Sporting Blood. Carlos Acevedo

between night crawling through Los Angeles, battling his ex-wife in court, and testifying to grand juries about racketeers. Finally, the impulsive Jordan decided to make his own career moves. Against the advice of his managers—and with McCoy seeing his cut reduced to training fees only—Jordan went on a short winter tour of South America, where unknown Luis Federico Thompson promptly knocked him out in Argentina. Jordan blamed his first stoppage loss on a mysterious “virus” that might actually have been a combination of mononucleosis and jake leg.

      Humiliated, Jordan returned to Los Angeles to recover over the holidays. Before long, however, he found himself in one rumpus after another. First, he was suspended by the California State Athletic Commission after refusing to appear for a physical without explanation; then he was arrested on a DWI charge after crashing into two parked cars. Next Jack Urch of the Athletic Commission pointed the finger of suspicion directly at “The Geronimo Kid” by bluntly stating, “We want to know why Jordan persists on palling around with Mickey Cohen.” Lastly, Jordan incurred the wrath of the NBA when he preposterously agreed to a “tune-up” bout with journeyman Candy McFarland less than two weeks before a scheduled defense against Benny Paret. At odds with his brain trust and full of near-surrealist irrationality, Jordan turned down a $12,500 television date with Don Fullmer to face McFarland at Baltimore Stadium for less than $1,400.

      On May 16, 1960, after a rain delay of two days, McFarland, undistinguished but earnest, cuffed Jordan into a stupor over ten rounds and copped an easy decision. “It was the best kind of workout I could have got,” Jordan blithely told the press. Oddsmakers immediately installed him as a 3-1 underdog against Paret.

By this time Jordan was considered not only a “cheese champ,” but serious trouble as well. Nevada state boxing commissioner Jim Deskin, vexed by the loose cannon about to step into the Las Vegas Convention Center, assigned a security detail of police detectives to stake out the Jordan training camp. On May 27, 1960, in the first nationally televised bout from Las Vegas, Paret pounded Jordan over fifteen monotonous rounds. “As early as the fifth round,” reported Sports Illustrated, “. . . it was clear that Don Jordan had lost everything but courage.” And courage was not nearly enough for the 4,805 spectators who booed intermittently as Paret churned away at a champion who could have doubled as a Penitente that night.

      Never one for damage control, Jordan compounded his troubles by signing over his entire $85,000 purse for the Paret bout to co-managers McCoy and Nesseth in order to hook up with Las Vegas–based hotel impresario Kirk Kerkorian. “I'd fight ten times for nothing to get rid of Nesseth,” Jordan snarled. Kerkorian, a former amateur boxer, knew little about the labyrinthine world of prizefighting, and, it could be said, his signing of Jordan proved it. With lawyers hounding him for alimony payments, Jordan decided that he would need a little incentive to step into the ring and held promoters ransom for $2,000 in the dressing room. He got the payoff, but that was the last time Don Jordan had things his own way in the topsy-turvy world of boxing.

      Over the next two years, Jordan would hit the skids running and would win only two of his last eleven fights. The boxer with graceful footwork, snappy combinations, and a precision jab seemed to vanish overnight. Other than Carmen Basilio, Tony DeMarco, and Ludwig Lightburn, Jordan suffered his humiliating free fall at the hands of one middling pug after another. On October 5, 1962, Jordan hit bedrock after being “stopped” in the first round by “Battling” Torres at the Olympic Auditorium, where Jordan had won the welterweight title less than four years earlier. The California State Athletic Commission immediately suspected a fix and suspended him for life. Jordan, only twenty-eight at the time of the Torres fiasco, never fought again. His final record stands at 51-23-1-1.

      Today Don Jordan is all but forgotten. If he is remembered at all it is for the sudden tailspin that sent him crashing from welterweight champion to complete washout in less than two years. Why did such a talented boxer unravel so suddenly? Was it the drinking, the carousing, the smoking? Certainly other fighters—from Abe Attell to Harry Greb—burned candles at both ends without sputtering out so quickly. Did the strange virus he claimed was responsible for his loss to Luis Federico Thompson linger on and affect his performances? Or was it merely hard luck? The kind of luck a rough-and-tumble man like Jordan might believe was the only kind he could expect?

In 1973, over a decade removed from his short-lived and tumultuous heyday, Jordan earned more notoriety after a bizarre interview with Peter Heller. Akin to some of the jailhouse ramblings of Charles Manson, the former welterweight champion of the world claimed, among other things, to have been a paid assassin as a child in the Dominican Republic and to have been a factotum for the underworld throughout his career. One outlandish claim followed another until, finally, the question of veracity became moot. His answers were “true” insofar as they functioned as dark correlatives to his fractured psyche. “Winning the championship was the most awful experience of my life,” Jordan told Heller. “Believe me, it was awful. It was not a thrill to me. I was involved in certain situations, activities not to my advantage, shall we say. I was involved in certain things; to win was not as thrilling as I thought it would be as a fighter. When I lost it I was happy. I was more happy losing it than winning it.”

      Boxers, like recently paroled felons, often have difficulty adjusting to the “outside” when their careers are over, and in this respect, Jordan was no different. He struggled with alcoholism, divorced for a second time, and found it difficult to make a living. “I went from job to job,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970, “I was a swamper in a produce market, a machinist in the shipyards, and a carpet layer. I found there were more people in public against me than there were when I was fighting.”

A few steady years working for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica were followed by a stint as a longshoreman in Wilmington. It was there, in the rugged waterfront district of Southern California, that Jordan was savagely beaten during a robbery on September 30, 1996. Two thugs attacked Jordan in broad daylight and left him for dead in a parking lot. He lingered in a coma for nearly five months before dying on February 13, 1997. He was sixty-two years old. Two men suspected of the murder were later released due to insufficient evidence. His senseless and tragic death was a fitting exclamation point to the unruly life of a boxer who once muttered the bleakest of aphorisms: “But all man knows when he fights he must lose.”

Dark Sun