For most of us with Parkinson’s, telling the world of our diagnosis is a small-scale affair. It’s done by phone…in person…by email…by social media. My announcement, seen by a few hundred people on Facebook and LinkedIn, could be charitably categorized as “limited impact.”
Bill Plaschke’s platform is just a wee bit bigger — a Sunday column in the Los Angeles Times. Plaschke’s been a sports columnist since 1996 and is also a panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn.” The paper reports a print circulation of 1.6 million on Sundays, and a combined weekly print/online reach of 4.4 million.
On June 8, 2025, Plaschke devoted his Sunday column to his Parkinson’s diagnosis and his experience with a Parkinson’s boxing program called Kaizen Kinetics.
He says he was diagnosed four years ago, but kept the information secret from his readers and his employer until now.
It’s likely he told his bosses in person, one by one or in some sort of group meeting. But I prefer to imagine him telling them the news last week by hitting “Submit” on his column and waiting for the phone to ring.
There are plenty of good Parkinson’s blogs, Substacks, Tik Toks, and podcasts out there, but most of us are relative amateurs at communication. Plaschke, by contrast, is a certified PROFESSIONAL WRITER — author of six books, a member of the National Sports Media Hall of Fame and California Sports Hall of Fame, and named national Sports Columnist of the Year nine times by the Associated Press.
How Plaschke decides to use his resources going forward is completely up to him, and there is no reason to expect regular references to PD in his LAT column. It’s his perogative to write about this as little or as much as he chooses, or even to go silent on the subject.
But something he said in his June 8 column makes me hope for more:
If my boxing classmates can have the strength to sweat through their tremors and wallop through their fears, then I can certainly have the strength to celebrate them without worrying what sort of light it casts on me.
I’m proud to be one of them, and the purpose of this column is to reflect that pride and perhaps make it easier for other folks afflicted with Parkinson’s to come out swinging.
Plaschke has skills and a reach most of us can only dream about. My purely selfish hope, as a fellow PWP who writes a little, is that he uses his platform to tell Parkinson’s stories that matter to an audience that needs to hear them.
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Phil Tries Sudoku. Results Are Mixed
I’ve never particularly liked “brain games.” I played chess for a while as a kid, and have over the years made halfhearted efforts at crossword puzzles and Words With Friends.
They didn’t take. The effort/reward equation just didn’t work for me.
Given my family history of dementia, I’m trying again. I’ve taken up Soduku. Or Suduko. Or Sudoku. Whatever — you go ahead and look it up.
The impetus for this was a seminar on cognition by Wes Smith and Brent Waroniecki at Parkinson’s Resources of Oregon. During the presentation, Waroniecki, an occupational therapist in the Providence Health system, and Smith, a speech-language pathologist at Providence, expressed some healthy skepticism of some claims made by the brain games industry.
But both spoke highly of Sudoku, praising its ability to exercise the “deductive reasoning” areas of the brain.
After the seminar, I poked around on the internet and found a Frontiers in Neurology article about a small clinical study that put a group of Parkinson’s patients through Suduko training for six months. The authors concluded that
…Sudoku training may contribute to improve the cognitive strategies used by PD patients in problem solving, improving their ability to generate internally applicable rules. Such training helps facilitate effective cognitive behavior demands, inductive reasoning, and spontaneous cognitive flexibility, processes that are typically impaired in PD (Goebel et al., 2010) and susceptible to improvement by training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the potential of Sudoku tasks in cognitive training, which may represent an interesting tool for cognitive conflict research. An adequate cognitive strategy requires the retention of decision-making information in the working memory, which in turn involves the inhibition of irrelevant information. As such, training in the development of internal strategies for conflict resolution should improve the performance of PD patients in these types of tasks.
While this is somewhat less than absolute proof the game will improve my cognition, it convinced me to download a free Sudoko app to my iPad. I set the level to “Easy.” My much-smarter wife did her best to teach me how the game worked.
My first attempt was a bit of a train wreck, but Game #2 was a qualified success. I took way too long, but I made only two mistakes and completed the board.
A quick note: when you ask for hint in “Easy” mode it GIVES YOU THE ANSWER! I only did this once.
Did I enjoy the experience? Not particularly, but I enjoy the prospect of dementia even less. If this game has the potential to ward it off, it’s worth a shot.
My plan is to take some of the time I use each day to doomscroll Twitter, and devote it to Sudoku instead.
Can’t hurt, might help.
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Bonus for Those Who Read to the Bottom
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So far this month, we’ve lost Sly Stone, Brian Wilson, and Norman Moreau.
Moreau was a vocalist with the Young@Heart Chorus, a New England-based music ensemble whose members are all well over 70. The chorus often performs classic rock hits, enjoying the camp of senior home residents rocking out while respecting the songs enough to play them well.
With the right song on the right night, Moreau (who passed away on June 3) was a perfect frontman. “Purple Haze” is a great introduction to his work.
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A fairly conventional cover of Sly Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher” is taken higher by Tina Turner’s voice.
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Before he became famous for the infidelity anthem “Me and Mrs. Jones,” Billy Paul spent many years as a jazz singer. This rendition of “Everyday People” is little complicated for my taste, and I’m not here to say I like it, exactly. But I respect it.
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Canada’s Dwayne Gretzky does the faster/louder thing with “Don’t Worry Baby.” As Brendan Shanahan put it on the Cover Me blog, “The most impressive part about this cover is how many of the original elements are still there – the harmonies endure, the melody is kept intact despite being sped up slightly, and the youthful positivity is here in abundance.“
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A sweet, folky interpretation of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Maybe a little too sweet for this reporter, but the harmonies are so good I’ll give ’em a pass.
Shakin' Street -- A Parkinson's Blog 
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