Three world titles into his career, Alexis Arguello finally broke into the mainstream after stopping heartland teen idol Ray Mancini in a 1981 lightweight title defense. After scoring a brutal thirteenth-round TKO, Arguello captured the imagination of a national television audience by consoling Mancini with a tenderness antithetical to the general mores of a blood sport. You could not ask for a saintlier contrast to Aaron Pryor.
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November 12, 1982—The Orange Bowl, Miami, Florida: Aaron Pryor TKO 14 Alexis Arguello
Before the bell rang, Pryor shadowboxed, paced, flurried with intensity. As he was being announced, he pointed his gloved fist at Arguello and held his pose, glowering, for nearly a minute. “I intended to make Alexis believe that I was going to . . . kill him,” Pryor later recalled. Soon the men met at ring center and nearly twenty-four thousand spectators watched, spellbound, as Pryor and Arguello abandoned themselves to bloodlust.
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“After the fight was stopped, Arguello was stretched out on the floor with an oxygen mask held to his face. For the moment, he was not an athlete, not an admirable public figure, but the victim of an accident, as if he had been hit by a drunken driver, or a coal mine roof had fallen on him.”
—George Vecsey
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There would be no salvaging either man. For both Pryor and Arguello, the future would be an illusion. “After I beat Arguello is when I started to lose myself,” Pryor once recalled. “I didn't know quite who I was for a long time.”
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At last, Pryor had earned the respect and distinction he had craved his entire life. Or had he? Within hours, his greatest accomplishment was eclipsed by the actions of his trainer, Carlos “Panama” Lewis. Twice—after the first round and after the thirteenth—Panama Lewis instructed Pryor to drink from a mysterious black bottle—“The one I mixed.” “The Black Bottle” was not black at all, in fact, but a strange Robert Ryman off-white. Grainy video reveals that it seemed to be wrapped in athletic tape as if to hide its contents.
Panama Lewis would go on to serve a prison sentence for removing the padding from the gloves of Luis Resto in a 1983 fight against Billy Collins Jr. “I had seen Panama Lewis getting to do this with Aaron one time,” recalls Frankie Sims, former co-trainer of Pryor. “He was getting ready to cut the inside of the gloves and take the pads out. I looked right at him and shook my head. ‘Don't do that man.’ He knew I was dead serious, and so he didn't cut out the pads, but he was very crooked in my opinion. He didn't help Aaron's reputation at all.”
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Pryor essentially trained himself for the rematch with Arguello in 1983. Sparring numberless rounds sans headgear, Pryor was hospitalized for a thunderous migraine. Under-conditioned, surrounded by chaos, and already battling a drug addiction that would leave him on the brink of death more than once, Pryor battered Arguello in Las Vegas, scoring a tenth-round TKO and leaving the limelight for a life on the margins.
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After being introduced to crack by his wife, Pryor spent the next ten years in a perpetual haze. A Sports Illustrated profile in 1985 revealed Pryor, death-in-life, gray and skeletal, his surroundings as dreary as those of a drifter wandering the streets from day to dire day. For Pryor, nothing mattered now except the rush. He placed his life and his career on a funeral pyre. “Miami is the drug capital of the U.S. There are drugs at every other door. Living in that environment, I reached out for some help,” Pryor recalled. “My wife had divorced me. I was so hurt by rumors of the black bottle that I had no energy. I reached out and certain people did not give me their right hand. They gave me drugs.”
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Pryor rallied in 1984, against limited Nicky Furlano in Toronto, where he labored to a fifteen-round decision and revealed in the process a fighter—a man—who was beginning to fray. A year later, in 1985, Pryor struggled to a narrow points win over Gary Hinton in Atlantic City and disappeared, undefeated, into a permanent midnight.
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“I ain't The Hawk now. The Hawk is dead. I'm a ghost.”
—Aaron Pryor, 1985
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The mid-1980s, neon and glitz for some, were some of the bleakest years for Pryor. He was divorced for a second time. In October 1986, he was arrested for assaulting his mother. In 1987 he was shot in the wrist and held hostage by a pair of baseheads and his mother tried to have him committed. In 1989, he was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. There were more lawsuits and canceled fights than can be remembered. He went through trainers, managers, and promoters the way a hanging judge went through outlaws in the West.
Finally, after the lost years passed him in a blur, Pryor was sentenced to six months in prison for drug possession. For more than one court appearance, Pryor, who appeared indefatigable in the ring, overslept and arrived late. Recalled Pryor: “I immediately became a night person. There's no such thing as a crackhead being a ‘day person.’ The crackhead is up all night and sleeps all day. I also became very undependable. Whenever anyone asks a crackhead to do something, they'd better not hold their breath waiting for it to happen. The person using the crack only thinks of themselves, how something will benefit them, and the next time they are going to get high. They're not thinking about picking up the kids from school, meeting the in-laws for dinner, or having a family get-together on Sunday. It's all about getting high.”
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This was not the kind of habit that led to a few weeks in the Betty Ford clinic or could be overcome by an intervention. It was Do the Right Thing, J Is for Junkie, Night of the Living Baseheads deterioration. For loose change, a shambolic Pryor shadowboxed on street corners. Occasionally, he even sparred against neighborhood toughs in alleys and backyards. He shuffled from one crack house to another, took beatings from conscienceless thugs, suffered sexual degradation, and slept on curbsides under harsh lamppost light. Every urban wasteland was a mirror image of another during that era. Crack vials shattered beneath feet, abandoned buildings were repurposed for shooting galleries and smoking dens, crosswalks were ruled by vicious sentinels wearing Timberlands and waving Glocks. All blue hours were splintered by the pop-pop-pop of gunshots, the nonstop wail of sirens, and the falling, booming bass beat of Jeeps cruising the risky streets. Then the sun would rise again on chalk outlines, spent shells, sidewalks caked in flaking blood. But you would never think to find someone as accomplished as Aaron Pryor in that netherworld.
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“One time, a dope dealer thought I was so high that he could manipulate me into believing that I owed him $5,000. I argued with him and he pulled a gun on me and started firing at me point blank. I pulled out my own gun and started firing back. In a flash, there were two other guys by his side firing automatic weapons at me. It was a good old Wild West show. The bullets were whizzing by me and putting holes in my car. We must have been only twenty feet from each other. When I emptied my gun, I got in the car and drove off. That was the kind of madness I was living in.”
—Aaron Pryor
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In 1987, more than two years after his last fight, Pryor faced hard-hitting ex-prospect Bobby Joe Young at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was too much for a disintegrating Pryor. Years of squalor had left him with a gray pallor. His vision, suspect for years, may have deteriorated to the point where he should not have been allowed in the ring. Before the fight began, Pryor had his mouth bloodied in a scuffle with Young's trainer, Tommy Parks. Young scored a knockdown in the first round, staggered Pryor repeatedly, and dropped the ex-champion hard in the seventh with an overhand right. As the referee tolled the mandatory eight-count, a wobbly Pryor dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross. The referee reached ten.