Adilson Maguila Rodrigues, multiple time Brazilian boxing champion, dies

A former boxer is known as a reference in South American sports and was fighting a degenerative brain disease, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), caused by multiple blows received to the head during his career as a fighter.

Maguila became interested in boxing while he was still in Aracaju (SE), watching fights between Eder Jofre and Muhammad Ali. When he came to São Paulo, at the age of 14, to work as a goalkeeper’s assistant, sport was a distant reality. In the documentary Maguila, by Galileo Garcia, produced in 1985 and released in 1987, the fighter said that he starved in the capital of São Paulo.

Maguila began training in boxing in 1979, but only competed in his first non-professional fight two years later, at Forja dos Champions. The reason: the coach Ralph Zumbano, who is also Éder Jofre’s uncle, preferred to extend the athlete’s preparation time because he knew that “he had something rare in his hands: a legitimate heavyweight” – the phrase from the journalist Fernando Tucori, who is writing the book “Maguila”, about the life of the champion – he is still studying proposals for publication.

The former athlete had special fights with great boxers in the sport, such as George Foreman and Evander Holyfield. Maguila ended up losing both, among only seven fights he lost in his career. Against Foreman, in 1990, in one of the most memorable events in boxing, he ended up being knocked out in the second round.