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“I got so depressed, I contemplated suicide. Plenty of times. Not because the money was gone or even that I had wrecked my life. I wanted to die because I couldn't find a way to live. I didn't know how to start a new life.”
—Aaron Pryor
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“All of it had to do with drugs. With crack. He has been assaulted—mentally, physically, sexually. He's been beaten, not just with fists, but with guns, sticks, bats. Some of these leeches have taunted him to shadowbox for them. They have mocked him, humiliated him, threatened him. All for what? A little rock of cocaine? For that trash, they've made him beg. Made him do unimaginable . . .”
—Cincinnati trainer Mike Brown, 1993
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Lying in a crack house, seemingly on the verge of death, Pryor had an epiphany. He was rushed to a hospital with bleeding ulcers and underwent surgery. When he was released after two weeks—now sporting a long scar across his stomach, the last of several life marks—he headed straight for a church and to a new beginning, one that lasted for more than twenty years. Pryor became a deacon and a motivational speaker. He trained amateur fighters in Cincinnati. Aside from a few national television appearances alongside his son, Aaron Pryor Jr., a journeyman super-middleweight, “The Hawk” no longer had the spotlight on him. This new anonymity was a sign of serenity—something Pryor had earned with blood and sweat. The same way he had earned his Hall of Fame status in the ring.
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“I've had a phenomical . . . just a phenomical life.”
—Aaron Pryor
The Catastrophist
THE TROUBLED WORLD OF DON JORDAN
“Chaos” is the only suitable word to describe the career of Don Jordan. Nearly sixty years after he first won his welterweight title, Jordan remains a mystery without a solution. Not only did he bewilder spectators with his desultory performances, he also mystified trainers, sportswriters, police officers, mobsters, and historians, few of whom bothered to trace a career that read more like a case study than the narrative of a boxer. Welterweight champion only long enough to make two defenses and accidentally TKO nefarious Frankie Carbo, Jordan left behind a legacy as befuddling as that of Iron Eyes Cody or D. B. Cooper. Like many fighters in the 1950s, Jordan was dogged by ties to mobsters, but it was his own instability that ultimately led to his spectacular crash.
Donald Lee Jordan was born on June 22, 1934, in Los Angeles to a sprawling family estimated to have had anywhere from between eighteen to twenty-two children. Son of a former amateur boxer, Jordan revealed his wild side early, running with street gangs as a teenager and spending time in various reformatories. “I wasn't a tough kid,” Jordan once told Lee Greene. “I was real quiet. I just had one big fault. I liked to fight.” His nickname, “Geronimo,” was earned during his stint gangbanging in the Russian Flats section of Boyle Heights in East L.A. Jordan dropped out of high school, married at age sixteen, and decided to put his fists to better use.
After a short stint in the amateurs, Jordan turned pro as a lightweight in California in 1953. A converted southpaw with a snappy jab and a busy left hook, Jordan won the state lightweight title less than two years after his debut, defeating Joe Miceli, Art Ramponi, and former champion Lauro Salas on his way to a 20-2 record.
In 1955 Jordan lost two decisions to buzz-saw Art Aragon, and subsequently fell into a slump, dropping six of his next twelve fights. Although he managed to beat another ex-champion in faded Paddy DeMarco, Jordan lost decisions to Jimmy Carter, Orlando Zulueta, Joey Lopes, L. C. Morgan, and, for the California State welterweight title, Charley “Tombstone” Smith. A slew of knock-over fights in Mexico, where his fluent Spanish and ring finesse made him a popular draw, put Jordan back on track, and when he returned to Los Angeles he hooked up with a used car salesman named Don Nesseth, who turned Jordan over to trainer Eddie Futch and Jackie McCoy for development. An improved Jordan soon ran off a hot streak that included decisions over Isaac Logart and Gaspar Ortega.
Even with his career gathering momentum, Jordan was unable to curb his reckless nature. Bad habits, the kind that sabotage athletic pursuits, were modus vivendi for Jordan. “Not only did Jordan drink but he was a chain cigarette smoker,” recalled Jackie McCoy. “Not many fighters do that. This guy never stopped smoking. But somehow he won the welterweight title.” Jordan, however, did not draw the line at martinis and Marlboros. In one of the strangest stories to ever come across police blotters involving a boxer, Jordan was arrested on November 8, 1958, for firing arrows from a sixty-inch target bow at two women after a dispute. Jordan was booked for assault with a deadly weapon. A belligerent and obviously blotto Jordan could easily have been charged with resisting arrest as well. “While being questioned by detectives,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “Jordan tried to grab the bow and arrow after threatening to shoot the officers and a newspaper reporter–photographer team.” Charges were later dropped, but in time other problems, the kind endemic to boxing in the 1950s, would arise.
When Nesseth asked Jackie Leonard, matchmaker at the Hollywood Legion, to approach IBC viceroy Truman Gibson for big fight exposure for Jordan, he unknowingly set off a chain of events that would eventually change the course of boxing history. No sooner was Gibson in the mix than Jordan was matched up with rugged Virgil Akins for a shot at the welterweight championship. Akins, who won the vacant title by annihilating Vince Martinez in 1958, would be making his first defense against Jordan. Hard-punching “Honeybear” was considered “inconsistent,” one of several euphemisms tossed around boxing in the 1950s, but as a fighter with friends in low places, it is nearly impossible to say how much of his hit-and-miss career was legitimate and how much was not. On December 5, 1958, Jordan plastered the 3-1 favorite over fifteen dirty rounds before 7,344 fans at the Olympic Auditorium to win the welterweight championship. His unexpected victory would have dramatic repercussions.
It is hard to imagine someone as erratic as Jordan—who was arrested for possession of marijuana only three weeks after winning the world title—causing the downfall of Frankie Carbo, but truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. When Nesseth refused to give Carbo a “cut” of Jordan after the Akins match, “Mr. Gray,” along with malignant sidekick Blinky Palermo, resorted to threats. Threats gave way to action, and Jackie Leonard, mistakenly thought by Carbo to be a willing go-between for his underworld shenanigans with Jordan, was beaten senseless by unknown assailants for taking his jitters to authorities. Several arrests, indictments, and trials later, Carbo and Palermo were convicted of conspiracy and extortion for their schemes involving Jordan and were each sentenced to long bids in prison. The mob stranglehold on boxing had been loosened, courtesy of a prizefighter for whom collateral damage was merely second nature. Even as Carbo and Palermo stewed on the witness stand, Jordan was partying with Mickey Cohen, poster boy of L.A. gangster chic, and drawing the enraged scrutiny of the California State Athletic Commission.
In 1959 Jordan defeated Akins in a rematch at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis and then made his second—and last—title defense a few months later against former sparring partner Denny Moyer in a dull and sparsely attended bout in Portland. For the Moyer fight, Jordan, who often trained like a man with hypersomnia, weighed in at 148.5 pounds and had to sweat down to the limit. “We never knew what kind of shape he would be for a fight,” Jackie McCoy