For me, Jerry Quarry was just a name, a fighter whose "day" was before my time. For those who remembered him, the pre-HBO, Sky Box Office generation who set their alarms for the early hours of the morning to listen to the big cross-Atlantic fights live on the radio, news of his death earlier this month drew only affectionate sighs.

"He just never knew when to give up, he'd the heart of a lion, that man," said one such fan of boxing in Quarry's era, one who wouldn't set his alarm for Tyson or Hamed even if HBO and Sky Box Office paid him to watch.

"I remember setting my alarm for three in the morning, going down to the kitchen and buttering my cream crackers, pouring a glass of milk and bringing them back to bed. I turned on the radio and Sonny Liston knocked out Floyd Patterson before I'd taken a bite out of my first cracker," he said.

"Floyd was married to a girl from Carlow, you know," he added, as if this was a good enough reason to be sitting up at three in the morning eating cream crackers. In April of last year Patterson, who lost twice to Quarry in 1967, resigned as New York's athletic commissioner because he was suffering from memory loss. "Sometimes I can't even remember my wife's name," he said of the "girl from Carlow", "and I've been married 32 . . . 33 years."

A fortnight ago Quarry's mother, Arwanda, asked doctors to take him off life support in a California hospital. One after another a generation of boxing greats slowly, cruelly paying for the courage they displayed in the ring. Quarry, the "Great White Hope" of the heavyweight division in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was 53, but, according to a neuro-psychologist who examined him three years ago, had the brain of an 80-year-old. If, like me, you know little of Quarry's history it's worth paying a visit to the website for The Jerry Quarry Foundation for Dementia Pugilistica (www.jerryquarry.com /tjqfmiss.htm), set up in October 1994 by his older brother, Jimmy, to help other victims of the progressive condition caused by repeated blows to the head, resulting in severe brain damage. The site has links to several articles, published in American newspapers and magazines, on Quarry's plight in his last years - years "spent in a haze of a grotesque, heartbreaking second childhood, unable to care for himself or recognise his parents or his children", as one writer, Wallace Matthews, described it.

His father, Jack, put boxing gloves on Jerry and his brothers when they were three-years-old and brought them to a gym in Los Angeles a few years later, but these days he says he only did it because Arwanda "wanted me to get the boys out of her hair". Hardly able to look into Jerry's vacant eyes in recent years, Jack didn't want to be reminded that it was he who introduced him to the sport that ultimately destroyed him.

"There is no quit in a Quarry," he used to preach to his boys. Three of them took him at his word, Jerry, Mike and Bobby, all of whom became professional boxers, all of whom "never knew when they were beaten". All of whom suffered brain damage, making the Quarry family story perhaps the most poignant of boxing's many sorry tales.

Mike Quarry has had 20 jobs in the last 15 years. "I've never missed a day," he said, "but I've been subject to forgetting what I was told to do."

"He loses his balance sometimes and he occasionally wakes up screaming, punching holes in the wall," says another (uncredited) article on the website. "Mike admits that he `took too many punches'. But then he says, `Life is lived forward, learned backwards'."

Bobby Quarry, the least successful fighter of the three brothers, is currently serving a sentence, for receiving stolen property, in a California jail. Seven years ago the California Athletic Commission passed him mentally fit to carry on fighting, but found that he had diminished reflexes in his left arm. They allowed him to fight. A year later he was knocked out by Tommy Morrison. Recently he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In 1992, 47-year-old Jerry fought one more time in Colorado, a state where no boxing licence is required. He was allowed to fight that night even though neurological tests had revealed early signs of dementia in 1982. He was pummelled by a club fighter for six rounds, losing two of his teeth. This is the man who was only stopped on cuts by Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, twice. But Jerry needed the money because, by then, he was living on Social Security cheques. His purse for the fight amounted to $1,050. Mike Tyson picks up a purse of at least $30 million for his fight against Francois Botha late tonight. There's an awful lot of money in boxing: pity a tiny fraction of it couldn't have found its way in to Jerry Quarry's hands, so he could have passed on the offer of that Colorado fight.

The day after his defeat he couldn't remember a thing about the night before. From then until his death his mother looked after him, nursing him just as she had done when he was a child. "Jerry was always good to his mom," she said, "now I'm taking care of him." And she did, until she made the hardest decision of her life by asking his doctors to switch off the machine that was keeping him alive. "He won the last fight of his life," she said, "by going home to God."

Rest in peace, Jerry Quarry.