Douglas McCollam: A Requiem for Heavyweights

Politicians, like fighters, often don’t know when it’s time to leave the ring. My father, a champion in the field of law, didn't either.

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) © Jan W Faul

By Douglas McCollam

At first, it was hard to accept my father’s decline. In many ways he still seemed the man I’d always known. Sharp, wise, funny. Possessor of a prodigious work ethic and a continuing mastery of his favorite subject, the law. He’d been showered with academic and professional honors from almost the time he began his legal career, finishing first in his class in law school and serving as editor-in-chief of the law review. Recipient of the Order of the Coif. Inducted as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship (which he declined). 

As he approached his mid-70s my father was still going strong. By then he was a widely recognized expert in the field of Energy Law and was regularly asked to arbitrate multi-billion-dollar disputes. With two-partners, he’d started his own law firm and built it into a major success, with dozens of lawyers in multiple cities. He was admired by his colleagues for his industry, acumen and unfailing collegiality. He was beloved by the cadres of associates and law students he’d trained over the decades. He was still very near the pinnacle of his professional success.

And then, quite suddenly, it seemed something wasn’t right. It’s hard to say exactly how it started. He was in New Orleans and I was living in Washington, D.C., so I didn’t see him day-to-day anymore. Maybe the voice on his messages had a touch more quaver. Maybe his gait was a bit off, but then again he had a bum knee from an old football injury. When I went to visit him and my mother in Manhattan, where he was temporarily based on another big arbitration, he seemed great and in good spirits. 

But less than a year later on a visit home to New Orleans, something very odd happened. We’d been going over some routine business in his office and stepped out to get some lunch. At the corner of a busy downtown intersection, he suddenly started to cross the street against the light. Only a timely snatch of the back of his jacket stopped him from walking into traffic. “Hey, what are you doing?” I snapped at him, which he answered, I will never forget, only with a quizzical smile. It was an expression I’d get to know a lot better in the coming years.

Not long after, during a family trip in Europe, my father got up at a restaurant to go to the bathroom. My mother urgently tapped me on the arm and told me to go with him. “Why would I go to the bathroom with Dad?” I was on the verge of asking her, when I saw him trip on an adjacent table leg and almost fall to the floor. I went. 

Sadly, these turned out to be early signs of what would soon be diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease (technically it was a variation of Parkinson’s, but it’s a fine distinction). Dad, a fine athlete for most of his life, began to trip more and more frequently. Then he started falling. Then he started falling down steps. When my mother called me one day at my office in Washington to tell me Dad was in the hospital because he’d tumbled down the back stairs while taking out the trash and knocked out his front teeth, I put my head on my desk and cried. I quit my job and moved home a few weeks later. 

Parkinson’s (and its variations)is a brutal disease. Resembling a kind of slow-motion Lou Gehrig’s disease, over time the person loses more and more control of their motor functions. While in the public mind it is often associated with severe tremors and involuntary movements, such as those suffered by the actor Michael J. Fox, those do not always appear (Dad didn’t have those symptoms). More universal signs are a kind of rigidity of the body, a tell-tale open-mouthed vacant look and a facial appearance that seems mask-like. As the disease progresses, the person typically walks without moving their arms and experiences severe balance issues. In Dad’s case, we eventually had to hire caretakers 24/7 to guard against him falling. It often still wasn’t enough to prevent catastrophe.

That was due in large part to a more insidious aspect of the disease. People with Parkinson’s often begin to exhibit poor impulse control. It can lead to things like out of control gambling, rash and destructive financial decisions and sharp outbursts of anger and abusive behavior. Thankfully, in my father’s case none of those behaviors presented themselves to any real degree. Instead, he’d do things like stare fixedly at a piece of food on my plate and then ever so slowly reach out and take it even if I was still eating. 

More dangerously, while he’d say he understood that his balance was poor and that he couldn’t get up and move around by himself, often as soon as he was left alone he’d try to do exactly that, with the resulting crash from the next room the only alert that he’d stirred. Don’t even ask about steps. He ended up falling down more sets of steps than a Hollywood stuntman. How he didn’t break his neck long before he succumbed to his illness I’ll never know. You’d think it would be fairly easy to keep a physically impaired geriatric Parkinson’s patient from slipping by you and into disaster, but you’d be wrong. It happened often despite the best efforts of family and caregivers to keep an eye on him. 

Dementia can also be a common symptom of Parkinson’s. Sometimes it is severe and can even lead to hallucinations. My father’s progression was, thankfully, much milder. Towards the end, particularly at night, he might think he was back in his boyhood home. But for the most part, he was lucid and even continued for years to go to the office and practice law—perhaps longer than he should have.

But it was hard to tell him he had to quit. It was hard for his law partners to tell him, as he’d been the heart of their firm for so long. It was hard for his family to tell him, as he had been so successful for so long and so generous to all of us. When he was slated to go to Australia a few years after his diagnosis in connection with another big arbitration, it was clear to everyone around him that under no circumstances should he make the trip. Yet no one at his firm wanted to tell him that. I didn’t either, but somehow got nominated for the job. It turned into one of the few ugly conversations we ever had. Normally so genial and rational, he was irate at the suggestion that he wasn’t up to par. This was his business. Who was I or anyone to tell him to step aside? He had a responsibility to his client. He had intimate knowledge of the case which he’d worked on for years. Who else but him could do the job? He ended up making the trip, with my Mom and a young legal associate in tow. And to no one’s surprise, it was a disaster both professionally and physically. He left his hotel and got lost in a strange city. He fell down a long flight of steps at a restaurant. Though he was an expert witness in the case, he got confused easily. He, who had literally written a book on the subject, mixed up basic points of law on the stand. Afterward, an admiring colleague on the case stated flatly he should never have been allowed to testify. 

Still, for many years he could be as sharp as ever, especially when well rested and in well-known surroundings among friendly faces. As these factors don’t appear often together in the legal world, his practice naturally diminished. Over time his lucid periods grew shorter and his mental capacity declined. Physically, the toll was worse. In the last year of his life his motor skills deteriorated so badly that he could no longer swallow and had to have a feeding tube inserted to avoid starving to death. When we asked him if he wanted to get the tube put in and fight on or let nature take its course, he’d change his mind from day-to-day and sometimes hour-to-hour. It was hard to tell how much he was really tracking what we were saying.

In January 2014 Dad died peacefully in bed at home, his suffering coming to an end. It was seven-years after his initial diagnosis—the lifespan the doctor had predicted to my mother on the day Dad was told he had the disease.

Now I prefer to remember my father the way he was before Parkinson’s took so much from him. But recently I’ve been getting some disturbing reminders. Looking at President Biden standing stark still and rigid at a festive ceremony, or seeing his face freeze into an open-mouthed mask during the debate, or listening to his train of thought peter out in mid-sentence, his voice dropping into a feathery rasp, I’m seeing my dad all over again. Visitation records indicate that Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist and Parkinson’s expert at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, has visited the White House at least eight times in the past year. The administration has declined to discuss the details of those visits, other than to say the president has not been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

But I am reminded that there is no blood test for Parkinson’s. There is no scan or X-Ray that can detect the disease. The diagnosis is, at least in part, a judgment call. And if one were inclined to split hairs, there are many neurological conditions similar but just adjacent to Parkinson’s disease that might provide enough plausible cover to avoid making a definitive diagnosis.

Politicians, like fighters, often don’t know when it’s time to leave the ring. There is always one more bout to win, one more shot at the title. The imploring of their loved ones comes to nothing. The sage counsel of their trainers falls on deaf ears. Even Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest,” could not resist the lure of the ring long past the time when his lightning fast reflexes—and even faster wit—had slowed then ossified, his once magnetic flow of verbiage dwindling into a slurry of a whisper. Still, he fought on.

I never got to see Ali box in person, but I did run across him once years after he finally left fighting behind. Passing by a men’s clothing store in Washington, I saw an oddly placed crowd humming with excitement. It was the Champ and my middle-aged heart instantly fell down an elevator shaft thirty-years long, landing in my boyhood.

Ali couldn’t speak much by then but he held the crowd with his presence, performing simple sleight-of-hand magic tricks and shadow boxing with the kids in the crowd. The face was a mask that could barely move, but his charm and essential good nature still showed through and we all basked with pleasure in the light of his soul. Similarly, long after Parkinson’s had robbed my brilliant father of his voice and movement, caretakers who had met him only in the later stages of his illness became emotional when discussing his kindness and consideration. How could they tell? Most days he barely moved or spoke. But they could all the same, the long practice of his impeccable manners and essential decency surviving amid the ravages of his physical destruction.

I can see those same qualities in President Biden, a good man who accomplished so much late in life after the time when most expected him to quietly recede from public life. Once he seemed to understand and accept the role fate had assigned him of being a transitional figure in the political history of the nation. Now, visibly teetering, he’s convinced himself he’s got one more good bout in him.

He doesn’t. There’s no shame in going out on top, Joe. The world will carry on without you, as it will without us all. There are always plenty of good, young contenders ready to carry on the fight and it’s a wise champion who knows when to hang ’em up. For the good of the country, that time has now come for the 46th president. Biden can’t afford to stay in the arena for the final knockout, because this time he won’t be the only one down for the count.

Douglas McCollam is a writer and lawyer living in New Orleans. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and Slate, among other publications.