in meeting all the expectations of being a world champion boxer.

There is a time, we have been instructed, to keep and a time to throw away. 

Curry’s son is trying desperately not to throw away his father. Donovan Curry believes he knows what has happened, writing late last year an eloquent post on social media, seeking answers and asking for help. 

He thinks it is CTE, the brain disease seen in many athletes of sports in which they take repeated blows to the head. In boxing, it has a different name: dementia pugilistica.

“Hello, all, I’m speaking on behalf of my father, Donald Curry, today. A champion of the world of boxing, one of the greatest welterweights of all time. However, today I’m asking for help. Not in a monetary way, but to spread awareness [and] hopefully find a solution for retired athletes with head trauma and symptoms of CTE. For the last three years, I’ve tried to find help for my father to possibly get a CT scan or have a mental evaluation take place, but living far away and him not being able to travel correctly have dampened that situation.

“I have not been able to figure out how to do so. My father has declined mentally since I was in high school. He now sits in jail again, where he has spent quite a bit of my childhood, teenage, and adult years. I didn’t feel for him at first when I was younger because I was unaware and uneducated on CTE and mental health. I didn’t realize what was going on. I had no idea why we would sit on the phone, and he would ramble for hours. He would ask me the same question multiple times in a conversation.

“He would forget where I went to school after telling him hundreds of times or forget where I live. My family members would say he would talk to himself in the bathroom for periods of time. He would randomly be aggressive to someone. Instead, some feedback I receive or when I look at people’s comments from the internet, people say, ‘That’s just the way he is, he’s crazy.’

“I went to a pawn shop in the Dallas/Fort Worth area where a fan reached out to me because there was memorabilia and family photos that were probably sold in an auction, and the employee said, ‘I heard he was on drugs.’ It was disheartening to hear [that] knowing what truly is going on.

“Then, for the first time in my life, I spent a weekend with him when he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame. There I could see he had trouble walking down a hallway. He would lean on a wall while walking and seemed impaired. He would need assistance with simple things and tasks. He would be confused about going to different events that we talked about before getting there.

“The last thing that broke me down was during the final day. I heard great, thoughtful speeches from [commentator] Teddy Atlas, [former champions] Julian Jackson and Buddy McGirt, and more. All of their families were there to support them. I tried to prepare a speech for my father for months, and he never wanted to really get to it. He thought he could go up to the stage and speak from his heart and talk about memories. But when he got there, all he could say was thank you, and he walked off because he was not able mentally.

“Things like this dishearten me because I know the reason why he is like this, but unfortunately, CTE and mental health is something that’s new to us all [in 2022]. He has more than likely broken relationships because of this disease, and I’m here to apologize on his behalf.”

“The only person who continually takes him back after verbal or physical assaults or more is my aunt. But at this point, she does not know what to do. I don’t know what to do. The last thing I could think of is to ask all his fans, supporters, friends, and former business colleagues for help before he hurts someone, someone hurts him, or he hurts himself.”

The state of Texas’ boxing history is storied. Fort Worth is a big part of that story.

Nick Wells, a heavyweight, knocked out future world heavyweight champion Larry Holmes in the 1972 Olympic Trials at TCU’s Daniel-Meyer Coliseum. Holmes would go on to be one of the fight game’s most prestigious champions, successfully defending his title 20 times, second only to Joe Louis’ 25. 

Wells, who grew up in Polytechnic, was a legend, but he was merely the prophet for the greatest of them all in Fort Worth.

That was Curry, but he had world championship peers from his hometown. Stevie Cruz, Gene Hatcher, Troy Dorsey, and Robin Blake all held world championships in various weight classes during the same timeframe of the 1980s. Curry’s brother, Bruce, was another world champion, though he was splitting time between here and California. A bit later came Paulie Ayala, and Sergio Reyes was an Olympian at the Barcelona Games in 1992.

Curry was the best of all of them.

“Donald was a well-schooled fighter, intelligent, and he knew how to work the ring and outsmart his opponent,” said Rudy Barrientes, who is notable in his own right as Fort Worth’s first Golden Gloves national champion, in 1968. Barrientes’ father, Joe, was Curry’s cut man. 

“Man, he was fast with those hands. I say that because I sparred with him at one point to stay active in the gym. As I recall, the bell rang, and we started moving around, and I caught Donald with a 1-2 combo flush. I can still see in his eyes saying to me, ‘You should not have done that.’ He opened up a can of whoop-ass on me. It was not fun.”

‘I intend to stop this fight’ If Charles Culberson, Texas governor from 1895 – 1899, had had his way, the bouts and adulation never would have happened.

Culberson’s final resting place is on Fort Worth’s North Side, in Oakwood Cemetery. He sits among some of the city’s early luminaries, including John Peter Smith, Burk Burnett, and K.M. Van Zandt. Horace Carswell, shot down in World War II, is there. Gunfighter Luke Short and his victim, Jim Courtright, ironically found places in the same burial ground. 

Culberson today is little known, but he had key roles in history. Culberson County in West Texas is named for his father, David Culberson, a lawyer and Confederate soldier. The last part should in no way taint the son. Charley Culberson spent is career opposing the KKK in every way.

Upon Culberson’s death, he was brought back to Texas and buried in a plot owned by his wife’s family, the Harrisons, in Oakwood Cemetery. A historical marker adorns his grave site.

Unlike Donald Curry, a cemetery plot is about the only personal tie Culberson had to Fort Worth. Culberson lived and worked in Dallas after immigrating from the Deep South. His introduction to our fair burg, it is presumed, was the state Democratic Convention in 1888 in Fort Worth. 

In 1895, Culberson was elected governor. While he supported the free flow of booze, Texas’ new governor was as anti-boxing as the Rev. J. Frank Norris was against sin. 

Dan Stuart, a promoter of his day every bit as persuasive as Barnum or Jerry Jones, had up his sleeve a championship heavyweight bout between “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and “Ruby Robert” Fitzsimmons in Dallas’ grand new amphitheater covering 4 acres, a quarter-mile northeast of the state fairgrounds, which had been advertised as the coming of the second-largest building, in terms as seating capacity, in the world.

Dallas city leaders envisioned the stadium as a permanent structure — they were saying that in those days, too — for athletics and conventions.

In fact, at the state fair that October, the same month as the fight, noted orator William Jennings Bryan, who next year would begin the first of three runs for the U.S. presidency, made an address. But this would be bigger, they all predicted, each and every one of the arena’s 52,000 seats occupied in Dallas, then a city of about 45,000. 

Boxing had been outlawed in many states, but not Texas, not completely anyway. So, city and state officials smelled a big money and public relations opportunity.

Stuart, by force of personality and a robust checkbook big enough to outlast any economic panic, outbid all the others by offering a purse of $41,000, including $39,000 going to the winner.

That was serious scratch in those days — more than $1 million in today’s money — in America the Beautiful. 

The fight between the two premier pugilists of that day in Dallas was a very big deal.

A few years earlier, Gentleman Jim was the first to win a heavyweight championship bout under the code of the Queensberry rules with boxing gloves. Before then, they did it the way John Wayne would’ve done it, bare-knuckles.

This “glove contest,” as it came to be called among all those with opinions about it — and there were plenty — would be the “most scientific boxing contest in the world” and the “premier event in the domain of sport,” the mayor assured his subjects.

Then Charles Culberson entered the figurative ring. This prize fight would occur only over his dead body. 

“I intend to stop this fight if it takes the entire police force of the state to stop it,” Culberson said. The great moral and religious sentiment of Texas has been aroused as perhaps it never has been either before or since, he added, perhaps forgetting the Alamo and Goliad. 

The entire state was in an uproar of vigorous protest against this attempted piece of brutality, he concluded.

That was political hyperbole. Even Culberson’s wife disagreed with her husband’s assessment, saying, “I say let them have [the fight]. There is no use in his staying up nights and worrying himself to death trying to keep up the public dignity. It’s all foolishness, and I’ve told him so. What is the use in poor Charles working himself to death to prevent something the whole state wants? At least nine men out of every 10 in Texas want the fight.” Even in Fort Worth, there were supporters.

Nonetheless, Culberson’s wife’s input was for naught. Culberson called a special session in 1895 to outlaw boxing. 

“Impelled by a sense of duty to exert every executive power to avert this calamity, you have been called in special session, and the responsibility for the consequences is now divided with you,” he said, welcoming the Legislature into session. “That you will meet it as becomes the representatives of the whole people, anxious and ready to protect the fair name of the state is, is not doubted.”

The bill was passed the next day in what might still be the shortest special session in the history of the state. 

Boxing and “all its kindred spirits” were outlawed in Texas until repeal in the mid-1930s.

The rise of a champion Donald Curry came up through the ranks of the Texas Golden Gloves as an amateur. He competed on Paul Reyes’ United Auto Workers team. 

“I met Donald when he was 7 years old,” says Reyes, his longtime trainer. “I had no idea I had a world champion on my hands. He’s not the same person. 

“Donald needs help.”

Curry’s amateur career was second to very few anywhere.

Curry’s preparation for becoming a world champion — which he first accomplished with a unanimous decision over Jun-Suk Hwang for the WBA world welterweight crown at the Fort Worth Convention Center in 1983 — included 404 amateur bouts.

Reyes says Curry was 400-4 in those bouts, all of them before his 20th birthday. (That’s a record that is widely accepted as accurate.) In two of those losses, he won in rematches, including a second time against 147-pound, Golden Gloves national champion Ronnie Shields, who was seven years older than Curry. Curry lost the first bout in a decision in the Golden Gloves state tournament at Will Rogers in 1979 in a fight some longtime observers recall as the best ever in the Gloves tournament.

Curry’s camp believed they won that fight, but that Shields’ status as national champion gave him an edge among the judges.

“That was the only time I saw Donald cry, that Shields fight,” says Reyes.

That summer at the Amateur Athletic Union national tournament — now the Junior Olympics — Curry again ran into Shields. And this time he won.

“I’m not a big-time gambler, but I went up to [Shields’ trainer],” Reyes says, “and I said, ‘I bet you $100 we beat you this time.’

“He wouldn’t take it.”

Curry, the youngest competitor, won the AAU title that year, one of five national titles in his career, including the 1980 Olympic Trials. Curry defeated Davey Moore to win a berth to Moscow.

Reyes recalls the beating Curry took against older and more experienced boxers at the AAU tournament.

“He was just a kid, and he was fighting against men in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines,” says Reyes. “I said, ‘Donald, you don’t need to do this.’

“He said, ‘Paul, I’m going to win it.’ That told me a lot about Donald. I knew he had the heart. He was something special. It was his first year against the big boys.”

After his knockout of McCrory, talk immediately began to swirl about a bout with Sugar Ray Leonard, then the beau ideal of the boxing industry. Good-looking, charming, and as marketable as perhaps any boxer in history, even Ali, whose marketability was harmed by his political stances. 

And a fantastic boxer, too, Leonard’s career cut short by an eye injury, which forced him to retire. For the moment, at least. Curry’s camp twice offered Leonard a fight. They were turned down twice. 

“I think Donald would’ve beaten him,” Reyes says. 

In an interview with this writer several years ago, Curry said he never believed a fight with Leonard would even happen. “Ray had a lot of respect for me as a fighter,” Curry said. 

Curry’s handlers then pursued moving up weight classes and fighting Marvin Hagler as a middleweight, another premier match that would have earned Curry multimillions against another of boxing’s star attractions. 

According to Curry’s handlers, Leonard advised the Fort Worth fighter against a Hagler bout, advice designed to keep Curry from being thrown to the dogs, which was the allegation his brother Bruce’s handlers faced. 

There was a reason for that, Curry’s people said. Leonard wanted the fight and the payday against Hagler. 

Those two fought in 1987. Curry’s advisers, who by then included Curry’s original manager, David Gorman, and Akbar Muhammad, alleged in a federal lawsuit that Leonard conspired with this attorney and lied about his comeback plans so as to assure that Curry was not in the way of that Leonard-Hagler fight. It turned out not to matter.

Curry lost his welterweight titles in a stunning upset to Lloyd Honeyghan in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in September 1986. Curry, struggling to make weight, lost 10 pounds in the days preceding the bout. Curry was suffering from extreme dehydration in an effort to make weight.

“Anybody would’ve have beaten him in that fight,” Reyes says. “He was weak. He lost it to a nobody. Honeyghan wasn’t in Donald’s class.”

Curry eventually did move up, winning a junior middleweight (USBA super welterweight) title with a victory over Tony Montgomery. He defended it against Carlos Santos before being knocked out by Mike McCallum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in a fight for the WBA belt.

A fight against Michael Nunn for the IBF middleweight crown in Paris ended in a knockout loss in the 10th round.

More than a few believe that Curry’s decline began when he moved Gorman out and Muhammad in as his manager and was not coincidental. It was a move intended to enhance his earnings opportunities. Gorman, who had been a friend for years, had been in construction before becoming Curry’s manager and earning reportedly a 28% share of Curry’s purses.

Muhammad was a vice president of Bob Arum’s boxing behemoth, Top Rank Inc.

“A fighter reaches a point,” Curry told a reporter at the time, “where he thinks of putting away money. I want to restructure my contract, so I get to keep 80% of what I earn.”

Curry demoted Gorman to a role as an adviser at a significantly lower price. The move was controversial and met on the whole with disappointment from his hometown fans. Curry had achieved so much with Gorman as the lead of his organizational structure, why change?

Curry and his trainer, Reyes, disagree over whether the controversy hurt the boxer, though Curry acknowledged it was a difficult period, which coincided with the Honeyghan fight.

“Akbar, I did not know the guy when he came in,” Reyes says. “I told Gorman, ‘You better watch him because he’s going to move you out of the way.’ He was up to no good.

“David always did what was best for Donald. Akbar just wanted to make money off of Donald.”

Reyes said Muhammad “interfered too much” in the relationship between trainer and boxer.

Muhammad “wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do,” Reyes says. “To me, that was Donald’s downfall. He quit listening to me and more to Akbar.”

After the Nunn fight in which he lost, Curry, a couple of months shy of his 31st birthday, faced Terry Norris for the WBC world super welterweight title in Palm Springs, California. A battered Curry succumbed in the eighth round. Curry’s last fight was in April 1997, a second attempted comeback that was stopped at 1:08 of the seventh round.

Now it was truly over, the hopes and dreams shattered once and for all.

The fall  In November, Reyes drove to a hotel on the South Freeway, not altogether sure what he would find. Out of a room came his former protégé, once one of Fort Worth’s most prominent citizens. Curry’s disheveled appearance and long, unkempt beard were the face of a man who had spent the first half of the month in the Tarrant County Jail. 

“I asked him what had happened,” says Reyes, addressing a person he doesn’t know anymore. 

Curry had been arrested and charged with assault of a family member, his sister — Donovan Curry’s aunt — the one person who has continued to take in her broken-down brother. 

That’s all in the past, however. She has vowed to never again, those close to the situation say. 

Having now lost perhaps his last friend, Donald Curry has lost everything.

His boxing fortune long ago had been eaten up in what he called bad investments, and the last remnants used to win acquittal against federal drug conspiracy charges in Detroit in 1995. Curry swore he “never, never, ever had anything to do with drugs,” calling the ordeal a terrible misjudgment he made by hanging around the wrong people. 

“I don’t even know how I got there in that situation,” Curry told news reporters afterward. “There’s good and bad in the world, and I wanted to go see what the bad looked like. For real. A lot of it was being curious. I was destructive of myself. I can’t blame nobody for where I am today but myself.”

The allegations and subsequent proceedings were simply the start of his spiral.

In March 1996, he was sentenced to a six-month jail term in Dallas for failing to pay child support for a son born in April 1992, the result of an infidelity that cost him his marriage. 

Public records show a lengthy arrest record since the late 1990s, including assault of a family member now three times, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault on a public servant. He also had two possession of marijuana charges. 

His dramatic descent mirrors that of his half-brother, Bruce, he, too, a boxer of repute and world champion in his own right. Bruce Curry was the runner-up to Sugar Ray Leonard in the 1976 Olympic Boxing Trials. 

In 1983, the Currys became the first brothers to hold world titles at the same time. After a loss the very next year, Bruce Curry’s mental decline was swift. 

Bruce Curry at one time in the mid-1980s had been committed to a Nevada mental institution after trying to shoot his trainer, the same trainer who by that time had refused to go to Curry’s door. 

“He regrets the one time he did,” a report in the Los Angeles Times recalled. “After first checking under a nearby car and then looking behind bushes, Reid [the trainer] cautiously approached the door, knocking, and standing aside. Curry jumped onto Reid from an upstairs window.”

The trainer, the report went on, recalled incidents in which Curry would call him from Texas in the early hours of the morning, wanting to know why Reid had caused a girl to spill popcorn on him at the movies, or why Red had caused a fly to be in his room because if his mouth were open, it could fly in and kill him. In another phone call, Curry demanded to know why Reid had nixed a dream date with one of the Pointer sisters.

Donald Curry during that time placed the blame on the downfall of his brother’s career to mismanagement by his handlers. 

All three of the Curry brothers — Bruce, Donald, and Graylin — were boxers. Two sisters were part of the family, too. One, Angela, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1984 at age 18. Some say Donald Curry witnessed the accident as he left training at the gym, though he didn’t know at the time that Angela was the victim.

They were raised by a single mother, Hazel, who made ends meet as a maid at St. Joseph Hospital on South Main Street. 

Curry, his mother said, was the “quiet one.” Hazel, her son said, impressed upon him the values of life and how “to stand on my own two feet during hard times.”

His mother, Curry said at another time, knew sadness intimately. What she hated most was seeing her kids sad. 

“He was a great kid,” says Gary Lee Williams, who grew up with Curry playing baseball and football, as well as boxing. “He was the biggest laugh. Just a big kid. Not a mean bone in his body. Never has been. How he’d ratchet up and fight the way he did always amazed me. A lot of guys fight out of meanness, but Paul Reyes and those guys took care of him. He never had a worry in the world.

“I can remember nights we were supposed to fight [each other], before or after fights, we’d be out shooting basketballs. Just a big kid. Fun-loving. Great athlete, obviously.” 

“They were like the average African American family household,” remembers Overton Brooks, who fought with Bruce on an amateur team sponsored by the union at General Motors. I parlayed boxing into getting a job. I didn’t really care about boxing. My brother [Monroe] was a boxer. I knew how to fight. When I found out they had a team, I figured if I could get on the team and get some good representation, just maybe [GM] would give me a job. And it turned out that way, and they did. I qualified for the AAU national championships and sat down and told them I need a job. 

“GM also offered Bruce a job and Robert Williams [another boxer] a job. I went to both and said, ‘I’ve got the door open for you. We can get you in.’ But they said they would have to work second shift and couldn’t train with the team. I said, ‘Boxing is just a play thing. Something to do. This is a job with a future that we can really do good for ourselves.’ They both refused to take the jobs.”

Boxing was Bruce’s world, Brooks remembers. 

Bruce Curry had a reputation for being uncoachable and narcissistic. If he wasn’t the center of attention or perceived as the most important member of the boxing team, he left for another team. He craved the attention.

Bruce Curry quit high school because it interfered with boxing. 

Brooks said he never knew Donald Curry well, considering he and Bruce were five years older.  

On the topic of Bruce and Donald Curry, Brooks says: “There’s a lot of guys out there who have brain damage. I’ve seen guys I used to fight as amateurs, and I could see it in their eyes. The way they look and the way they respond. Their speech itself tells you they have damage. I’m sure [Donald Curry] has got some problems, and it all stems from the fight game.”

The tragedy  “Don is a true disaster story,” says Larry O’Neal, sitting in his offices at Classic Auto Detail Shop, which doubles as his equally known Fort Worth Memories Museum, which has a following on Facebook of more than 100,000. Sitting on shelves are countless mementos of Fort Worth history. O’Neal, once himself a Golden Gloves fighter in his youth, also has a Facebook page devoted to Fort Worth boxing.

“I don’t know what the hell happened to him. He had a beautiful wife. He just went to hell in a handbasket. He helped a lot of people. He would take your call and talk to you. The stardom never went to his head. He was a humble guy.

“It has to be CTE.”

In November 2021, O’Neal says, an associate of his had closed on the purchase of a warehouse. In it, he found a number of items from Curry’s old fighting inventory, including a robe, gloves, and trophy. The gentleman and O’Neal made arrangements to meet with Curry.

“Don said, ‘I don’t want to buy that,’” O’Neal says. The warehouse owner said, “‘I’m not trying to sell it to you. I want to give it to you.’ Don said, ‘I don’t want it.’ I said, ‘Don, you could go sell it and get some money that you need.’ That’s when I knew something was really wrong.” 

It was O’Neal’s office that Reyes took Curry after picking him up from the hotel. O’Neal was the one who had bailed Curry out of jail. 

The meeting didn’t go well, O’Neal says. Curry was agitated, he says, standing most of the time shadow boxing. The 61-year-old Curry added that he would be back in the ring in 60 days, declaring that “they’re all jealous.”

When asked who “they” were, Curry responded USA Boxing and Sugar Ray Leonard. 

It was determined there, however, that Curry needed professional help. 

The brain scan that Curry’s son Donovan wanted performed wasn’t part of that remedy, at least not immediately. Curry said he had a scan a couple of years ago, O’Neal said, though none of the participants knows if that’s true. The World Boxing Council has been in contact with the Cleveland Clinic in an effort to help get Curry a brain scan, according to The Independent.

CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after examining a brain after death, according to the medical and scientific community. 

Reyes asked a friend who operates a church-based facility for addicts to take him in. The friend agreed. It is not known if Curry has been diagnosed as an addict or if he suffers from any other emotional or mental conditions. That facility is a mere 3 miles from Culberson’s gravesite. 

In his youth, his friends said they never knew him to drink or smoke. “He trained hard, and he was clean, clean, clean,” says one.  

“He is doing fine,” says Reyes, 83.

It was in 1928 that an American pathologist introduced a “peculiar condition among prize fighters.” Harrison Stanford Martland titled his study, “Punch Drunk,” which was soon adopted as part of the American lexicon.

“As far as I know, this condition has not been described in medical literature,” Martland wrote. “I am of the opinion that in punch drunk there is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages in the deeper portion of the cerebrum. … These hemorrhages are later replaced by a gliosis or a degenerative progressive lesion in the areas involved. 

Therefore, in the late stages the symptoms often mimic those seen in diseases characterized by the parkinsonian syndrome. I realize that this theory, while alluring, is quite insusceptible of proof at the present time, but I am so convinced from my former studies on post-traumatic encephalitis that this is a logical deduction that I feel it is my duty to report this condition.”

Many of these cases of dementia pugilistica, as it is also known, Martland noted, were mild in nature, though others were severe with symptoms that that included a “peculiar tilting of the head, a marked dragging of one or both legs, a staggering, propulsive gait with the facial characteristics of the parkinsonian syndrome, or a backward swaying of the body, tremors, vertigo and deafness. Finally, marked deterioration may set in necessitating commitment to an asylum.”

What Martland was describing was CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Over the course of the next 10 decades other researchers have found similar findings. One of those was titled, “Chronic Traumatic Brain Injury Associated with Boxing,” by Cornell University researcher Barry D. Jordan. He found that 20% of professional boxers suffer from chronic traumatic brain injury.  

A signature study was performed by English pathologist John Corsellis, who studied the brains of 15 retired boxers. He also examined their fight histories and found a correlation between punch drunkenness and number of fights. The fighters he studied had between 300 and 700 bouts over the course of their careers. That was in addition to sparring and other fight training. 

Curry had at least 444 bouts, including 404 amateur fights. 

The fight game has come a long way since 1928. In use today is protective headgear for amateurs as well as more proactive referees encouraged to intervene sooner when a fight turns one-sided. In the professional ranks, the punches come more frequently with 8-ounce gloves being thrown, as opposed to 10 ounces in the amateur ranks. 

And, as one former boxer said, “I can assure you, six of those ounces are in the wrist.”

Ann McKee’s research at Boston University has become the authority on CTE. McKee has identified more than 450 cases in the last 20 years, particularly in former NFL players and boxers. 

She told The Independent: “Cognitive issues like forgetfulness, memory loss, and difficulty with organization that present in middle age are a very common onset to the disease. Then, it’s common to develop behavioral abnormalities. They can be violence, a short fuse, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. It can involve motor symptoms in some people like Parkinson’s, rigidity, or difficulty walking. It’s a progressive disease, that can start even a decade before you see the symptoms, and then accelerates as a person ages.

“It’s very common for people to behave in ways that make them unlikeable or hard to live with because they become irrational and act out. The smallest infraction can make them fly off the handle and have explosive or erratic actions. But the thing that can help families to understand it is that it’s the disease making them this way, it’s controlling their mind and their behavior. It’s not really them.”

There has been change within the professional boxing industry. Championship fights have been reduced to 12 rounds from 15, and weigh-ins are now conducted the day before a bout, rather than the day of, a move designed to reduce the likelihood of a boxer entering the ring dehydrated as Curry did in his loss to Honeyghan. 

After seeing Donovan Curry’s social media post, the World Boxing Council is offering its resources, too. Last year, the WBC and Wesana Health partnered to investigate new medications for those affected by CTE. 

Williams, Curry’s chum from their boyhood days, says he spoke to his old friend about two years ago. 

“He sounded happy,” Williams says. “Like a lot of them, his speech was a little slurred. A lot of those guys … I guess I was just lucky. I quit at 18. I didn’t pursue it. I got out at the right time. You step up the caliber of competition … you take a hell of a lot more punishment fighting professionally than as an amateur.”

And so, it is this time that rather than a boxer’s defensive posture, it is perhaps only a guardian angel who can protect Curry from the wickedness and snares of a devil of a disease.

“I have nothing but great things to say about him,” Mallick says. “The Donald Curry I knew was a mild-mannered, respectful gentleman who showed great promise, and we were all proud of him.