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By Arthur Allen

April 30, 1999 | Muhammad Ali came to the Russell Senate Office Building last week to lend his presence to a federal bill that already bears his name -- the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, which is intended to curtail the brazen corruption in the boxing industry. While a friend testified on his behalf, Ali sat stolidly at the witness table, noble and glorious and mute, like one of the stone heads on Mount Rushmore.

In fact, Ali's brain has become the fleshy equivalent of stone. He suffers from parkinsonism -- brain cells turned to scar tissue as a result of the many cruel blows landed on his head. And while the senators were not primarily concerned with Ali's brain -- the subject at hand was the rip-off of boxers and their fans by Don King and his ilk -- the boxer's funereal presence was an inescapable reminder of the brute facts of the sport. You had to wonder which was more disturbing -- watching a fixed fight or one in which a man gets beaten half to death.

Ali, the icon, unable to speak for himself, was lavished with the sort of praise he seldom got from politicians back in the days when his rhetoric -- "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger" -- was as mighty a weapon as his fists. Would it be paternalistic to say that authorities should have stopped Ali's career before it became virtual suicide, that more should be done to protect a boxer's most vulnerable organ -- his brain?

A new crop of zealous boxing reformers, including John McCain, the Arizona Republican senator and presidential hopeful (who boxed in the Navy), and Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, have been asking just such questions as they move to clamp state and federal controls on a sport they say is deeply corrupt. In 1996, Congress passed the first federal boxing law -- a boxing safety act that created a computerized I.D. system so fighters suspended after a knockout in one state could not fight under an alias in another. But the law didn't specify the type of medical examinations boxers should get, and regulations vary enormously. In some states, boxing commissions will accept a cursory physical by any M.D. In others, such as New York, each boxer must undergo a CAT scan -- at the state's expense -- every year and after each knockout. "We saved a few lives," says neurologist Barry Jordan, who instituted the changes as medical director of the New York State Athletic Commission from 1987-95.

The New York physical also includes an hour-long neurological exam and an EEG, which measures brain waves. A task force of attorneys general headed by Spitzer now wants to go further, with uniform medical standards around the country. The group's model regulations recommend that boxers in high-risk categories -- those over 40, with 15 or more losses, three consecutive KO losses or a career of more than 350 rounds -- be suspended until they receive an MRI exam, which shows more anatomical detail than the CAT scan, as well as an EEG and a detailed neurological exam. Meanwhile, Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D-N.Y., has introduced an amendment to the 1996 law that would require CAT scans semiannually for every boxer.

Boxing traditionalists will squawk at such regulations, but the boxers' brains are worth it. Over the past 80 years, about 700 fighters have died in the ring. Every generation has a sickening example -- Benny Paret, pummeled into a coma by Emile Griffith in a 1962 grudge bout (during the weigh-in, Paret called Griffith a maricón, or fag); Duk Koo-Kim, killed by Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini in 1982; Jimmy Doyle by Sugar Ray Robinson in 1947. When a gloved fist strikes a head, the brain and skull accelerate at different speeds. The brain, sitting in a pool of fluid that acts as a hydraulic buffer, lags behind, and the resulting pressures tear veins and rip membranes. While a kinked brainstem might cause nothing more than a concussion, severe bleeding between the brain and the skull can be fatal.

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