Ferdie Pacheco was the doctor who helped make Muhammad Ali the greatest, but Ali's fight with Joe Frazier in Manila made him re-evaluate his role as a doctor, writes Michelle McDonagh
When Ferdie Pacheco met the young Cassius Clay in his office in Miami in the early 1960s, the man who would go on to become the world's greatest boxing legend was "just another fighter with a cold".
That day, the physician could never have envisaged what was to lie ahead of him in the next 17 years in his role as Muhammad Ali's fight doctor and cornerman - the massive highs of success and the tragic lows of Ali's disintegrating health.
Today, the powerful, former heavyweight world champion suffers from mid brain damage and Parkinson's disease. Most of this damage could have been avoided, according to Pacheco, if the champ had quit boxing after his bout against Joe Frazier on October 1st, 1975, in Manila in the Philippines, regarded as the best fight in heavyweight history.
"I knew that the 'Thrilla in Manila' was the last stop on the road to boxing damage. After a grim battle, each subsequent match caused Ali more brain and kidney damage. What happened was progressive, irreversible, and, regrettably, inevitable," Pacheco remarks.
Although nowhere near as famous as his most famed patient, Ferdie Pacheco has lived an incredible life. As well as being a doctor and boxing cornerman for 12 world champions including Ali, he has enjoyed a long and successful career as a television commentator, as well as being an author and artist.
He will be sharing anecdotes about his life and his medical career at a series of meetings due to take place around Ireland, starting on Saturday, February 16th in Dublin. The meetings, aimed at healthcare professionals with an interest in pain management, are being held in Dublin, Cork and Galway.
Speakers will include Dr Liam Conroy, a consultant in anaesthesia and chronic pain at University Hospital Galway, and Dr Dave O'Gorman, consultant in anaesthesia and chronic pain at University Hospital Galway.
Born in Ybor city, the Spanish section of Tampa, Florida, on December 8th, 1927, Pacheco realised that he wanted to become a doctor at the age of 14. He was heavily influenced by his father, JB, a pharmacist who instilled in his son the idea of helping others.
As well as working as a ghetto doctor for 25 years and working with Ali and other boxers, he also served as a boxing commentator for NBC, Showtime, and Univision, winning two Emmys, for 25 years.
Since he retired from broadcasting at the age of 75, he has devoted himself to painting full time. He is happily married for 33 years to Luisita Sevilla, a Flamenco artist and photographer.
After getting his medical degree from the University of Miami and completing his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital as a physician in June 1959, Pacheco headed for Miami's black ghetto, Overtown, to fulfil his father's dream - to help the indigent.
For 25 years, he "worked like a dog" in his office there, seeing 50 to 100 people a day, not charging those who could not afford to pay, which was a large percentage of his patients. To distract himself from the daily grind and all encompassing poverty of the Overtown ghetto, the doctor started going to Miami Beach promoter Chris Dundee's Tuesday fight nights.
He ended up becoming the doctor for the Fifth Street Gym in 1960 and treated all of the fighters who passed through over the next 20 years. In exchange for free medical care for the boxers and their retinues (which ultimately included all of their families too), Pacheco was welcomed into "the deepest inside of boxing". He became a "boxing guy".
In his book, Blood in My Coffee - The Life of the Fight Doctor, Pacheco tells how he treated Muhammad Ali for 17 years and not only took no fees, but paid for everything from X-rays and lab works to physical therapy.
"I went all over the world with chief cornerman Angelo Dundee, watched him work his magic and develop 12 champions, and, as the cherry on the cake, he brought Cassius Clay, then only a kid, to my little office on NW Second Avenue and 10th Street," he recalls.
Although he thoroughly enjoyed his career as the fight doctor, which took him all over the world with Ali and other champions, the fight in Manila which Ali won on a technical knockout in the 14th round was so close to life and death that it finally made him re-evaluate his own role as a doctor in the fighter's corner.
"As all humans must, Ali grew old. The first thing that goes is the reflexes. Ali had the fastest in boxing history. That's why he never got hit. When the reflexes slowed, everybody hit Ali.
"The beating he took in Manila from Joe Frazier almost cost him his life. It finished whatever little he had left in his brain. His brain was a swollen, scar-filled mess. Anyone with eyes could see the difference in his speech, now slurred and slowing - in slowing of ideation, the lack of balance, the shuffling gait, and the loss of reflexes," he says.
"As a doctor, I couldn't in all consciousness stay knowing what I knew. There was little I could do but to tell him to quit."
When a New York Boxing Authority doctor showed Pacheco disastrous lab results which showed that Ali's kidneys were "falling apart", he made the heart-breaking decision to end his career with "the champ" in 1977.
He tells the Health Supplement: "Of course it was sad and tragic to watch. How could you be with somebody for 17 years through those thrilling days and not be the best of friends? What happened to him was not hard to figure out. He was in a spot where nothing good could come out, only bad and it did just like I said it would."
Before he quit as Ali's doctor and corner man, Pacheco gave his friend "chapter and verse" about what was ahead for him medically. He says Ali understood him, "but headlights and spotlights were his world, so he chose to go on.
"Those around him encouraged him shamelessly until we were treated to his humiliation at the hands of his ex-sparring partner, Larry Holmes."
During his years in front of an NBC microphone, Pacheco campaigned constantly to make boxing a safer sport. After a fight in Montreal on June 20th, 1980, where an American boxer called Cleveland Danny died in the ring, Pacheco went straight to NBC executive producer Don Ohlmeyer, told him of the horrifying night and asked permission to use NBC to attack boxing's cavalier attitude towards death in the ring.
He left Canada and resolved to ensure there would not be another NBC telecast unless the promoter signed a contract to provide an ambulance with paramedics and that the boxing commission would see to it that there was always a doctor at ringside.
He fought for the installation of a fourth rope on the boxing ring to keep heads from bouncing on the ring apron - a four ring rope is now standard. He also fought for a different glove design, one where the thumb would be attached to the glove as the thumb was a missile that could take out an eye.
One of his biggest battles, he recalls, was the change in the attitude of referees and cornermen when it came to stopping a fight. Historically, the promoter and the crowd wanted to see a match to the finish.
"Of the many things I saw in the boxing ring that I could not condone, nor find an excuse for, nor fit into my code of life, was the death of a boxer. Every time I was a witness to, or part of a boxing death, I came home to sleepless nights. Why was I, an ethical physician with a large charity practice, a part of a sport that allowed death to be part of the sport? I never found a suitable answer. I don't have one now. I don't know if there is one. I suppose I have to say it's a character flaw," he muses.
Pacheco believes the main reason for death in the ring is a big beating a fighter sustains in a previous bout. This, he says, is entirely avoidable through good record keeping, with computerised records instantly available, and "a boxing commission with balls.
"I think there are fewer deaths now and fewer fearful beatings, but, as with everything, money talks. Old washed-up fighters keep fighting, plodding on doggedly, defeat after defeat into neurological damage or the punch-drunk syndrome, Alzheimer's disease and eventually death. Why? Because the public wants to see it, which translates to money and ratings."
Ferdie Pacheco will be the guest speaker at a series of meetings on pain management at: the Four Seasons Hotel, Dublin on Feb 14; the Ardilaun Hotel, Galway on Feb 19; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork on Feb 21