Touching The Void: The Hawk And The
Schoolboy In Late ‘82
By Mike Casey
I’m
tired of living and scared of dying. So go the famous old words of Ol’ Man
River. It’s funny how people see life and death in different ways. We all have
our fears and our phobias.
During my
long career in journalism, I have had the good fortune to meet many men of
courage from various walks of life, be they boxers, soldiers, firefighters,
policemen or humble nine-to-fivers who never imagined they could be Superman for
a day.
Few have
been tired of living, yet they have been strangely scared of it. They can only
live joyously when life is spiced with danger and the price of failure is
savage.
Understand
that such men do not harbour a death wish. What they need is the challenge and
the adrenaline charge of venturing into the valley of death and daring it to
swallow them up.
We should
not be too harsh on our heroes who fall apart and lose themselves when there are
no more titanic battles to wage. What else does a man do, where else does he go,
once he has touched the void and taken a peek at that mystical halfway house
between the present and hereafter that mortal men only get to see at the moment
of dying?
He can
perform the impossible when he is lost in that magical world. He can beat anyone
or anything. Then the bubble bursts, his theatre of dreams is dismantled and
suddenly he is being eaten away and driven mad by the ticking of a clock in a
lonely house.
Bobby
Chacon knew all about the monotonous ticking of clocks. I suspect that Aaron
Pryor did too. Both were fast and dangerous fighting men, forever barrelling
towards the next target in life at breakneck speed. There is no greater curse
for such warriors than a pregnant pause or an empty space.
In the
early hours of December 11, 1982, the day when he would go out and win the
greatest fight of his career, Bobby Chacon couldn’t sleep. His wristwatch kept
beeping out the time as the hours passed with agonising slowness. Chacon knew
only one way to struggle through the darkness. Focusing on his opponent, the
formidable Rafael ‘Bazooka’ Limon, Bobby kept saying to himself, “I can’t lose,
I can’t lose.”
By this
time, Aaron Pryor’s work was done. A month before, on November 12 at the Orange
Bowl in Miami, the whirlwind of a man they called The Hawk had swooped through
the valley of death and somehow emerged victorious against a living legend in
the great Alexis Arguello.
None of us
could quite believe what we had seen in that fight. It had soared and dipped and
charged along like a violent, rocking rollercoaster, fuelled by courage, heart,
passion and an almost disquieting brand of commitment.
Aaron took
the cheers of the screaming crowd. It was Hawk Time, just as he always liked to
tell us. Did he sleep that night? Had he slept the night before? And what would
such a volcanic and hyperactive man do when there were no more wars to be
fought? Nights can be killers, but days are even longer.
Perpetual
Perpetual
motion is a thrilling and dangerous condition in human beings. Thrilling because
we love to see it and wish we had it. Dangerous because it is finite. A
neighbour of mine in our Kentish haven here recently passed comment on a
tireless woman in our community who charges around the place organising outings,
garden parties, theatre trips, you name it. She is greatly admired and rightly
so. But my neighbour’s take on her kept coming back to me: “It’s almost as if
she’s afraid to stop in case she discovers she has nothing else to do.”
Well,
those of us who know our boxing are all too aware of the personal demons that
came to claim Aaron Pryor and Alexis Arguello after the final bell had sounded.
Reams have been written on how the two titans of the ring were yanked from the
heights to the depths. We call them ‘human interest’ stories in journalism and
your writer tends to steer clear of them. However well intentioned, they still
end up smacking of glorification and sensationalism.
So forgive
me for being sentimental and singin’ in the rain like Gene Kelly. This little
forum has been roped in to include only the glory days of late 1982, when Aaron
Pryor and Bobby Chacon were kings of the hill and monarchs of all they
surveyed.
With
typical melodrama, they left it late and then left us with one heck of a bone to
chew on. Around November time, as every boxing fan will know, we start picking
our fight of the year. We figure that it’s pretty safe to do so, that everyone
has done what they are likely to do.
In 1982,
having pretty much finalised our neat little lists, we got beaned by two of the
most vicious curveballs ever thrown. Pryor overwhelmed Alexis Arguello in the
fourteenth round of an almost impossibly fast-paced and brutal battle. That
clinched it, surely. The fight of the year beyond question. Then Chacon
outlasted Rafael Limon at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento in a primitive
and surreal war of attrition that didn’t seem to take place in the real world.
Those who personally witnessed that spectacle reeled uncertainly into the
streets and the parking lots when it was all over, bearing the stunned
expressions of alien captives who had been whisked off to another star system
for a few quick experiments and then tossed straight back.
The fight
of the year? Definitely. Well, definitely maybe.
Pryor and
Chacon just kept punching, just as Ad Wolgast and Battling Nelson had done
decades before, just as Stanley Ketchel and Joe Thomas had done in their
thunderous classic at Colma. Where do such men go at such times? They seem to
stop that ticking clock that they fear and slip into a private heaven where
everything is constant and makes perfect sense.
I remember
vividly how Aaron Pryor charged to the fore with remarkable haste. What a
wonderful breath of fresh air The Hawk was. His progress through the
professional ranks was as fast and as furious as his fists. Suddenly the
ferocious kid from Cincinnati just seemed to be there, knocking at the world
championship door before most of us had managed to peruse his application form.
Twenty-four wins in just under three years, twenty-two knockouts, and he was
ready for the mighty Colombian Antonio Cervantes. Pryor was a living embodiment
of Jack Kerouac’s freefall prose, where full points and commas are regarded as
unnecessary inconveniences. Don’t stop the flow! Keep charging on!
Aaron had
roared out of the amateurs with a 204-1 record and he just kept roaring as he
made the transition to professional in 1976. Only Jose Resto and Johnny
Summerhays managed to take The Hawk the distance on his charge to the
championship.
The great
Antonio ‘Kid Pambele’ Cervantes was a fading but still formidable WBA
junior-welterweight champion when he journeyed to the Riverfront Coliseum in
Cincinnati to defend his championship against Pryor. By the time Cervantes
journeyed home again, his manager Ramiro Machado was saying, “We are finished.
No more fights.”
In fact
Cervantes would have five more fights and win four of them. But he would never
touch championship heights again after being brutally swept asunder by Pryor.
The 5’ 10” Cervantes had seen off eighteen challengers to his crown with his
height and great punching power. As a junior-welterweight, only those classic
boxing masters, Nicolino Locche and Wilfred Benitez, had inconvenienced the
stately Colombian by way of silky skills and finesse. Overpowering Cervantes was
another question entirely and not recommended to fighters of good sense.
Aaron
Pryor, however, could never be truly profiled or bracketed. He was his own
raging storm, blowing every which way and defying classification. He was quite
simply glorious. He took the breath away as the special ones always do. And he
took the fight out of Cervantes inside four rounds.
It all
started well enough for Antonio, who wasn’t accustomed to being batted around
and might have come to believe that it couldn’t happen. He looked his old lithe
and dangerous self in the opening two rounds, hurting Aaron in the first and
then sending him down on one knee in the second. Pryor claimed he slipped but
the official ruling was a knockdown. Not that The Hawk dwelt upon the incident.
He never did pay much attention to adversity in the ring, sweeping it aside like
a troublesome bee.
Pryor’s
endurance matched his fire and fury. His ability to absorb punches with apparent
immunity would be seriously questioned two years later against Arguello. But it
was Aaron’s cyclonic offence that ultimately crushed Cervantes. Like a rabid
version of Henry Armstrong, Pryor would just keep firing.
In the
third round, Aaron cracked home a left hook to open a one-inch gash over
Antonio’s eye, and the old champion was suddenly looking uncertain and
vulnerable. Always a demon at finishing a man in distress, Pryor wasted no time
in going to work in the fourth round, chasing Cervantes into a corner and
letting fly with a barrage of blows. A final right to the head sent Antonio to
his knees and left him clutching the lower ropes. A magnificent champion had
finally been toppled and unceremoniously ripped apart. “I was sad about the
knockout,” Cervantes said. “If I don’t get cut, maybe it would have been mote
interesting.”
Possibly
but unlikely. Pryor was now approaching the raging prime of his life as a
fighter and quickly established himself as a dominant champion in his own right.
The challengers to his throne quickly came and quickly went: Gaetan Hart in six
rounds, Lennox Blackmore in two, Dujuan Johnson in seven, Miguel Montilla in
twelve and Akio Kameda in six.
Then it
was the turn of the mighty Alexis Arguello in the electric atmosphere of Miami’s
Orange Bowl. What a match-up! Most of us sensed that a meeting of Aaron and
Alexis couldn’t fail to be a very special and thrilling spectacle.
What can
one say about the great Arguello by that time in his career? There he stood, the
lanky Nicaraguan known as El Flaco Explosivo (The Explosive Thin Man), with
three titles in three weight divisions already on his ledger and an eye-popping
record of 77 wins in 82 fights, including 62 knockouts. Yet Arguello was much
more than merely a destructive puncher. He was wily, intelligent, a cool master
boxer into the bargain.
He could
outbox his rivals when the occasion demanded or knock them out with a strike of
frightening suddenness. When he tore the WBA featherweight crown from the head
of Ruben Olivares in 1974, the big bomb came late in the day and stunned the
Inglewood Forum crowd into momentary silence. A single, cracking left hook to
the jaw unhinged Olivares, just when it seemed that the Mexican ace had solved
the Arguello puzzle and found the path to victory. The punch sent Ruben’s
mouthpiece flying and dropped him like a man who had been hit by a car. Bravely
he got to his feet, but he was quickly knocked out by Arguello’s concluding
combination.
However,
it was as a junior lightweight that Alexis found his true domain, winning the
WBC title from Alfredo Escalera and seeing off eight challengers before making
an equally smooth transition to the lightweight division and taking the WBC
bauble on a commanding decision from the hardy Scottish southpaw, Jim Watt.
Arguello
was moving up through the divisions with all the smooth assurance of a finely
tuned Ferrari and was no less confident of his ability to dethrone Aaron Pryor.
There was an elegant and almost royal air about Alexis. He was a natural born
killer of the ring, yet his class and sportsmanship never cast him in the role
of the marauding villain. Arguello’s idea of the ultimate fight was an
ever-shifting chess game, not a slam-bang affair of little depth or
intelligence.
His shrewd
old trainer Eddie Futch saw many comparisons between Arguello and a certain
other former pupil: Joe Louis. Talking to reporters in the run-up to the Pryor
fight, old Eddie said of Alexis: “He reminds me a lot of Joe Louis in and out of
the ring. In the ring, he keeps the pressure on you with that hard, straight
left hand. Out of the ring, he is the same quiet gentleman Joe Louis was.”
Then
Alexis met Aaron in a chess game that combined skill, nerve and an oddly poetic
form of brutality. Arguello was the grand master looking to put the young
pretender in his place. Pryor was the charging cavalier looking to clear the
board as soon as he could.
Private War
One
wondered how they managed to extend their private war to the fourteenth round.
Even people in the crowd of 23,800 were physically and emotionally drained at
the finish. They had seen everything that constitutes a wonderful and
competitive prizefight: skill, courage, passion, perseverance and incredible
physical and mental strength. They had seen hard hitting, durability, defiance
and glorious rallies in the face of adversity.
Pryor, the
shorter man by three inches at 5’ 6 ½” started fast, rattling Arguello with
rapid-fire combinations to the head and showing great hand speed. Alexis
displayed tremendous coolness under fire and great resilience in weathering
these storms and firing back with his own formidable artillery. Pryor exerted
great pressure through the first five rounds, but thereafter began to mix his
slugging with some intelligent boxing. Arguello, a marvellous counter puncher,
always looked the more precise and damaging hitter, but could not match Aaron
for volume.
Nevertheless, the balance of power constantly tipped back and forth as each kept
the other in check. The eleventh round was a rocky session for Aaron, as he
seemed to wobble and lose his way momentarily after taking a big right to the
head and a debilitating left to the stomach. Yet this was one exceptional man
that the lethal Arguello simply couldn’t put in the ground. Alexis must have
wondered if a falling chunk of masonry would have had any greater effect on
Pryor.
Aaron kept
coming and kept rifling home punches. He stepped up the pace again in the
twelfth round and maintained his forward march in the thirteenth, despite taking
another cracking right from Arguello. In the ferocious and fateful fourteenth
round, The Hawk finally broke the great man from Nicaragua. No longer could
Alexis ward off the runaway train as he suddenly wilted from a heavy right to
the jaw and a follow-up left. As he staggered back into the ropes, Aaron leapt
on him and fired off a succession of fast and hard blows to the head. Some
counted twenty-three in all. South African referee Stanley Christodoulou jumped
between the fighters and called off one of the great modern wars of attrition.
Arguello
fell slowly to the canvas and lay there with his nose broken and blood running
from his left eye. It was some minutes before he was able to leave the ring to a
thunderous ovation.
Well, as
our fellow historians will know, the big fight was followed by the big
controversy. Had Pryor been flying through that titanic battle on something more
than pure adrenaline? Arguello’s agent, Bill Miller, certainly thought so,
claiming that no post-fight urine samples were taken from Pryor. That didn’t sit
at all right with Miller, who added that Aaron’s trainer, Panama Lewis, was
heard on cable TV asking for a bottle with a special mixture. Pryor’s cornermen
were also seen breaking capsules under their fighter’s nose during the contest.
Arguello,
ever the gentleman, expressed surprise at is opponent’s ability to take the
hardest punches with little visible effect, but didn’t want to press the matter.
“I don’t know what happened,” Alexis said. “I don’t want this thing to go too
far. I was beaten by a great champion. There is no doubt in my mind. I don’t
want to question his ability or honesty.”
Panama
Lewis, for his part, claimed the bottle with the ‘special mixture’ consisted of
Perrier and tap water. There was a disturbing sequel to the story on June 16th
of the following year, which may or may not tell us something. Nashville
welterweight Billy Collins Jnr, whose father had been a top ten 147-pounder in
the sixties, was savagely beaten by Lewis’ charge, Luis Resto. Young Billy’s
eyes were pounded shut and his nose and mouth were horribly gashed and bashed.
It was
subsequently discovered that Resto’s gloves had been cut and half the padding
removed. Lewis and Resto were banned from boxing for life and Resto served a
prison term for assault and other related charges.
Billy
Collins Jnr never did recover from the incident. Plagued by bouts of depression
and drinking, he died nine months later at the age of twenty-two.
The kid From The San
Fernando Valley
It was
somehow typically perverse of Bobby Chacon that he should come along as a
grizzled and gnarled veteran of thirty-one and show Mr Pryor and Mr Arguello
what a REAL fight was.
Even at
that age, even after a tumultuous, helter-skelter life of joy and despair, we
were still calling Chacon The Schoolboy. We were still thinking of him as the
pugnacious young kid from the San Fernando Valley.
I do not
intend to recount Bobby life story here, since I, along with many others, have
already done so. Well documented are Chacon’s many trials and tribulations and
his need to fuel his fire by constantly dancing with the Devil.
Worth
remembering, however, is just how highly regarded Chacon was in the twinkle-eyed
days of his youth, long before he walked through fire and came back to bring his
career to a roaring climax at a time in his life when many of us had thought he
might already be dead and gone.
After just
two professional fights, Chacon was already being noticed by reporters and
hailed as Southern California’s best prospect since Mando Ramos. Frankie
Goodman, boxing columnist of the Van Nuys News, said: “Bobby Chacon is the
Valley’s most sensational fighter in a long time.”
Bobby was
living in Sylmar at that time and training at the Main Street gym and at the
downtown Elk’s Club Gym, where he was crossing swords with some illustrious
‘sparring partners’. Among those who showed the kid some tricks of the trade
were Ruben Navarro, Danny Lopez, Arturo (Turi) Pineda, Fernando Cabanela, Romy
Guelas, Romeo Anaya, Octavio (Famoso) Gomez, Julio Guerrero and Antonio Gomez.
Ruben
Navarro said of Chacon: “Bobby is one of the best fighters around. He’s strong
and he fights strict. I like to spar with him because he gives me a good
workout.”
Sure
enough, Bobby Chacon was sensational. He was still two months shy of his
twenty-third birthday when he won the vacant WBC featherweight title from
Alfredo Marciano in 1974. But it was Chacon the old hand, the blistered veteran
bruised and battered by the lumps of a turbulent life, who would thrill us with
a succession of never-say-die epic performances.
The
undisputed apex of that cycle was his fourth and final set-to with old foe
Rafael Limon. Their first battle had ended in a decision for Limon, their second
in a technical draw, their third match in a split decision victory for Chacon.
Feelings ran high between the two warriors, and they were not feelings of
immense affection.
Some
mischievous soul, I swear, must have visited Bobby and Rafael before their
Sacramento finale, run them the film of Pryor-Arguello and said: “Beat these
guys for thrills and spills and you will never be forgotten.”
Somehow,
some way, Chacon and Limon stepped up to the plate and just kept hitting home
runs. My good friend and fellow scribe, Ted (The Bull) Sares, who doesn’t wax
lyrical when the waxing isn’t justified, has never forgotten where he was and
how he reacted as Chacon and Limon hacked and chopped their way through their
staggering 15-rounds marathon.
Recalls
Ted: “First one would get rocked, then the other. Both would be floored. Bobby
was cut, bleeding profusely, pummelled and ready to go – only to come back and
score his own knockdown. Chacon got up bleeding after knockdowns suffered in
rounds three and ten to drop Limon in the closing seconds of round fifteen to
take a close but undisputed decision.
“Surely,
had Limon not gone down, Bobby would not have won. I lived in Boston at the time
and recall leaping up from my chair, spilling beer and food all over the place
and on my friends, and screaming unabashedly at the top of my voice, ‘Get him,
Bobby, get him, knock him out!’ And get him he did. The scoring was: Judge Angel
L Guzman, 142-141, judge Carlos Padilla, 143-141, and judge Tamotsu Tomihara,
141-140.
“This was
the fight that turned me from dedicated boxing fan to full fledged addict. This
fight, the essence of which was toe-to-toe, ebb and flow, back and forth action,
was breathtaking and I mean that quite literally. It was as close as two
fearless men can get to death, to the edge if you will, and still survive.
“Limon
actually had a strange smile on his face as he was knocked down for the last
time and was getting up. I swear on a stack of bibles that he smiled at the
crowd. It was almost mystical, surreal, whatever label you could put on it. All
I know is, I will never forget the fifteenth round of that fight.
“I
remember Bobby saying, ‘I broke down after the Limon fight. I didn’t like that
guy to begin with, and with everything that happened…. I couldn’t sleep,
couldn’t eat….’”
Chacon, in
typical storybook fashion, couldn’t have timed his final charge more finely or
dramatically. He staggered Limon with a right to the head in those dying seconds
and then knocked him down with two more short rights in mid-ring. At the bell,
Limon was on his feet, taking an eight count and hovering with strange and numb
pleasantness in his own private twilight zone as blood ran from his mouth.
“I wanted
to win any way I could,” said Bobby Chacon.
The fight
of the year for 1982? Yes, I believe it was. No doubt others will tell me I’m
wrong and cast their vote for the storming battle between Mr Pryor and Mr
Arguello at the Orange Bowl.
C’est la
vie!
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