A Fight to the End

If Ellen Quarry had her way, there would be a law that puts a warning on boxing rings like the ones on packs of cigarettes: This may be hazardous to your health.

Quarry doesn’t need the qualifier. Her husband, Mike Quarry, died Sunday.

He was 55, a boxer who, on June 6, 1972, in Las Vegas, fought Bob Foster for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Featured that night was a heavyweight fight, Muhammad Ali against Quarry’s brother, Jerry.

Promoters had a field day: “The Quarry Brothers versus the Soul Brothers.”

The Quarrys both lost by knockout that night. They also both died of pugilistic dementia, a fancy medical term that describes a person who has been hit in the head so many times that his brain is severely damaged and slowly deteriorates. Jerry died seven years ago.

“They took MRIs of Mikey’s brain every year,” Ellen Quarry says, “and every year, he would lose about one point in their rating system. Last year when they took it, he lost six points. The doctor held up a picture of his brain and put it next to one of an 82-year-old man. You could see it. Mikey’s was worse.”

Ellen Quarry is 48. She met Mike 23 years ago, in a bar in New York.

“He always told people it was a dinner house,” she says.

He wanted her phone number. She laughed because he had told her he was returning to California the next day. You’ll never call, she told him, giving up the phone number on a lark.

In every way, they were from different worlds. She was a medical student, studying at a state university in Buffalo, N.Y., and later at Cornell. Eventually, after 14 years of college, including a master’s degree in human nutrition and food sciences, she would earn her doctorate degree in education from Biola University, open a family counseling practice and become a member of the Biola faculty.

He was a boxer, the younger brother of the world-famous Jerry Quarry and a respectable light-heavyweight in his own right until his 36-0 record got its first blemish that night against Foster and things slid downhill. When they met, his career was well into its twilight.

He surprised her. He did call, often. And soon, she left home and friends to come to California and marry him.

Her nightmare had begun.

“The first one or two years of our marriage were normal,” she says. “Then the signs of short-term memory loss began.”

She tells her story from her family care office in La Mirada, less than two days after her husband’s death.

“I did my mourning long before today,” she says.

She sat with him as he died in an assisted living center in nearby La Habra, where his strong heart did battle with his dying brain, racing up to 140 beats a minute for three days.

“On Friday, I had him dressed and ready to go,” she says. “Regular clothes, the diaper off. To the end, I wanted him to have his dignity. The care-givers who had been there on Friday and had said their goodbyes when they left couldn’t believe he was still alive when they came back the next day.”

She never saw him fight -- has only seen a handful of boxing matches in her life -- and is blunt in her opinion.

“I don’t like boxing. I think it is stupid,” she says. “I am sad at what my husband went through, sad at the many, many losses that occurred in his life because of boxing.”

There are photos of Mike all over her office. In most of them, no matter who he is with or what the occasion, he posed with his fist clenched.

“Punching, he was always punching,” she says.

In the June 1998 issue of Esquire Magazine, a year before Jerry died and well after Mike was able to take care of himself, there is a full-page picture to go with a story about athletic brothers. Jerry and Mike posed, punching.

The reality was that, by then, Mike had begun his decline into a second childhood, caused by the years of beatings in the boxing ring. His wife became his second mother, deciding that, whatever it took, and however long, she would stay the course, leaning on friends, professional care-givers and strong faith to survive, one day at a time.

“We traveled, and that brought many happy times,” she says. Then she describes the night she woke up in a hotel room and her husband was gone, to be found later in the lobby with a sheet wrapped around him.

“From that point on,” she says, “I always pushed chairs and sofas in front of the hotel room door. I realized that, if he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, that he might turn the wrong way when he was heading back to bed.”

There are stories of night tremors, of fists through walls and windows. There was the time he wandered away from a hotel in Las Vegas and was found, 14 hours later, in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, wearing swim trunks, a T-shirt and a dress belt. It was 2:45 in the morning.

“I asked him, ‘Mikey, what have you been doing all this time?’ ” she says. “He looks at me and says, ‘Drinking Cokes.’ ”

He would approach people in airports, tap them on the shoulder and tell them they were his next opponent.

“I was constantly stepping in, smoothing things over, letting people know with a gesture or a wink,” she says.

When medication wasn’t working, the burden increased.

To make sure she knew where he was, Ellen would bring Mike into the bathroom and make him sit on the toilet while she took a shower. She would find ways to trick him into eating real food, because all he wanted was candy and mocha drinks. At the end, he couldn’t eat his favorite, Snickers bars, because he couldn’t swallow the nuts. So she convinced him that peppermint patties were Snickers bars, because she knew peppermint patties would melt in his mouth.

They moved into a condominium near her family counseling office so she could run home between appointments, and he became well known in the area.

“He was the Mayor of La Mirada, that’s what some people called him,” she says.

He had no real plan for what he would do after boxing -- “He thought he would become a color commentator,” she says -- and the job opportunities diminished with his mental capabilities.

“He had a construction job for a while,” she says, “but he couldn’t keep that because he kept losing track of the bucket.”

She says she clings to the knowledge that, throughout this, his existence was painless.

“He was never aware,” she says. “He was like a child. You learned his language and then you could talk to him.”

Mike Quarry will be buried, probably sometime next week, in a family gravesite near Shafter, Calif.

“He’ll be back with Jerry, where he wants to be,” Ellen says.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at Bill.Dwyre@LATimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.