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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2009 > July > 03 > Entry
COLUMN: The Alexis Arguello I Remember So Well
It remains one of the greatest fights in boxing history. It featured two champions who brought out each other’s best for 13 punishing rounds and ended with a brutal barrage no one will forget.
It was one time I forgot I was a writer and reacted as a friend.
That’s how I remember Nov. 12, 1982, when lightweight champion Alexis Arguello met unbeaten junior welterweight champ Aaron Pryor in front of a raucous crowd of 23,800 on a warm night filled with salsa music and a big-fight edginess that swirled through the Orange Bowl.
As a Miami columnist, I had covered both fighters extensively leading up to the bout and had become especially close with Arguello, who mixed gentlemanly ways outside the ring with an executioner’s precision inside the ropes.
In his Hall of Fame career, he would win 82 of 90 fights, claim world titles at three different weights — he beat Ruben Olivares for the featherweight crown in 1974, Alfredo Escalera for the super featherweight title (also known as junior lightweight) in 1978 and Jim Watt for the lightweight championship in 1981 — and he’d get recognition as the greatest junior lightweight of the 20th century.
Over the years I covered several of his fights around the country, visited him at his Gables-by-the-Sea home — I spent Christmas Eve with him once when his wife left him — and went out fishing on his yacht, The Champ.
When he came to a function in Wilmington a dozen years ago, he told me a chilling tale, one that supposedly came to fruition two days ago in his native Nicaragua, where — at age 57 — he died of a gunshot wound to the chest. The initial report is suicide.
That night at the Orange Bowl, I was sitting ringside, right up against the canvas apron. The fight was a war and in the 13th round Arguello stunned Pryor with a withering right.
After drinking from a bottle handed to him between rounds by controversial trainer Panama Lewis, a reinvigorated Pryor landed 20 straight punches in Round 14 before the referee stopped the fight as the defenseless Arguello melted to the canvas, two feet in front of me.
People rushed to Arguello, whose eyes rolled back as he lay motionless for over four minutes. That’s when I grabbed the bottom ring rope and pulled myself closer, heartsick by what had just happened.
I remember his assistant trainer Don Kahn talking to him: “Alexis, hold on, you’ll be all right.”
The fight took a lot out of each boxer and neither was quite the same after, though Pryor would knock out Arguello again 10 months later.
After boxing, their lives sometimes paralleled each other.
They were both children of extreme poverty. Arguello’s family was so poor it made him quit school at age nine and work on a dairy farm. By 13, he’d hitchhiked to Canada and worked two jobs, which enabled him to give his parents $1.000 the following year. Within three years he was fighting as a pro.
Thanks to boxing, Arguello — like Pryor — made fortunes…and then lost them. He battled drugs and at times he struggled with family issues.
Over the years, he and Pryor became friends — at heart, Pryor is a good man, too — and whether they wanted it to be such or not, the two realized what the other had and what it meant to them.
Arguello, for all his historic accomplishment, knew that Pryor was the man who conquered him twice. Pryor knows that for all his triumph, Arguello was still the man embraced and adored by the crowds.
Each man had a piece of the other, a piece that helped them be complete.
Last year Arguello — after Pryor and his wife campaigned for him — was elected mayor of Managua.
That night in Wilmington, he quietly told me how, in 1984 — with life spiraling downward — he had snapped while out on his boat with his young son A.J. and had put a gun to his own head.
His sobbing son begged him not to kill himself and Arguello said he came to his senses: “I realized I had a lot to live for.”
If reports are true, that realization now escaped him.
And while Don Kahn’s words from that warm Orange Bowl night — “Hold on, you’ll be all right,” — have evaporated, too, one thing has not.
I’m again heartsick by what’s happened to my friend.
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