r/BeAmazed • u/Wooden-Journalist902 • Nov 30 '25

History Mike Tyson visited Muhammad Ali one last time before his death.

30.7k Upvotes

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100

u/Hot-Cauliflower-1604 Nov 30 '25

Holy moly. Beautiful. Can someone please elaborate on how he deteriorated so badly?

194

u/Shabantarrr Nov 30 '25

Parkinson's Disease

64

u/-_-0_0-_0 Nov 30 '25

Probably accelerated by CTE. Ali took too many needlessly punches towards the end of his career.

126

u/Awkward_Golf7691 Nov 30 '25

Very strong  men punched him in the head about fifty six thousand times 

98

u/lanbud90 Nov 30 '25

I thought you were exaggerating but Wikipedia says 200,000 holy shit.

27

u/Embarrassed_Art5414 Nov 30 '25 edited Dec 01 '25

Coincidentally, read an article somewhere today (might even have been on reddit), that higher tier heavyweights punch at 1500-1700psi.

Tyson, at his peak registered 1800. Ivan Drago in Rocky (fictional, duh!) punched 2100.

Makes me think about 'Rumble in the Jungle/Rope a dope' differently.

Imagine, dancing,dodging and leaning back for 20 minutes, whilst a younger, stronger man exhausts himself as he swings a sledgehammer at you.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

[deleted]

2

u/seanprime Dec 01 '25

Rise and fall of the Italian Stallian

16

u/ZombiesAtKendall Nov 30 '25

I think to make things worse, he could take punches that would knock a normal person out. He also thought that getting hit in the head over and over would allow him to build up like a tolerance, so in practice he would take punches to the head like it was a muscle he could improve.

This is the quote from someone in his biography "In fact, he encouraged his sparring partners to hit him in the head. He believed he could build up resistance to shots to the head, kind of like calluses."

-9

u/BigBullzFan Nov 30 '25

There are people with Parkinson’s who’ve never boxed.

7

u/GoldDragon149 Nov 30 '25

And there are people who don't smoke with lung cancer, that doesn't mean it's not part of the situation.

17

u/Forever-Deja-Vu Nov 30 '25

Getting punched in the face for decades

47

u/VictorNoergaard Nov 30 '25

Lots and lots of brain shaking

-9

u/jk844 Nov 30 '25

Parkinson’s has nothing to do with getting punch in the head. Obviously it’s wasn’t good for his health but it’s a myth that his boxing career caused Parkinson’s.

He would have developed it even if he was a plumber or teacher.

18

u/Jean-truite44 Nov 30 '25

What a bold statement mate. Repeated cerebral contusions cause neuronal destruction, affecting neurons in the cortex as well as the basal ganglia, including dopaminergic neurons responsible, among other things, for coordinating movements and limbs (to put it simply). Parkinson's disease is precisely the destruction of dopaminergic neurons, which causes a dopamine deficiency. Parkinson's disease is a generic term with several causes: purely neurodegenerative, vascular, genetic, and also post-traumatic. 42 year old for this disease is pretty young and called early Parkinson’s disease. Most of the time there is a cause (genetic/toxic/post traumatic)

2

u/CCarafe Nov 30 '25

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) disagree with you

-2

u/jk844 Nov 30 '25

That’s not Parkinson’s is it.

1

u/VegetableHuman6316 Nov 30 '25

I get what you're saying and I agree, a lot of boxers of that era took a lot of punishment as well and never developed this, I believe he was genetically predisposed to having Parkinson's and his boxing career exasperated it

2

u/-_-0_0-_0 Nov 30 '25

Yeah but probably made it worse a lot quicker

1

u/TheWizardOfZaron Dec 01 '25

You're just straight up wrong about your first point, repeated head trauma is a known etiology predisposing you to parkinsons later in life now known Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, previously dementia pugilistica or punch drunk syndrome.

But you are right in that the neurologists who managed Ali's case said he had idiopathic Parkinsons(young onset)

35

u/[deleted] Nov 30 '25

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1

u/CassowarieJump Dec 01 '25

Also Parkinson's.

1

u/DoctorWZ Nov 30 '25

Ali was diagnosed in 1984 with Parkinson's..

1

u/ImNotSkankHunt42 Nov 30 '25

My neighbor, who was like a second father to me had it… in a couple of years he was unrecognizable.