Columnist Dean Juipe: No laughs in watching Quarry die

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

Before the era of political correctness, good taste took a relentless beating.

People openly ridiculed one another for their physical or mental weaknesses, and any shortcoming of your own was fair game for exploitation by both your friends and adversaries.

As movies, radio and TV emerged in the 20th century, this tendency to belittle the handicapped, the underprivileged and even the guy next door accelerated to where it was not only commonplace but showcased in a Marx Brothers spectacular.

Anything that set you apart from the majority, be it race or birth defect or bad habit, was targeted and often presented as humorous.

As a result, Hollywood loaded up on actors who were either a card short or could play someone who was a card short. These were bit parts, designed to amuse a rather heartless audience.

Nitwits, winos and sloppy drunks of all kinds were regularly featured, and every studio had a stable of misfits it could plug into one of these roles.

From the dumb guy in the Dead End Kids to the Las Vegas schtick of Foster Brooks, the dizzier the performance the bigger the laughs. Brooks and his drunken TV counterpart, Otis on the Andy Griffith Show, played similar roles that used to bring a chuckle. They not only would act falling-down drunk, they were welcomed with a bemused acceptance by those around them.

Likewise, punch-drunk fighters were a hoot and surfaced in any number of legitimate films. They were inevitably dense, lost and easily led.

They sold ties for spare change or relied on their fading muscle to make ends meet. Almost without exception, they were hopelessly pathetic.

"Ha-ha," the crowds bellowed. "Look at that fool.

"He doesn't have all his marbles.

"He's less a man than us."

Then Jerry Quarry dies and reality strikes home. Luckily, times have changed at least a little.

Today, no one thinking clearly finds drunkards or anyone with an affliction uproariously funny. There's no laughing at how Jerry Quarry spent the last few years of his life.

He died Sunday in California at the age of 53, a former heavyweight contender who just missed becoming a world champion during a 1970s heyday. Yet for at least the final 20 years of his life he increasingly suffered from what is now called dementia pugilistica, which began with memory lapses and ended with him childishly inadequate and insecure.

By the end his money and his memories were long gone, victimized by years of blows to an unprotected head. It got to where he was unable to care for himself, the result of about 1,000 too many to the chin.

Boxing does that to some men and the ones it targets are not forewarned. Do you think Muhammad Ali would have laid on the ropes accepting abuse if he knew it was going to lead to the Parkinson's that plagues him today?

As for Quarry, he's dead and had he been able to rationalize his punch-drunk status in recent years he would have said there was no one to blame but himself.

But it sure wasn't funny.

And say what you will about political correctness, we as a country no longer equate suffering and despair with the barrel of laughs they once were.

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