Don King, on Mike Tyson


"Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter?
He went to prison, not to Princeton."



"To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music
and the dancers hit each other."

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Motivating Yourself with Earl Nigh0tingale



 This is a transcript...

The Strangest Secret

 

Transcribed from The Strangest Secret audio program by Earl Nightingale


Some years ago, the late Nobel prize-winning Dr. Albert Schweitzer was asked by a reporter, “Doctor, what’s wrong with men today?” The great doctor was silent a moment, and then he said, “Men simply don’t think!”

It’s about this that I want to talk with you. We live today in a golden age. This is an era that humanity has looked forward to, dreamed of, and worked toward for thousands of years. We live in the richest era that ever existed on the face of the earth … a land of abundant opportunity for everyone.

However, if you take 100 individuals who start even at the age of 25, do you have any idea what will happen to those men and women by the time they’re 65? These 100 people believe they’re going to be successful. They are eager toward life, there is a certain sparkle in their eye, an erectness to their carriage, and life seems like a pretty interesting adventure to them.

But by the time they’re 65, only one will be rich, four will be financially independent, five will still be working, and 54 will be broke and depending on others for life’s necessities.

Only five out of 100 make the grade! Why do so many fail? What has happened to the sparkle that was there when they were 25? What has become of the dreams, the hopes, the plans … and why is there such a large disparity between what these people intended to do and what they actually accomplished?

THE DEFINITION OF SUCCESS

First, we have to define success and here is the best definition I’ve ever been able to find:

“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”

A success is the school teacher who is teaching because that’s what he or she wants to do. A success is the entrepreneur who start his own company because that was his dream and that’s what he wanted to do. A success is the salesperson who wants to become the best salesperson in his or her company and sets forth on the pursuit of that goal.

A success is anyone who is realizing a worthy predetermined ideal, because that’s what he or she decided to do … deliberately. But only one out of 20 does that! The rest are “failures.”

Rollo May, the distinguished psychiatrist, wrote a wonderful book called Man’s Search for Himself, and in this book he says: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice … it is conformity.” And there you have the reason for so many failures. Conformity and people acting like everyone else, without knowing why or where they are going.

We learn to read by the time we’re seven. We learn to make a living by the time we’re 30. Often by that time we’re not only making a living, we’re supporting a family. And yet by the time we’re 65, we haven’t learned how to become financially independent in the richest land that has ever been known. Why? We conform! Most of us are acting like the wrong percentage group and the 95 who don’t succeed.

GOALS

Have you ever wondered why so many people work so hard and honestly without ever achieving anything in particular, and why others don’t seem to work hard, yet seem to get everything? They seem to have the “magic touch.” You’ve heard people say, “Everything he touches turns to gold.” Have you ever noticed that a person who becomes successful tends to continue to become more successful? And, on the other hand, have you noticed how someone who’s a failure tends to continue to fail?

The difference is goals. 

People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going. It’s that simple. 

Failures, on the other hand, believe that their lives are shaped by circumstances … by things that happen to them … by exterior forces.
Think of a ship with the complete voyage mapped out and planned. The captain and crew know exactly where the ship is going and how long it will take and it has a definite goal. And 9,999 times out of 10,000, it will get there.

Now let’s take another ship and just like the first and only let’s not put a crew on it, or a captain at the helm. Let’s give it no aiming point, no goal, and no destination. We just start the engines and let it go. I think you’ll agree that if it gets out of the harbor at all, it will either sink or wind up on some deserted beach and a derelict. It can’t go anyplace because it has no destination and no guidance.

It’s the same with a human being. However, the human race is fixed, not to prevent the strong from winning, but to prevent the weak from losing. Society today can be likened to a convoy in time of war. The entire society is slowed down to protect its weakest link, just as the naval convoy has to go at the speed that will permit its slowest vessel to remain in formation.

That’s why it’s so easy to make a living today. It takes no particular brains or talent to make a living and support a family today. We have a plateau of so-called “security.” So, to succeed, all we must do is decide how high above this plateau we want to aim.

Throughout history, the great wise men and teachers, philosophers, and prophets have disagreed with one another on many different things. It is only on this one point that they are in complete and unanimous agreement and the key to success and the key to failure is this:

WE BECOME WHAT WE THINK ABOUT

This is The Strangest Secret! Now, why do I say it’s strange, and why do I call it a secret? Actually, it isn’t a secret at all. It was first promulgated by some of the earliest wise men, and it appears again and again throughout the Bible. But very few people have learned it or understand it. That’s why it’s strange, and why for some equally strange reason it virtually remains a secret.

Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor, said: “A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.”

Disraeli said this: “Everything comes if a man will only wait … a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfillment.”

William James said: “We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and it will become infallibly real by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.” 

He continues, ” … only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”

My old friend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale put it this way: “If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results. If you think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results.” 

George Bernard Shaw said: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”

Well, it’s pretty apparent, isn’t it?   We become what we think about. 

A person who is thinking about a concrete and worthwhile goal is going to reach it, because that’s what he’s thinking about. 

Conversely, the person who has no goal, who doesn’t know where he’s going, and whose thoughts must therefore be thoughts of confusion, anxiety, fear, and worry will thereby create a life of frustration, fear, anxiety and worry. And if he thinks about nothing … he becomes nothing.


AS YE SOW, SO SHALL YE REAP

The human mind is much like a farmer’s land. The land gives the farmer a choice. He may plant in that land whatever he chooses. The land doesn’t care what is planted. It’s up to the farmer to make the decision. 

The mind, like the land, will return what you plant, but it doesn’t care what you plant. If the farmer plants too seeds and one a seed of corn, the other nightshade, a deadly poison, waters and takes care of the land, what will happen?

Remember, the land doesn’t care. It will return poison in just as wonderful abundance as it will corn. So up come the two plants and one corn, one poison as it’s written in the Bible, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

The human mind is far more fertile, far more incredible and mysterious than the land, but it works the same way. It doesn’t care what we plant … success … or failure. A concrete, worthwhile goal … or confusion, misunderstanding, fear, anxiety, and so on. But what we plant it must return to us.


The problem is that our mind comes as standard equipment at birth. It’s free. And things that are given to us for nothing, we place little value on. Things that we pay money for, we value.

The paradox is that exactly the reverse is true. 

Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free and our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence, our love of family and children and friends and country. All these priceless possessions are free.

But the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time. A good man can be completely wiped out and make another fortune. He can do that several times. Even if our home burns down, we can rebuild it. But the things we got for nothing, we can never replace.

Our mind can do any kind of job we assign to it, but generally speaking, we use it for little jobs instead of big ones. 


So decide now. What is it you want? Plant your goal in your mind. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make in your entire life.

Do you want to excel at your particular job? Do you want to go places in your company … in your community? Do you want to get rich?

All you have got to do is plant that seed in your mind, care for it, work steadily toward your goal, and it will become a reality.

It not only will, there’s no way that it cannot. You see, that’s a law and like the laws of Sir Isaac Newton, the laws of gravity. If you get on top of a building and jump off, you’ll always go down and you’ll never go up.

And it’s the same with all the other laws of nature. They always work. They’re inflexible. 

Think about your goal in a relaxed, positive way. 

Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved this goal. 

See yourself doing the things you will be doing when you have reached your goal.

Every one of us is the sum total of our own thoughts. 

We are where we are because that’s exactly where we really want or feel we deserve to be and whether we’ll admit that or not. 

Each of us must live off the fruit of our thoughts in the future, because what you think today and tomorrow and next month and next year and will mold your life and determine your future. You’re guided by your mind.

I remember one time I was driving through e a s t e r n Arizona and I saw one of those giant earth-moving machines roaring along the road with what looked like 30 tons of dirt in it and a tremendous, incredible machine and and there was a little man perched way up on top with the wheel in his hands, guiding it.

As I drove along I was struck by the similarity of that machine to the human mind. 

Just suppose you’re sitting at the controls of such a vast source of energy. 

Are you going to sit back and fold your arms and let it run itself into a ditch?

Or are you going to keep both hands firmly on the wheel and control and direct this power to a specific, worthwhile purpose? 

It’s up to you. You’re in the driver’s seat. 

You see, the very law that gives us success is a double-edged sword. 

We must control our thinking. 

The same rule that can lead people to lives of success, wealth, happiness, and all the things they ever dreamed of and that very same law can lead them into the gutter. 

It’s all in how they use it … for good or for bad. 

That is The Strangest Secret!

Do what the experts since the dawn of recorded history have told us to do:

pay the price, by becoming the person you want to become. 

It’s not nearly as difficult as living unsuccessfully.

The moment you decide on a goal to work toward, you’re immediately a successful person 
and you are then in that rare group of people who know where they’re going. 

Out of every hundred people, you belong to the top five. 

Don’t concern yourself too much with how you are going to achieve your goal.

 Leave that completely to a power greater than yourself. 

All you have to do is know where you’re going. The answers will come to you of their own accord, and at the right time.

Start today. You have nothing to lose and but you have your whole life to win.



30-DAY ACTION IDEAS FOR PUTTING THE STRANGEST SECRET TO WORK FOR YOU:

For the next 30-days follow each of these steps every day until you have achieved your goal.

1. Write on a card what it is you want more that anything else
. It may be more money. Perhaps you’d like to double your income or make a specific amount of money. It may be a beautiful home. It may be success at your job. It may be a particular position in life. It could be a more harmonious family.

Write down on your card specifically what it is you want. Make sure it’s a single goal and clearly defined. 
You needn’t show it to anyone, but carry it with you so that you can look at it several times a day. 

Think about it in a cheerful, relaxed, positive way each morning when you get up, and immediately you have something to work for and something to get out of bed for, something to live for.

Look at it every chance you get during the day and just before going to bed at night. 


As you look at it, remember that you must become what you think about, and since you’re thinking about your goal, you realize that soon it will be yours. In fact, it’s really yours the moment you write it down and begin to think about it.

2. Stop thinking about what it is you fear. 

Each time a fearful or negative thought comes into your mind, replace it with a mental picture of your positive and worthwhile goal. 

And there will come a time when you’ll feel like giving up. It’s easier for a human being to think negatively than positively. That’s why only five percent are successful! You must begin now to place yourself in that group.

“Act as though it were impossible to fail,” as Dorothea Brande said. No matter what your goal, if you’ve kept your goal before you every day, you’ll wonder and marvel at this new life you’ve found.


3. Your success will always be measured by the quality and quantity of service you render. 

Most people will tell you that they want to make money, without understanding this law. The only people who make money work in a mint. The rest of us must earn money. This is what causes those who keep looking for something for nothing, or a free ride, to fail in life. 

Success is not the result of making money; earning money is the result of success and and success is in direct proportion to our service.

Most people have this law backwards. It’s like the man who stands in front of the stove and says to it: “Give me heat and then I’ll add the wood.” 

How many men and women do you know, or do you suppose there are today, who take the same attitude toward life? There are millions.

We’ve got to put the fuel in before we can expect heat. 


Likewise, we’ve got to be of service first before we can expect money

Don’t concern yourself with the money. Be of service … build … work … dream … create! Do this and you’ll find there is no limit to the prosperity and abundance that will come to you.

Don’t start your test until you’ve made up your mind to stick with it. If you should fail during your first 30 days and by that I mean suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by negative thoughts and simply start over again from that point and go 30 more days.

Gradually, your new habit will form, until you find yourself one of that wonderful minority to whom virtually nothing is impossible.

Above all … don’t worry! Worry brings fear, and fear is crippling. 


The only thing that can cause you to worry during your test is trying to do it all yourself

Know that all you have to do is hold your goal before you; everything else will take care of itself.

Take this 30-day test, then repeat it … then repeat it again. Each time it will become more a part of you until you’ll wonder how you could have ever have lived any other way.

Live this new way and the floodgates of abundance will open and pour over you more riches than you may have dreamed existed. Money? Yes, lots of it. 

But what’s more important, you’ll have peace … you’ll be in that wonderful minority who lead calm, cheerful, successful lives.



Learn more about Earl Nightingale and his many timeless books and audio programs.
The Strangest Secret
The Strangest Secret Article by: Earl Nightingale


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Learn more about Earl Nightingale and his many timeless books and audio programs.

The Strangest Secret - Advantedge Article By Earl Nightingale

LINK:  http://www.nightingale.com/ae_article~i~22~article~strangestsecret.aspx


The Strangest Secret Earl Nightingale Conant 1950's Origional FULL 31:35 Min.
31:35 - 4 years ago
Earl Nightingale Conant The Strangest Secret 1956 1950's

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Ex-NFL quarterback Erik Kramer shoots himself in suicide 'over injury' | Daily Mail Online



"'He is not the same man I married': Former NFL quarterback shoots himself as ex-wife blames failed 'suicide bid' on football head injury
Ex-quarterback Erik Kramer 'shot himself in a suicide attempt but survived'

His former wife said he 'suffered depression since he was with the Bears'
She blames his football injury for both their divorce and his 'suicide bid' 

2014 report revealed alarmingly high risk of mental health issues to players



Former NFL quarterback Erik Kramer shot himself on Wednesday night in what police believe was a suicide attempt.
The 50-year-old, who survived the shooting, had suffered from depression for years, according to his ex-wife.
Law enforcement officials, called to a motel in the Los Angeles area around 8pm on Tuesday, reported that Kramer ‘shot himself in a suicide attempt, but survived’.

The player’s former wife, Marshawn Kramer, also confirmed that it had been a suicide attempt.
‘He is a very amazing man, a beautiful soul, but he has suffered depression since he was with the Bears,’ she told NBC News.

‘I can promise you he is not the same man I married.’

Ms Kramer believes that Kramer’s depression is a direct result of his time in the NFL.

The quarterback is most well known for his time as the Chicago Bears starting quarterback in from 1995 until 1997. 

He suffered two serious neck injuries during his career, one of which meant he missed much of the 1996 season and the other which forced him to retire in 1999. 

Ms Kramer added: ‘I know Erik and I would still be together if not for his football injury.’

The couple, who divorced in 2010, lost their 18-year-old son Griffen, then a high-school quarterback, after he died from a drug overdose in 2011.They have another 17-year-old son Dillon.

Kramer’s alleged suicide attempt comes amid fierce debate about the risks of mental health issues that former NFL players face.







Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3204705/Former-NFL-quarterback-shoots-ex-wife-blames-suicide-bid-football-head-injury.html#ixzz3n72x1okM


By IMOGEN CALDERWOOD FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 12:01 GMT, 20 August 2015 | UPDATED: 19:14 GMT, 20 August 2015"

Ex-NFL quarterback Erik Kramer shoots himself in suicide 'over injury' | Daily Mail Online:

'via Blog this'




Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver





Scans of living brains show patterns of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. (Credit: PNAS/UCLA)



Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide


POSTED 3:20 PM, APRIL 6, 2015, BY CNN WIRE



WASHINGTON — After his last tour in Iraq, it took master gunner Shane Garcie about six weeks to notice he’d changed.



“Your brain is throwing parties because you’re home, you’re alive,” says Garcie. “So, it doesn’t settle in right away.”



Now he’s not sure what bothers him most: the fogginess of his brain, the anger that can erupt from nowhere or the deep, dark depressions he can’t shake off.



“One minute I’m in a good happy mood, everything is cool; the next minute I’m depressed,” Garcie said. “I don’t want to be around anybody, I want to isolate. Some days, I don’t want to get out of bed.”



“We could walk around this town and everybody, 90% of these people, would say, ‘Hey, Shane, hey,’ ” Garcie says about his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana. “But it’s not Shane. It looks like me, it walks like me, it talks like me, but it’s not me because of the damage.”



Since 1984, Green Beret Tommy Shoemaker has served in many war theaters — Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia — and is still an Army reservist. He came home from Iraq to Monroe, Louisiana, in late 2006 with a bum leg and a disabled brain.



“I carry note cards and a pen with me everywhere I go, and when I’m talking to somebody, I write it down,” Shoemaker told Gupta. “Because if I don’t, I won’t remember. I mean memory was not a problem for me, I could remember anything. And now I have to write everything down.”



But it’s the mood swings he can’t control that do the most harm.



“I’ve always been really easygoing. Everything rolled off my back, no problems,” says Shoemaker in his Southern drawl.



“But now that’s not so. I mean, I’ll get mad over something as simple as a banana peel in the front yard or my wife saying the wrong thing to me, and is it really anything? No, but at that moment, it hits me and I just do things that I would’ve never done before. I yell, I scream, I holler, and that’s just never been my manner. I’m sad for my kids and my wife to have to live with that.”



“It’s tough, really tough,” agrees Pam Shoemaker, Tommy’s wife. “I do remember him telling me that ‘I’m different,’ ‘I’m not the same'” when he first came home. “I didn’t understand. But I do now.”

Brain studies



Dr. Julian Bailes, co-director of the NorthShore Neurological Institute in Evanston, Illinois, is pointing at the angry red and vivid yellow blooms on the PET scan of a living brain.



“Compared to normal controls, you see abnormal binding in the areas under the surface of the brain and deeper in the brain, showing abnormal accumulations of tau protein,” he explains.



All are signs of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a crippling neurological disorder caused by repeated blows to the head.



Characterized by deep depression, failing memory and anger that lurks just under the surface, CTE is a form of dementia that first came to light in the boxing world. “Punch drunk” was the term most often used for former pugilists, such as Muhammad Ali, who developed brain damage after a lifetime of hard knocks. Today it’s called dementia pugilistica and is considered a variant of CTE.



CTE is the disease many believe played a role in the deaths of former NFL players like Ray Easterling, Junior Seau, Shane Dronett and Dave Duerson. They all shot themselves. Duerson left a note asking that his brain be studied.



RELATED: Chris Borland, 24, retires from NFL over concussion fears



Images like these are traditionally gathered post-mortem, from brain samples taken at autopsy. That’s been the only way CTE could be diagnosed. Only a handful of studies have looked at living brains, with the hope a diagnosis could be made before death.



“Looking at living brains is a remarkable contribution to the science right now, a really remarkable contribution,” Dr. Geoffrey Ling said. Ling is director of the Biological Technologies office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “It is very exciting and the potential is dramatic.”



In one of the largest studies of its kind to date, Bailes and his co-authors at UCLA compared the living brains of 14 former athletes thought to have CTE, 24 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and two ex-soldiers, Tommy Shoemaker and Shane Garcie, to a control group of 28 cognitively normal people.



The researchers injected the participants with a radioactive “tracer” called [f-18]FDDNP before their PET scans. The tracer latches on to a brain protein called tau, which is thought to be responsible for much of the damage in Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain disorders, and lights up areas of the brain that are affected.



“For us to be able to make the diagnosis of the injury or the disease in living people is paramount to being able to help them, treat them and to find some way to keep them out of progressing into a terminal problem,” says Bailes.



The scans of the ex-soldiers was a plus: a tiny sample designed to give a glimpse into what might be causing their debilitating symptoms.



And they offer a chance to explore what many experts are beginning to suspect: The blasts and energy jolts common in warfare might be creating a new form of CTE, a “blast-variant” version.



“In the military, it seems it would be vitally important to know who has been exposed to this, and then be able to identify, mark, follow the progression of brain degeneration from blast injury,” says Bailes. “And to know who’s at risk and maybe who needs to be pulled out of harm’s way permanently.”



Sure enough, the specific pattern of the tau the researchers found in Garcie and Shoemaker’s brains didn’t look at all like Alzheimer’s. Instead, it looked similar to the tau display found in the 14 players suspected of having CTE and the results taken from brain autopsies of people diagnosed with CTE.



And it looked similar to what had been found in a previous study by Bailes and his UCLA colleagues of the living brains of five NFL football players who were suspected of having CTE.

‘So many’ concussions



According to the Brain Trauma Foundation, 10% to 20% of Iraqi veterans are suffering from some level of traumatic brain disorder. The foundation even calls it the “signature injury” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.



“One was a suicide bomber,” says Shoemaker. He’s recalling the last — and worst — of some 35 concussions he’s had over his military career. While about half of those rendered him unconscious, he says his training often took over.



“I was in an open vehicle with no top between me and the explosion. So I had some shrapnel and suffered a concussion, but I was able to stay focused enough with muscle memory to just keep driving, ’til my head kind of cleared, and I kept going.”



“And the other one was a roadside bomb. I was knocked unconscious but again was able to just out of memory continue driving, not even realizing what had happened.”



Shane Garcie can’t recall how many concussions he’s had.



“No, because there’s so many. There’s so many,” says Garcie. “There are so many reasons for the jarrings, for the beatings. Not just IEDs, not just car bombs, not just in a firefight or grenades going off.”



“Think about it, you know. Iraq doesn’t have the best roads,” Garcie continues. “And you hit that bump and your head — it smacks the turret. Rollovers are severe because of the canals. I mean, you’re driving in blackout mode on dark nights, with nods on and no lights — you can barely see 10 feet in front of you. There are so many ways it can happen.”

New form of dementia?



The science of CTE is in its infancy. A band of researchers around the country has been racing to catalog as much information as possible, to answer the questions: Is CTE distinct enough to be diagnosed? Is it a “new” neurodegenerative disease?



“Before people run out and say, ‘Oh, this person has CTE, or that person has CTE,’ I think that’d be way premature to do that,” says Ling. “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, that’s a condition that still needs further study.”



Researchers struggle with how to tease out the differences between post-concussion syndrome, a chronic but stable disease, and CTE, which early research shows spreads from the initial site of impact throughout the brain and worsens with age.



“There’s so many things about CTE we don’t understand,” says Bailes. “There never has been long-term longitudinal studies that analyze who gets it and exactly why, what the prevalence of it is, and then who progresses. There may be a group that doesn’t progress.”



The type of radioactive marker to use, and how accurate it is in binding to tau protein, is also under scrutiny. A number of tau trackers are in the works, and each seem to have unique characteristics. The UCLA study’s [f-18]FDDNP is an older marker that critics say isn’t specific enough because it can also bind to amyloids, which are misfolded proteins commonly seen in Alzheimer’s brains.



Bailes and several of his UCLA co-authors have launched a company to develop [f-18]FDDNP, and they defend their tracer this way: “Most CTE sufferers have been found at autopsy to have tau, but also about 40% have had amyloid as well. So they are showing both degeneration markers in the brain,” says Bailes.



“Most importantly, it’s a distinct pattern that we haven’t seen in any other condition — not in Alzheimer’s, not in other forms of dementia, and certainly not in normal controls. So it’s not just what we’re binding to, it’s that this pattern appears to be distinct and it appears to be the areas that have been damaged in autopsy studies of sufferers with CTE.”



Ling has a more global view. “In the end, these scans are just scans. That’s all that they are. It really has to do with the context of the patient. We have to understand the patient: What is their history? Do they have multiple head injuries? Do they have anything else that could compound this?”

Right now, prevention is the only treatment



At this time, there is no cure for CTE. There are no real treatments, either. All that can be done is to treat the symptoms. Psychotherapy and antidepressants are often prescribed for anxiety and anger, while memory issues are tackled with lifestyle and diet changes that may or may not help.



“There really is no concussion pill, there’s no specific medication we have to treat these,” says Bailes. “It’s recognition, it’s taking that individual out of harm’s way for future impacts or blast injury, and it’s allowing the brain to heal.”



Experts agree that accurately identifying brain injury on the spot is critical. That’s because the risk increases each time you have one. “Every concussion predisposes you to be a little more sensitive to have another one, especially if they are in close proximity time wise,” says Bailes.



The hope is that science will develop a test that can diagnose brain trauma in war zones or on the sidelines of a football game at the time of injury. Several are in development, but only a pencil-and-paper test is in use right now.



For Shane Garcie, all that matters is what can be done to keep other soldiers from ending up like him.



“I’ve talked to other doctors and a couple of neurologists and neurosurgeons, and they’re like, ‘Man, really, I don’t know how you’re functioning like you are,’ he says. “I could’ve been a comedian. I was very quick-witted, very smart. Now I stutter. I sputter. I lose words. I can be having a conversation and forget everything we’re talking about.”



“But it’s not just Shane that’s having all these brain issues. There were thousands of troops who were getting blasted by IEDs, car bombs, RPGs, grenades. I want them to know that they’re not alone.”



For Tommy Shoemaker, it’s important that soldiers with CTE receive a physical diagnosis, rather than just being lumped under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder. To him, it matters a great deal that his symptoms are the result of a brain injury, instead of the inability to cope with the emotional fallout of trauma.



“People are more apt to accept a physical disorder than they are mental disorders,” he says. “So if you can do that for soldiers, I think that’s a big plus.”



“I think it’s a plus when they go to get a job, you know, and they ask ’em: ‘Do you have a mental disorder?’ Well no, I don’t. I have a brain injury. Nobody wants to be diagnosed as having a mental disorder.”





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Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver:



http://kdvr.com/2015/04/06/study-ex-soldiers-have-same-brain-damage-as-nfl-players-who-committed-suicide/





'via Blog this'






Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver





Scans of living brains show patterns of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. (Credit: PNAS/UCLA)



Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide


POSTED 3:20 PM, APRIL 6, 2015, BY CNN WIRE



WASHINGTON — After his last tour in Iraq, it took master gunner Shane Garcie about six weeks to notice he’d changed.



“Your brain is throwing parties because you’re home, you’re alive,” says Garcie. “So, it doesn’t settle in right away.”



Now he’s not sure what bothers him most: the fogginess of his brain, the anger that can erupt from nowhere or the deep, dark depressions he can’t shake off.



“One minute I’m in a good happy mood, everything is cool; the next minute I’m depressed,” Garcie said. “I don’t want to be around anybody, I want to isolate. Some days, I don’t want to get out of bed.”



“We could walk around this town and everybody, 90% of these people, would say, ‘Hey, Shane, hey,’ ” Garcie says about his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana. “But it’s not Shane. It looks like me, it walks like me, it talks like me, but it’s not me because of the damage.”



Since 1984, Green Beret Tommy Shoemaker has served in many war theaters — Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia — and is still an Army reservist. He came home from Iraq to Monroe, Louisiana, in late 2006 with a bum leg and a disabled brain.



“I carry note cards and a pen with me everywhere I go, and when I’m talking to somebody, I write it down,” Shoemaker told Gupta. “Because if I don’t, I won’t remember. I mean memory was not a problem for me, I could remember anything. And now I have to write everything down.”



But it’s the mood swings he can’t control that do the most harm.



“I’ve always been really easygoing. Everything rolled off my back, no problems,” says Shoemaker in his Southern drawl.



“But now that’s not so. I mean, I’ll get mad over something as simple as a banana peel in the front yard or my wife saying the wrong thing to me, and is it really anything? No, but at that moment, it hits me and I just do things that I would’ve never done before. I yell, I scream, I holler, and that’s just never been my manner. I’m sad for my kids and my wife to have to live with that.”



“It’s tough, really tough,” agrees Pam Shoemaker, Tommy’s wife. “I do remember him telling me that ‘I’m different,’ ‘I’m not the same'” when he first came home. “I didn’t understand. But I do now.”

Brain studies



Dr. Julian Bailes, co-director of the NorthShore Neurological Institute in Evanston, Illinois, is pointing at the angry red and vivid yellow blooms on the PET scan of a living brain.



“Compared to normal controls, you see abnormal binding in the areas under the surface of the brain and deeper in the brain, showing abnormal accumulations of tau protein,” he explains.



All are signs of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a crippling neurological disorder caused by repeated blows to the head.



Characterized by deep depression, failing memory and anger that lurks just under the surface, CTE is a form of dementia that first came to light in the boxing world. “Punch drunk” was the term most often used for former pugilists, such as Muhammad Ali, who developed brain damage after a lifetime of hard knocks. Today it’s called dementia pugilistica and is considered a variant of CTE.



CTE is the disease many believe played a role in the deaths of former NFL players like Ray Easterling, Junior Seau, Shane Dronett and Dave Duerson. They all shot themselves. Duerson left a note asking that his brain be studied.



RELATED: Chris Borland, 24, retires from NFL over concussion fears



Images like these are traditionally gathered post-mortem, from brain samples taken at autopsy. That’s been the only way CTE could be diagnosed. Only a handful of studies have looked at living brains, with the hope a diagnosis could be made before death.



“Looking at living brains is a remarkable contribution to the science right now, a really remarkable contribution,” Dr. Geoffrey Ling said. Ling is director of the Biological Technologies office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “It is very exciting and the potential is dramatic.”



In one of the largest studies of its kind to date, Bailes and his co-authors at UCLA compared the living brains of 14 former athletes thought to have CTE, 24 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and two ex-soldiers, Tommy Shoemaker and Shane Garcie, to a control group of 28 cognitively normal people.



The researchers injected the participants with a radioactive “tracer” called [f-18]FDDNP before their PET scans. The tracer latches on to a brain protein called tau, which is thought to be responsible for much of the damage in Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain disorders, and lights up areas of the brain that are affected.



“For us to be able to make the diagnosis of the injury or the disease in living people is paramount to being able to help them, treat them and to find some way to keep them out of progressing into a terminal problem,” says Bailes.



The scans of the ex-soldiers was a plus: a tiny sample designed to give a glimpse into what might be causing their debilitating symptoms.



And they offer a chance to explore what many experts are beginning to suspect: The blasts and energy jolts common in warfare might be creating a new form of CTE, a “blast-variant” version.



“In the military, it seems it would be vitally important to know who has been exposed to this, and then be able to identify, mark, follow the progression of brain degeneration from blast injury,” says Bailes. “And to know who’s at risk and maybe who needs to be pulled out of harm’s way permanently.”



Sure enough, the specific pattern of the tau the researchers found in Garcie and Shoemaker’s brains didn’t look at all like Alzheimer’s. Instead, it looked similar to the tau display found in the 14 players suspected of having CTE and the results taken from brain autopsies of people diagnosed with CTE.



And it looked similar to what had been found in a previous study by Bailes and his UCLA colleagues of the living brains of five NFL football players who were suspected of having CTE.

‘So many’ concussions



According to the Brain Trauma Foundation, 10% to 20% of Iraqi veterans are suffering from some level of traumatic brain disorder. The foundation even calls it the “signature injury” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.



“One was a suicide bomber,” says Shoemaker. He’s recalling the last — and worst — of some 35 concussions he’s had over his military career. While about half of those rendered him unconscious, he says his training often took over.



“I was in an open vehicle with no top between me and the explosion. So I had some shrapnel and suffered a concussion, but I was able to stay focused enough with muscle memory to just keep driving, ’til my head kind of cleared, and I kept going.”



“And the other one was a roadside bomb. I was knocked unconscious but again was able to just out of memory continue driving, not even realizing what had happened.”



Shane Garcie can’t recall how many concussions he’s had.



“No, because there’s so many. There’s so many,” says Garcie. “There are so many reasons for the jarrings, for the beatings. Not just IEDs, not just car bombs, not just in a firefight or grenades going off.”



“Think about it, you know. Iraq doesn’t have the best roads,” Garcie continues. “And you hit that bump and your head — it smacks the turret. Rollovers are severe because of the canals. I mean, you’re driving in blackout mode on dark nights, with nods on and no lights — you can barely see 10 feet in front of you. There are so many ways it can happen.”

New form of dementia?



The science of CTE is in its infancy. A band of researchers around the country has been racing to catalog as much information as possible, to answer the questions: Is CTE distinct enough to be diagnosed? Is it a “new” neurodegenerative disease?



“Before people run out and say, ‘Oh, this person has CTE, or that person has CTE,’ I think that’d be way premature to do that,” says Ling. “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, that’s a condition that still needs further study.”



Researchers struggle with how to tease out the differences between post-concussion syndrome, a chronic but stable disease, and CTE, which early research shows spreads from the initial site of impact throughout the brain and worsens with age.



“There’s so many things about CTE we don’t understand,” says Bailes. “There never has been long-term longitudinal studies that analyze who gets it and exactly why, what the prevalence of it is, and then who progresses. There may be a group that doesn’t progress.”



The type of radioactive marker to use, and how accurate it is in binding to tau protein, is also under scrutiny. A number of tau trackers are in the works, and each seem to have unique characteristics. The UCLA study’s [f-18]FDDNP is an older marker that critics say isn’t specific enough because it can also bind to amyloids, which are misfolded proteins commonly seen in Alzheimer’s brains.



Bailes and several of his UCLA co-authors have launched a company to develop [f-18]FDDNP, and they defend their tracer this way: “Most CTE sufferers have been found at autopsy to have tau, but also about 40% have had amyloid as well. So they are showing both degeneration markers in the brain,” says Bailes.



“Most importantly, it’s a distinct pattern that we haven’t seen in any other condition — not in Alzheimer’s, not in other forms of dementia, and certainly not in normal controls. So it’s not just what we’re binding to, it’s that this pattern appears to be distinct and it appears to be the areas that have been damaged in autopsy studies of sufferers with CTE.”



Ling has a more global view. “In the end, these scans are just scans. That’s all that they are. It really has to do with the context of the patient. We have to understand the patient: What is their history? Do they have multiple head injuries? Do they have anything else that could compound this?”

Right now, prevention is the only treatment



At this time, there is no cure for CTE. There are no real treatments, either. All that can be done is to treat the symptoms. Psychotherapy and antidepressants are often prescribed for anxiety and anger, while memory issues are tackled with lifestyle and diet changes that may or may not help.



“There really is no concussion pill, there’s no specific medication we have to treat these,” says Bailes. “It’s recognition, it’s taking that individual out of harm’s way for future impacts or blast injury, and it’s allowing the brain to heal.”



Experts agree that accurately identifying brain injury on the spot is critical. That’s because the risk increases each time you have one. “Every concussion predisposes you to be a little more sensitive to have another one, especially if they are in close proximity time wise,” says Bailes.



The hope is that science will develop a test that can diagnose brain trauma in war zones or on the sidelines of a football game at the time of injury. Several are in development, but only a pencil-and-paper test is in use right now.



For Shane Garcie, all that matters is what can be done to keep other soldiers from ending up like him.



“I’ve talked to other doctors and a couple of neurologists and neurosurgeons, and they’re like, ‘Man, really, I don’t know how you’re functioning like you are,’ he says. “I could’ve been a comedian. I was very quick-witted, very smart. Now I stutter. I sputter. I lose words. I can be having a conversation and forget everything we’re talking about.”



“But it’s not just Shane that’s having all these brain issues. There were thousands of troops who were getting blasted by IEDs, car bombs, RPGs, grenades. I want them to know that they’re not alone.”



For Tommy Shoemaker, it’s important that soldiers with CTE receive a physical diagnosis, rather than just being lumped under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder. To him, it matters a great deal that his symptoms are the result of a brain injury, instead of the inability to cope with the emotional fallout of trauma.



“People are more apt to accept a physical disorder than they are mental disorders,” he says. “So if you can do that for soldiers, I think that’s a big plus.”



“I think it’s a plus when they go to get a job, you know, and they ask ’em: ‘Do you have a mental disorder?’ Well no, I don’t. I have a brain injury. Nobody wants to be diagnosed as having a mental disorder.”





TRADEMARK AND COPYRIGHT 2015 CABLE NEWS NETWORK, INC., A TIME WARNER COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



FILED IN: NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS













































Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver:



http://kdvr.com/2015/04/06/study-ex-soldiers-have-same-brain-damage-as-nfl-players-who-committed-suicide/





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Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver





Scans of living brains show patterns of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. (Credit: PNAS/UCLA)



Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide


POSTED 3:20 PM, APRIL 6, 2015, BY CNN WIRE



WASHINGTON — After his last tour in Iraq, it took master gunner Shane Garcie about six weeks to notice he’d changed.



“Your brain is throwing parties because you’re home, you’re alive,” says Garcie. “So, it doesn’t settle in right away.”



Now he’s not sure what bothers him most: the fogginess of his brain, the anger that can erupt from nowhere or the deep, dark depressions he can’t shake off.



“One minute I’m in a good happy mood, everything is cool; the next minute I’m depressed,” Garcie said. “I don’t want to be around anybody, I want to isolate. Some days, I don’t want to get out of bed.”



“We could walk around this town and everybody, 90% of these people, would say, ‘Hey, Shane, hey,’ ” Garcie says about his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana. “But it’s not Shane. It looks like me, it walks like me, it talks like me, but it’s not me because of the damage.”



Since 1984, Green Beret Tommy Shoemaker has served in many war theaters — Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia — and is still an Army reservist. He came home from Iraq to Monroe, Louisiana, in late 2006 with a bum leg and a disabled brain.



“I carry note cards and a pen with me everywhere I go, and when I’m talking to somebody, I write it down,” Shoemaker told Gupta. “Because if I don’t, I won’t remember. I mean memory was not a problem for me, I could remember anything. And now I have to write everything down.”



But it’s the mood swings he can’t control that do the most harm.



“I’ve always been really easygoing. Everything rolled off my back, no problems,” says Shoemaker in his Southern drawl.



“But now that’s not so. I mean, I’ll get mad over something as simple as a banana peel in the front yard or my wife saying the wrong thing to me, and is it really anything? No, but at that moment, it hits me and I just do things that I would’ve never done before. I yell, I scream, I holler, and that’s just never been my manner. I’m sad for my kids and my wife to have to live with that.”



“It’s tough, really tough,” agrees Pam Shoemaker, Tommy’s wife. “I do remember him telling me that ‘I’m different,’ ‘I’m not the same'” when he first came home. “I didn’t understand. But I do now.”

Brain studies



Dr. Julian Bailes, co-director of the NorthShore Neurological Institute in Evanston, Illinois, is pointing at the angry red and vivid yellow blooms on the PET scan of a living brain.



“Compared to normal controls, you see abnormal binding in the areas under the surface of the brain and deeper in the brain, showing abnormal accumulations of tau protein,” he explains.



All are signs of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a crippling neurological disorder caused by repeated blows to the head.



Characterized by deep depression, failing memory and anger that lurks just under the surface, CTE is a form of dementia that first came to light in the boxing world. “Punch drunk” was the term most often used for former pugilists, such as Muhammad Ali, who developed brain damage after a lifetime of hard knocks. Today it’s called dementia pugilistica and is considered a variant of CTE.



CTE is the disease many believe played a role in the deaths of former NFL players like Ray Easterling, Junior Seau, Shane Dronett and Dave Duerson. They all shot themselves. Duerson left a note asking that his brain be studied.



RELATED: Chris Borland, 24, retires from NFL over concussion fears



Images like these are traditionally gathered post-mortem, from brain samples taken at autopsy. That’s been the only way CTE could be diagnosed. Only a handful of studies have looked at living brains, with the hope a diagnosis could be made before death.



“Looking at living brains is a remarkable contribution to the science right now, a really remarkable contribution,” Dr. Geoffrey Ling said. Ling is director of the Biological Technologies office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “It is very exciting and the potential is dramatic.”



In one of the largest studies of its kind to date, Bailes and his co-authors at UCLA compared the living brains of 14 former athletes thought to have CTE, 24 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and two ex-soldiers, Tommy Shoemaker and Shane Garcie, to a control group of 28 cognitively normal people.



The researchers injected the participants with a radioactive “tracer” called [f-18]FDDNP before their PET scans. The tracer latches on to a brain protein called tau, which is thought to be responsible for much of the damage in Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain disorders, and lights up areas of the brain that are affected.



“For us to be able to make the diagnosis of the injury or the disease in living people is paramount to being able to help them, treat them and to find some way to keep them out of progressing into a terminal problem,” says Bailes.



The scans of the ex-soldiers was a plus: a tiny sample designed to give a glimpse into what might be causing their debilitating symptoms.



And they offer a chance to explore what many experts are beginning to suspect: The blasts and energy jolts common in warfare might be creating a new form of CTE, a “blast-variant” version.



“In the military, it seems it would be vitally important to know who has been exposed to this, and then be able to identify, mark, follow the progression of brain degeneration from blast injury,” says Bailes. “And to know who’s at risk and maybe who needs to be pulled out of harm’s way permanently.”



Sure enough, the specific pattern of the tau the researchers found in Garcie and Shoemaker’s brains didn’t look at all like Alzheimer’s. Instead, it looked similar to the tau display found in the 14 players suspected of having CTE and the results taken from brain autopsies of people diagnosed with CTE.



And it looked similar to what had been found in a previous study by Bailes and his UCLA colleagues of the living brains of five NFL football players who were suspected of having CTE.

‘So many’ concussions



According to the Brain Trauma Foundation, 10% to 20% of Iraqi veterans are suffering from some level of traumatic brain disorder. The foundation even calls it the “signature injury” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.



“One was a suicide bomber,” says Shoemaker. He’s recalling the last — and worst — of some 35 concussions he’s had over his military career. While about half of those rendered him unconscious, he says his training often took over.



“I was in an open vehicle with no top between me and the explosion. So I had some shrapnel and suffered a concussion, but I was able to stay focused enough with muscle memory to just keep driving, ’til my head kind of cleared, and I kept going.”



“And the other one was a roadside bomb. I was knocked unconscious but again was able to just out of memory continue driving, not even realizing what had happened.”



Shane Garcie can’t recall how many concussions he’s had.



“No, because there’s so many. There’s so many,” says Garcie. “There are so many reasons for the jarrings, for the beatings. Not just IEDs, not just car bombs, not just in a firefight or grenades going off.”



“Think about it, you know. Iraq doesn’t have the best roads,” Garcie continues. “And you hit that bump and your head — it smacks the turret. Rollovers are severe because of the canals. I mean, you’re driving in blackout mode on dark nights, with nods on and no lights — you can barely see 10 feet in front of you. There are so many ways it can happen.”

New form of dementia?



The science of CTE is in its infancy. A band of researchers around the country has been racing to catalog as much information as possible, to answer the questions: Is CTE distinct enough to be diagnosed? Is it a “new” neurodegenerative disease?



“Before people run out and say, ‘Oh, this person has CTE, or that person has CTE,’ I think that’d be way premature to do that,” says Ling. “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, that’s a condition that still needs further study.”



Researchers struggle with how to tease out the differences between post-concussion syndrome, a chronic but stable disease, and CTE, which early research shows spreads from the initial site of impact throughout the brain and worsens with age.



“There’s so many things about CTE we don’t understand,” says Bailes. “There never has been long-term longitudinal studies that analyze who gets it and exactly why, what the prevalence of it is, and then who progresses. There may be a group that doesn’t progress.”



The type of radioactive marker to use, and how accurate it is in binding to tau protein, is also under scrutiny. A number of tau trackers are in the works, and each seem to have unique characteristics. The UCLA study’s [f-18]FDDNP is an older marker that critics say isn’t specific enough because it can also bind to amyloids, which are misfolded proteins commonly seen in Alzheimer’s brains.



Bailes and several of his UCLA co-authors have launched a company to develop [f-18]FDDNP, and they defend their tracer this way: “Most CTE sufferers have been found at autopsy to have tau, but also about 40% have had amyloid as well. So they are showing both degeneration markers in the brain,” says Bailes.



“Most importantly, it’s a distinct pattern that we haven’t seen in any other condition — not in Alzheimer’s, not in other forms of dementia, and certainly not in normal controls. So it’s not just what we’re binding to, it’s that this pattern appears to be distinct and it appears to be the areas that have been damaged in autopsy studies of sufferers with CTE.”



Ling has a more global view. “In the end, these scans are just scans. That’s all that they are. It really has to do with the context of the patient. We have to understand the patient: What is their history? Do they have multiple head injuries? Do they have anything else that could compound this?”

Right now, prevention is the only treatment



At this time, there is no cure for CTE. There are no real treatments, either. All that can be done is to treat the symptoms. Psychotherapy and antidepressants are often prescribed for anxiety and anger, while memory issues are tackled with lifestyle and diet changes that may or may not help.



“There really is no concussion pill, there’s no specific medication we have to treat these,” says Bailes. “It’s recognition, it’s taking that individual out of harm’s way for future impacts or blast injury, and it’s allowing the brain to heal.”



Experts agree that accurately identifying brain injury on the spot is critical. That’s because the risk increases each time you have one. “Every concussion predisposes you to be a little more sensitive to have another one, especially if they are in close proximity time wise,” says Bailes.



The hope is that science will develop a test that can diagnose brain trauma in war zones or on the sidelines of a football game at the time of injury. Several are in development, but only a pencil-and-paper test is in use right now.



For Shane Garcie, all that matters is what can be done to keep other soldiers from ending up like him.



“I’ve talked to other doctors and a couple of neurologists and neurosurgeons, and they’re like, ‘Man, really, I don’t know how you’re functioning like you are,’ he says. “I could’ve been a comedian. I was very quick-witted, very smart. Now I stutter. I sputter. I lose words. I can be having a conversation and forget everything we’re talking about.”



“But it’s not just Shane that’s having all these brain issues. There were thousands of troops who were getting blasted by IEDs, car bombs, RPGs, grenades. I want them to know that they’re not alone.”



For Tommy Shoemaker, it’s important that soldiers with CTE receive a physical diagnosis, rather than just being lumped under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder. To him, it matters a great deal that his symptoms are the result of a brain injury, instead of the inability to cope with the emotional fallout of trauma.



“People are more apt to accept a physical disorder than they are mental disorders,” he says. “So if you can do that for soldiers, I think that’s a big plus.”



“I think it’s a plus when they go to get a job, you know, and they ask ’em: ‘Do you have a mental disorder?’ Well no, I don’t. I have a brain injury. Nobody wants to be diagnosed as having a mental disorder.”





TRADEMARK AND COPYRIGHT 2015 CABLE NEWS NETWORK, INC., A TIME WARNER COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



FILED IN: NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS













































Study: Ex-soldiers have same brain damage as NFL players who committed suicide | FOX31 Denver:



http://kdvr.com/2015/04/06/study-ex-soldiers-have-same-brain-damage-as-nfl-players-who-committed-suicide/





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Monday, September 28, 2015

Butter-bean fights Larry Holmes






Larry Holmes vs Ken Norton (High Quality)

9th of June, 1978..............Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
WBC Heavyweight World Championship
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    • Standard YouTube License


Larry Holmes versus Jerry Cooney











11th of June, 1982...............Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, Nevada
WBC Heavyweight World Championship

Category Sports
License: Standard YouTube License

















ALI - FRAZIER























Image result for laRRY HOLMES






King of the Ring » Larry Holmes









.

Image result for laRRY HOLMES


KING OF THE RING FOR SEVEN YEARS, LARRY HOLMES WAS THE UNDISPUTED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD. HE'S BEEN FIGHTING FOR HIS LEGACY EVER SINCE.


by MICHAEL DOLAN


As the old proverb goes, a fool and his money are soon parted. And Larry Holmes is nobody’s fool. In the back room of Champ’s Corner, a bar and grill located within the office complex of L & D Holmes Enterprises on Larry Holmes Drive in Easton, Pennsylvania, the former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world taps away at a keyboard with the same persistent consistency as his famous left jab.

Champ’s Corner doesn’t open until 4 p.m. today. During the winter, the locals don’t venture out as often for lunch. But Holmes still comes to work just about every day and punches his own clock at his office inside the establishment. After his long time assistant, Angel, lets Holmes know that we are here, the man himself appears.

Holmes had an illustrious boxing career—48 straight victories, 20 heavyweight title defenses, seven years atop the most prestigious division in professional boxing.

“I saw on my computer the other day a picture of Floyd Mayweather,” Holmes says. “He calls himself “Money” now (laughs). He’s standing in front of a private jet he bought. A jet! And then, he has all these expensive cars lined up in front of them. About 20 of them. Now let me ask you something…” Holmes says as he gets to the punch line. “How long do you think that’s going to last? It will last until he stops fighting. And then how do you pay for all of that? The money’s gone!”

Holmes may be the most qualified person to speak on the subject of boxers and money. As he did during his reign as heavyweight champ, Holmes has managed to avoid the knockout blow to his finances that most boxers inevitably suffer. “This building that we’re sitting in right now?” Holmes says. “I paid $1.5 million to build it. And then the first week it opened, it started costing me money. Once you stop fighting, where is that money going to come from? It can’t come from your pocket anymore.”

Holmes has sold the building that we are sitting it that still hosts his name and the bar. Sold the nightclub in Easton as well. Had a house in Florida, sold that. Had a boat, sold that too. Had a fleet of 20 cars just like Mayweather, all paid in full, got rid of them all. “I may not have all the money I once did, but I don’t owe anyone anything,” Holmes says. And the same can be said about his boxing career as well.

Holmes was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, the fourth child of Flossie Holmes’ twelve children. “We were poor, man!” Holmes says of his childhood. “We had one of those houses that there was a space that you could crawl underneath. We lived like hillbillies. Water? You had to go outside and pump your water. The toilet was an outhouse outside. That’s why my father moved us here to Easton. His brothers found work up here, and so we moved.”

Holmes’ father would leave the family eventually would move to work in Connecticut to do landscaping, leaving Flossie to care for the kids.

Holmes dropped out of school in the seventh grade to work at John DiVietro’s Jet Car Wash, making a dollar an hour. “You see that bridge,” he says, pointing at the window to the view of the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge that crosses the Delaware River into New Jersey. “I must have walked across that bridge a thousand times to shine shoes. I hit every bar on Main Street to shine shoes. There ain’t a bar or business within a five mile radius of that bridge that I did not hit to shine shoes.”

On a good day, Holmes would make $20. “But we worked from 10 in the morning until seven at night. And we walked everywhere. We didn’t have a car. And the cops were always chasing us away, because they said we weren’t allowed to do that. But we did it anyway.”

Holmes worked a variety of shift work jobs throughout his teenage years. He worked in a quarry. He drove a dump truck. He poured steel in a local mill. He even helped make artillery shells in a factory in a local factory during the Vietnam War.

When Holmes was 19, he turned his eye towards boxing. He took a job driving a truck for a pants factory so he could get steady daytime hours. Then he would train in the evenings. “Honestly, I got into it because I thought I could make so money,” he says. “I didn’t do it for fun. It was another job. I wasn’t thinking about being the heavyweight champion of the world. I was thinking about making a living.”

After winning the Golden Gloves, Holmes entered the 1972 US Olympic boxing qualifiers. In a fight against future pro, Duane Bobick, Holmes was disqualified for holding too much. “I didn’t want to go to the Olympics,” Holmes says. “Every time Bobick tried to hit me, I’d get him in a clinch. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get hit. Well, nobody wants to get hit. But I wasn’t afraid of him. I just didn’t want to go to the Olympics. I wasn’t going to Germany. I had never been out of the country before. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. During the fight, the referee kept saying, ‘If you hold again, I’m going to disqualify you.’ So I kept holding him. Once I got disqualified, I had this rap follow me around that I had no heart. It wasn’t that I didn’t have heart, I just didn’t want to go to the Olympics.”

After Holmes turned pro, through sheer coincidence, Muhammad Ali had acquired some land in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania and opened his training camp there. Through a mutual friend, Holmes was invited to try sparring with Ali.

“That first time, he beat me up pretty good!” Holmes says, “He gave me a black eye. They wanted to put ice on it, and I said, ‘Don’t put no ice on it! I want everyone to see this!’” Holmes came back to Easton to show his friends that he got a shiner courtesy of the champ himself. “No one believed me though,” he says. ”Not even my family. They thought I made it up. Soon I started bringing them up there to see for themselves.”

Holmes would make $1,000 a month taking his lumps from Ali. “The only reason he kept me around was because he knew I could take it,” Holmes remembers. “He told me, ‘I ain’t got time to teach anybody how to fight. I need to get ready for my fight. If you can’t take it, you’re not gonna be here.”

The day after Holmes got a black eye, he came right back to Deer Lake. And the next day. And the next. Ali quickly understood that Holmes had the heart to help him prepare for his fight and took a liking to him. He even bought him new gear to replace the falling apart headgear and gloves Holmes was using. Ali even took Holmes to spar with him in Zaire prior to his famous “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman.

But Holmes’ pro career wasn’t taking off. “I wasn’t going anywhere,” he remembers. “A lot of people threw in the towel on me. They thought I didn’t have what it takes. I remember Howard Cosell saying during the Olympic trials, (as Holmes goes into his Cosell impersonation), ‘He just doesn’t have it (laughs).’ But that helped me! It motivated me to show them.”

For Holmes, sparring not only paid the bills, it set the stage for his greatness as a fighter. “See, they thought they were using me, but I was using them,” Holmes says. “I was getting an education. I was gaining confidence. I’m in there holding my own against the best heavyweights in the world. And I’m younger than them! What’s going to happen when their time is up?”

Their time was up on June 9, 1978. That’s when a 27-0 stepped into the ring at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas to face WBC heavyweight champion, Ken Norton. Norton, who had claimed the title when Leon Spinks signed to fight a rematch against Muhammad Ali, entered the ring a prohibitive favorite. Little was expected of Holmes, who most of the fight public had yet to see on the national stage.

“I wasn’t supposed to win,” Holmes says. “At least that’s what the writers thought. See this arm?” Holmes points to his left bicep. “Six days before the fight with Norton, I tore a muscle. That’s why that knot is still there. We iced it, rubbed it, iced it, rubbed it. When I got into the ring, I wasn’t even throwing my left; I was just feinting, shrugging my shoulders. I was praying. ‘Come on arm, don’t fail me now!’ After I got hit a few shots by Norton, that arm started working! I wasn’t canceling that fight. No way in hell they would have given me another chance. Opportunity only knocks once.”

That night, after a hellacious fifteen rounds, including one of the greatest fifteenth rounds in boxing history, Holmes won a split decision. He was the new heavyweight champion of the world. As he promised his friends, they all left the ring and jumped, fully clothed, into the Caesar’s Palace swimming pool. Holmes jumped in wearing his boxing trunks. After they got out of the pool, King cursed out Holmes for not going directly to the press conference. “I didn’t know, or didn’t think. But I didn’t care. I had fun doing what I wanted to do. After we went to the room, I went around to all the tables and yelled at people, ‘You fucking guys bet against me. You bet against me and I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!’ That didn’t make friends either (laughs)! But I was tired of hearing it. Imagine if your friends were telling you constantly, ‘You can’t write! You can’t even spell the words! How do you expect to write a story’”

Now, Holmes was at the center of the boxing universe. He made enough money to buy himself a house. Bought one for mom, too. Yet still, there was one currency he couldn’t seem to collect—respect.

“When I won the title, everyone thought it was a fluke,” Holmes says. “Guys right here in my hometown said, ‘That fight was fixed. Don King fixed that fight for you.’ But then I won, and won, and won, and then they had to start taking a look at me. I was starting to make money now. And I was building things here, and people thought that I was showing off with my money. When I bought this land and started building things here, people in the town liked that it was happening, but even they didn’t like that I was the one doing it, because I’m black. They loved me. They liked what I did, but I will always be black. Even though half of my family is white, I’ll always be black. I put millions of dollars into this city; do you think I get the support? Fuck no.”

“Did you ever feel like you wanted to leave,” I ask Holmes.

“I did,” he says. “I bought a house in Jacksonville and went down there for a while, but I didn’t like it. I was still boxing then, but I wasn’t boxing. Every time I needed a few dollars and didn’t want to touch the money I saved in the bank, I’d fight.”

“Now we’re working on a statue. See the sign over there?” Holmes points us to a sign across the road visible through the window. “That’s where it is supposed to go. The guy that was working on it died. My wife is taking the project over now. They named the street here after me. They had an alley that they wanted to name after me and I told them they could keep it. They didn’t have anything big enough in this city to name after me. I’m bigger than this city. So the mayor I helped gets into office. He gave me this street. But the money, the taxes I pay? They should put 10 statues up! (laughs)



Holmes takes me for a ride to a local Chinese buffet. It’s between the lunch and dinner hours, so there are only a few people in the restaurant, all of whom Holmes seems to know. If he doesn’t, he still greets them respectfully.

“I’m here!” Holmes says to the restaurant hostess. She greets him with a big hug. “Sit! Sit! Tell me what you want, and I’ll go get it.”

“You should try the buffet,” Holmes tells me. “You’re gonna love it.”

As we make our way through lunch, I share my theory with Holmes on why he never got the accolades he felt he deserved. I tell him that to sell tickets, every fight has to have a stark contrast. Good versus evil. Hero versus villain. Against Ali, Holmes was the younger man trying to vanquish a legend. Over ten rounds, Holmes brutalized an aging Ali, begging the referee to stop the fight. After it was over, he cried because of the pain he inflicted on his idol. Ali’s fans never forgave him.

Against Gerry Cooney, he was depriving a white boxing fan base of a Great White Hope. Holmes would receive death threats daily, to the point that he would do road work while carrying a gun. On the night of the fight, Vegas casinos had police snipers on the rooftops for security.

Even when he came back at age 38 to fight a young Mike Tyson (Holmes was the only fighter to fight Ali and Tyson for the championship), he was trying to short-circuit boxing, and Don King’s most electrifying attraction.

“I was off by two weeks!” Holmes says, still bristling about the Tyson fight, the only bout of Holmes’ 75-fight career that he finished with his back on the canvas. “The fight was supposed to be in June,” Holmes recalls. “Then Don moved the fight up t0 January. He had given me half the money already, so it’s hard to give the money back once you have it. So I said, ‘The hell with it. Let’s fight!’ I knew how to beat him. We were in the fourth round and he was already running out of gas. A few more rounds he would have been done. He was made for me! But my timing was off. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to throwing punches from down here because he’s short!”

Holmes demonstrates by crouching and swinging wild upward hooks. “But my timing was all off. So he caught me. BAM! BAM! And I went down. So now I’m going to set him up, make him come in and give him an upper cut. And when I reached back to throw it, my right hand got caught in the ropes. Then BAM! It was over. I wasn’t ready for the fight. I wasn’t mad at Mike or Don King. I was mad at myself for not being in shape. But I got three and a half million for it.”

The conversation turns to Don King and Holmes relationship with the dominant boxing promoter of the day.

“There were many times that Don King would say to me, ‘Here’s a million dollars but I can’t get you any more.’ Now what should I do? I can say I’m not going to take it Don. Beat it. And then what? Am I going to go back to shining shoes for $30 a day? You look at my record and you’ll see that I would fight four times a year.”

“But do you regret not negotiating differently?” I ask.

“What, I’m going to be mad at Gerry Cooney because he got $10 million and I got $10 million, even though I was the champ and he hadn’t fought anybody? You going to pay us both $10 million? Gerry, lets fight every year! We can fight every day if you want. And then I’m the fool because I should have gotten more? Meanwhile, I’m stacking those millions. I’m not going to be the dumb guy that’s going to turn the money away because it’s not enough.”

To this day, you can still feel Holmes’ survival instincts kick in. He will not be denied the legacy that he believes is rightfully his. It doesn’t matter what anyone else would do. He did it his way, and he’d do it again.

“I beat everybody they put in front of me. Then they got tired of me. They gave those decisions to Michael Spinks. (At 48-0, Holmes lost the title and his next two fights to Michael Spinks in controversial decisions.) And I knew they were never going to let me win. But then people forget. I came back and fought Ray Mercer. People were like, ‘Good luck, Larry. You’re going to need it! This guy killed Tommy Morrison.’ And I’m like. ‘Man, I’m not Tommy Morrison! I’m a pro! I was the world champion!’ And I whooped Mercer’s ass, while everyone was calling me names at ringside. I’m a bad man! And you know what else I can still do? I can talk to you today. Ali is sick. Joe Frazier’s dead. Kenny Norton’s dead. Here I am, 65 years old. I don’t owe nobody. I’m debt free. And I’m still doing what I want to do.”



Holmes has one more stop to make before we call it a day. He’s going to go visit the barbershop, so his friend Boogie can cut his hair. As we drive toward the shop, Holmes speeds up a bit. “See this curve? They call it Cemetery Curve, because the cemetery is right here.

We proceed through the curve, and you can see the gravestones peeking up from the Eastern Pennsylvania snow that blankets the entire landscape. “My whole family is buried here,” he says. “That’s why I speed up. I try not to think about it.”

We get to the barbershop and pull into the parking lot. Holmes explains how he’s even responsible for the empty space in Easton. “There used to be buildings here,” he says. “They were all run down. So I bought them and tore them down. There was no place for anyone to park around here. The city was mad as hell, but people were finally able to come out in their cars and do things in town. After a while, we built this shop on one of the lots.”

As we enter the shop, Holmes gets a hearty greeting from the patrons. “I get to cut the line, right?” Holmes barks. He’s greeted with laughs and handshakes. Even though those in line would gladly let their champ go first, he would never think of taking advantage. It’s not the right thing to do.

Holmes sits in an empty barber’s chair in the shop.

“You know Saoul Mamby?” Holmes asks.

“I do,” I say. “Tremendous fighter from New York City.”

“Yeah, he still lives in the Bronx,” Holmes says. “He and I used to train in Gleason’s Gym together in the Bronx over forty years ago. I would drive there every night and drive back home. We’ve been friends ever since. I think he’s having some trouble with dementia. He won’t stop fighting. He’ll fly over to Germany and they’ll pay him ten grand to fight somebody, so he goes.”

“How old is he,” I ask.

“I think he’s 67.”

“67?” I ask? Later I would look up Mamby’s age. He is indeed 67.

“Mamby! It’s Larry Holmes. How you feeling?”

The champ listens a bit before he interjects.

“Mamby, no more boxing! Nothing with rings and gloves and getting punched in the head, you hear? I’m going to send my friend here to do a story on what a great fighter you were.”

Holmes hangs up the phone wistfully. “I tried to convince him to move down here, but he’ll never leave the Bronx,” he says.

Holmes turns to a high school junior waiting to have his hair cut who proudly wears his Easton Football jacket.

“Son, when you play, don’t use your head to tackle people. What position do you play?”

“Defensive tackle, Mr. Holmes.”

“That’s the position that I used to play before I started boxing!” Holmes says. “Early in my life, I learned very quickly that you don’t take the punches to show how tough you are,” he says. “If you keep getting hit in the head, something’s got to give. Whenever you hear someone saying that a fighter isn’t tough enough because they don’t take punches, they’re usually standing outside the ring.”

Holmes takes photos with the young football player and asks about his season, before he’s ready to step in the chair. He points to a building across the street.

“That’s where the club was. I bought that building and refurbished it. I sold it though. Then we built this building here, and now Boogie cuts everyone’s hair here. I sold most of these place now.”

“Whatever you do, keep Boogie here!” an older man currently sitting in the barber chair says. Everyone in the shop laughs.

Eventually, Holmes settles in the chair. “Hurry up, Boogie. I’ve got to get this guy to the bus,” he says, pointing to me. “Otherwise, he’s here for the night!” After a nice trim, Holmes pays and tips generously. He shakes everyone’s hand and wishes everyone well before we head out into the night.

As we leave the shop and head to Holmes’ car, a voice calls out. “The great Larry Holmes!” a young white college-age man says as we pass. “Mr. Holmes, can I ask you something,” the young man says. “Can you spare a dollar?”

“What are you going to do with it,” Holmes asks.

“I’m going to buy a cigarette,” the young man says.

“And then what?” Holmes asks.

“I’m not sure,” the young man says.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Holmes says, peeling off a dollar and handing it over. “Stay warm tonight.”

We get into the car for a brief ride to the bus terminal. Holmes didn’t want me to get lost or walk over in the cold. “Don’t worry,” he says. “If you miss the bus, I’ll drive you back to New York.” Even though we’ve only known each other for five hours, I have no doubt that Holmes means what he says. He always does.






TAGS: LARRY HOLMES BOXING HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP HALL OF FAME










































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