Why Jordan Parsons' CTE diagnosis matters, even if it's not completely surprising

Jordan Parsons was 25 with 13 fights as a pro and three more from an amateur career that started when he was just 17. He’d spent a little less than a decade inside MMA gyms had only suffered one loss via knockout.

Still, when researchers cut open his brain after Parsons died as a result of injuries sustained in an alleged hit-and-run accident earlier this year, they found the telltale signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy – or CTE – the degenerative brain disease that has plagued athletes in other contact sports from football to boxing to hockey.

Surprised? I was. And then I was surprised by how many people seemed utterly unfazed by the news.

It’s not that we had no reason to suspect that getting hit in the head repeatedly might be bad for your brain. We understand that, or at least we think we do.

But this isn’t something we should gloss over if we care about this sport and its athletes, who generally make far less money than NFL and NHL players, and enjoy less in the way of ongoing medical care once their careers are over. If MMA equals CTE for a significant number of athletes, there are likely to be a lot of fighters who eventually find themselves in need of care that the sport is not set up to provide.

And if a 25-year-old fighter with no extraordinary history of head trauma was walking around with CTE, common sense says he’s not alone.

That’s important because of what CTE is, and what it can do. The researchers at Boston University who have studied it describe CTE as a “progressive degenerative disease of the brain” that begins with the build-up of tau protein. In its earliest stage, there are usually no outward symptoms, though the tau build-up has already begun to damage nerve cells and impair brain function.

As the disease progresses, it can lead to impulsive behavior, sudden fits of anger, severe depression, and eventually memory loss, confusion, and advanced dementia.

Stories of the horrors wrought by CTE are abundant among former NFL players. The disease was first identified in the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who spent his final years tormented by pain and dimming cognitive abilities. He went days without eating. He used a taser to stun himself to sleep. His family recalled him shivering in the cold because he couldn’t remember to put on a coat in the winter.

The stories have reached into combat sports as well. In 2012, I wrote this story on former MMA fighter and kickboxer Gary Goodridge, whose doctors have said he’s likely suffering from CTE. (The disease can only be positively identified with an autopsy of the brain.)

At the time, Goodridge suffered from severe memory loss. He showed wholesale personality changes. He slurred his words when he talked, and by the evening he often couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast that morning.

But with Goodridge, who was 46 at the time, at least we could tell ourselves that the disease was a result of fighting too long, taking too many destructive blows, and in two different combat sports. With Parsons, it’s different.

Talk to his coaches and training partners, and they’ll tell you they saw no signs that there was anything the least big wrong with Parsons. Jake Bonacci, the strength and conditioning coach with the Blackzilians squad in South Florida, said he worked with Parsons extensively in his final training camp.

“He was the same guy every day,” Bonacci told MMAjunkie. “Nothing seemed different about him.”

At the same time, team members will admit that the twice weekly sparring sessions in the gym can be brutal at times. Parsons had a reputation as a workhorse, said Blackzilians featherweight Sean Soriano, and his competitive nature pushed him to the limit in training.

“He was a tough mother(expletive),” Soriano (9-5 MMA, 0-3 UFC) said. “I don’t think he went out there looking to take blows, but he could take them and was willing to take one to give one back. That’s who he was. He was very competitive, and whether it was wrestling or sparring he was trying to get the best of it. And the way we train, sometimes you’ll have to take one to get best of it against some people.”

While the focus in some sports has shifted to concussions, researchers now believe that it’s both the concussive and “asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head” that contribute to CTE. There may also be genetic and lifestyle components to explain why some people develop the disease relatively early, while others sustain more damage without suffering any signs of CTE.

But since MMA is still a relatively young sport, it’s hard to gauge what the true extent of the damage might be, both for the current generation of fighters and those already edging into their later years.

If Parsons had CTE at 25, and without showing any outward symptoms, how many other current fighters could there be who share the same fate? And with a disease that often manifests itself in reckless, erratic behavior, sometimes leading to violent outbursts and even suicide, how many fighters are walking around right now with a time bomb in their heads?

That thought occurred to Soriano when he heard about his friend’s posthumous diagnosis.

“Honestly, I didn’t want to read too much about it,” Soriano said. “Because a lot of us, we’re too late. We’re too deep into it. This is our career, how we make our money. It’s our passion. This does play on your mind, I guess. You think about it some, but you focus on your goals and you try not to let anything derail you from that.”

As for Bonacci, he said news of Parson’s autopsy results made him think of walking through the Miracle Mile shops on the Las Vegas strip and seeing the retired boxers signing autographs, mumbling through fan interactions, sometimes even sleeping on the tables.

He thinks about that, he said, and then he thinks about what he’s seen in MMA gyms over the years.

“I’m at pretty much every (Blackzilians) sparring session, and they do go hard,” Bonacci said. “These epic gym wars you hear about, those are real and those do happen. That’s really where the damage happens, is in the gym. Obviously, the fights don’t help, but if you’re 40 years old and you’ve been training since you were 18, that’s a ton of damage. I think we’re going to see some of these guys as they get older end up like those old boxers. I hope we don’t. But I think we will.”