Tuesday, July 16, 2002 | 9:35 a.m.
Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4084.
Boxing can be a deadly sport, as each of its participants knows so very well. And when one of them succumbs as the result of taking part in a fight, the others -- as well as the physicians who oversee their matches -- want to be able to specify not only the cause of that death but what preventive measures might have avoided it.
Unfortunately in the case of Pedro Alcazar, who died June 24 in Las Vegas following a fight here two days earlier, there will be no lasting legacy or immortalizing revelation. With a Clark County coroner's office autopsy completed and now public record, it has become apparent that Alcazar's death qualifies as something of a fluke.
Yet Dr. Margaret Goodman, a neurologist associated with the Nevada State Athletic Commission, said Monday that she's determined to take something positive from Alcazar's passing.
She's going to use it to underscore the importance of fighters and their handlers speaking up when something doesn't seem quite right.
"When they get their (pay)check after a fight, everyone who fights in Nevada receives a paper that lists symptoms to look out for and phone numbers where they can get help," she said. "What Pedro's death taught me, if anything, is that we need to stress these instructions to the boxer and get them to take personal responsibility.
"We need to stress education."
Alcazar, who lost by sixth-round TKO to Fernando Montiel June 22 at the MGM Grand Garden, more or less dropped dead in his hotel room 36 hours after the fight. He was officially declared dead at Desert Springs Hospital, leaving, at the age of 26, two children in Panama and a mystery that his autopsy failed to unravel.
For the record, Alcazar died accidentally of blunt force trauma. He was the fifth man to die after a fight in the state in the past 20 years, but the first to do so this unexpectedly.
"The coroner said it was so out of the norm for a ring death," Goodman said. "He called it, quote, 'an extremely unique case' and said it was so unusual we would probably never see it again."
In an earlier interview, Goodman wondered aloud "Why we don't see this more often?" if an otherwise healthy young man can expire without warning following a fight, and she reiterated that she remains baffled by it. "I don't know why it doesn't happen more often," she repeated.
"Typically, what we see with ring deaths are multiple areas of bleeding (within or near the brain)," Goodman said, elaborating with the appropriate medical terms. "But none of those signs were apparent with this individual. As far as any case I know of, we've never heard of this type of brain injury with a fighter.
"The whole picture is frustrating and was impossible to diagnose."
Alcazar, who fought at 115 pounds and concluded his career with a record of 25-1-2, complained only of a rib injury following his fight with Montiel. While he took some solid punches to the head, he was neither abused nor battered in the bout, which only adds to the puzzling nature of his death.
Doctors spoke to him afterward in the ring and in the locker room and he did not warrant additional medical attention or even an exploratory trip to a hospital. Yet two days later he's dead, and, as the autopsy proved, it wasn't as if he spent his post-fight hours doing drugs or endangering himself by any other means.
Two peripheral items that surfaced in the aftermath of his death have been dismissed as tangent factors as well.
In one, it was learned that Alcazar had been involved in a car accident in December, while in the other the cable network HBO reported that Alcazar came into the ring weighing a bloated 130 pounds. Neither, however, is given much credence today.
The car accident apparently did take place yet it was minor in nature and no lasting repercussions were evident in the autopsy. Goodman, however, said the fact that Alcazar did not mention the accident during a prefight medical work-up was a mistake on his part, and one she would like to correct in the future under the aforementioned heading of education.
"It's not like we wouldn't have let him fight even if we'd known about it," she said of Alcazar not being more forthcoming about the minor incident.
As for the weight issue, Goodman was skeptical.
"I think it was extremely unlikely that he weighed 130 pounds," she said, Alcazar having weighed in the day before at the junior bantamweight limit of 115. "Rapid weight gain is a big concern for boxing itself, but this kid did not have a weight problem."
She said tests and surveys conducted by the NSAC in recent years have shown no advantage or disadvantage in gaining weight between the official weigh in and the actual bout. "Weight gain slows a fighter's reflexes and reactions, but it hasn't shown to be a big deal in who wins or loses," Goodman claimed.
So what do we have here? A fit and healthy man takes part in a fight and later dies of a head injury that he neither complains of nor is evident from a cursory follow-up medical examination. It's a fatality that came without warning and perhaps, in retrospect, qualifies as unavoidable.
Those who carry on in the sport can pause to re-examine their practices, yet each is unable to find fault with how Alcazar was handled or tended to during his first, last and only stay in Nevada.
The fight caused his death, no doubt about it. But aside from serving as a catalyst in future doctor/boxer conversations pertaining to full disclosure before and after a fight, there may be little to be gained.
Alcazar's name will surface in ensuing talks between Goodman and her colleagues and the fighters who come this way, yet his death lacked the characteristics, the immediacy or the viciousness to cause a ripple of change.
He fought and he died, and, as cold as it seems, apparently that's that.
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