LOUISVILLE, Ky. – She has closed the door to his room and can finally sleep through the night. Yet sometimes when she wakes, and the house is quiet, Patricia hears her husband calling her.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – She has closed the door to his room and can finally sleep through the night.
Yet sometimes when she wakes, and the house is quiet, Patricia hears her husband calling her.
“For the last eight years of my life, it’s revolved around Greg,” she said. “It’s going to be really strange to get used to not having that.”
We all face crises in life. Some turn out to be minor, some are major, others will be with us forever. All of them ask us to make the same tough choice: Stand and fight, or fall apart?
For Patricia Page, the decision was obvious. And by standing tall, she held her husband up too.
Boxer Greg Page died in the early hours of April 27, eight years after a brutal brain injury robbed the former heavyweight champion of his mobility and parts of his memory. That it couldn’t steal his dignity is a testament to his wife’s love and strength.
The man who doctors once feared wouldn’t last through the night went to concerts, fished, showed up at fights and, for a few years, at least, enjoyed those milkshakes and White Castle burgers he loved so much.
“Women are natural caregivers. We just pitch in and do what we’ve got to do,” Patricia said. “And he had nobody else, so I took all the responsibility on me.”
Greg Page had a great jab and moved well, and people in Louisville were hailing him as “the next Ali” before he could drive. He was 26 when he stunned Gerrie Coetzee on Dec. 1, 1984, to win the WBA title.
But he held the title a mere five months and never got a shot at it again as his career unraveled amid financial difficulties and personal problems.
By the time he got involved with Patricia, an old high school friend, he’d moved back to Louisville. The year was 2000 and Page was north of 40, but he was still clinging to the dream. George Foreman had won the heavyweight title when he was 45. If Page could win a few fights, beat a few decent names, maybe he’d get one last shot at the title.
Instead, he went down in the closing seconds of a $1,500 fight against little-known Dale Crowe at ramshackle Peel’s Palace in Erlanger, Ky.
The ringside doctor – who wasn’t licensed in Kentucky – initially pronounced him fine. But Page had suffered a serious brain injury. With no oxygen or emergency medical staff on site, his condition quickly worsened. There was no ambulance at the fight, either, further delaying his arrival at the hospital.
During surgery to reduce the swelling on his brain, he had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He was in a coma for a week.
“It was a terrifying time,” Patricia said. “When he started waking up out of the coma, he had such a look of fear in his eyes. And when he saw me, it seemed like that kind of pacified him a little bit.
“I knew I couldn’t bail on him.”
Neither, though, did she know how they would make it. They weren’t even married yet, there wasn’t much money. Greg didn’t have insurance, and Patricia had two young daughters at home. And a brain injury? Partial paralysis? Patricia had no idea how to care for someone with those disabilities.
But with help from her children, she plowed forward.
“We’re not saints by any stretch of the imagination,” said Teisha Page, Patricia’s oldest daughter. “That was just the way it was. It was what we were to do.”
Teisha, then 19 and living about a half-hour away, moved home, taking care of her little sisters while her mother stayed at the hospital with Greg.
A first-floor room was converted into a bedroom, complete with a hospital bed.
Though he could talk, write and had some mobility, Greg needed constant care. He couldn’t get out of bed, his wheelchair or recliner without someone to lift and place him in his new spot. He needed help changing, bathing and shaving.
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