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.
So did Derrick Brown cost himself millions by jumping into the NBA draft last week rather than playing his final season at Xavier and possibly upping his profile, his draft status and his bank account?
That question has been volleyed back and forth the past five days, especially down in Cincinnati — “Brown, Meeks make big mistakes by eschewing final year of eligibility” read a headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer — since the Chaminade Julienne grad was taken in the second round, the 40th pick overall, by the Charlotte Bobcats.
I can see Brown’s reasons for leaving: He’s already graduated and he sat out a red-shirt year for the Muskies; a new coach is coming in; there’s always the possibility of injury; next year’s draft will be more loaded with talent; and, of course, he had plenty of people telling him he would be a first-round pick.
That said, I still think he should have stayed. I said it before the draft.
Although Xavier’s scheme usually isn’t built to make one guy the star — at least not since David West — I think Brown could have dominated in the Atlantic 10 this coming season, especially if new coach Chris Mack could build a fire, a sense or urgency, in him for every half of every game.
And I think had Brown known last week what he knows now, he would have stayed at Xavier. In fact, his camp said so in the weeks leading up to the draft. To paraphrase: “If Derrick’s going to end up in the second round, he’ll stay in school.”
The flip side is that he’ll be playing alongside better players and be learning from Larry Brown. He certainly should make the Bobcats and that could position himself for his next contract.
As for that aforementioned Enquirer headline, it was above an item in a Sunday column by Richard Skinner, who wrote:
“They (Brown and Kentucky’s Jodie Meeks) certainly couldn’t have done much worse than being picked in the second round. Both do have great opportunities to make the teams that drafted them, but both left guaranteed millions behind by not being picked in the first round where each could have been selected next year.”
So what kind of money are we talking about here?
This isn’t the NFL — the NBA has a rookie salary scale — so the loss isn’t as drastic by not being a first-rounder. But it’s still a sizable difference of cash when you end up in the second round.
Last year, for example, Doug Lewis made $442,114 — the league minimum — from the New Jersey Nets as the 40th pick in the draft.
The 15th overall pick in 2008, Phoenix’s Robin Lopez, was slated for a three-year deal worth $5.24 million. The 25th pick, Portland’s Nicolas Batum, was set for a three-year deal worth $3.36 million.
The first pick in the draft, Derrick Rose signed a contract that gave him a contract worth a guaranteed $10,007,280 for two seasons and a team option at $5,546,160 for a third season.
(On a side note, in the NFL where there is no set scale, the top pick in the 2008 draft, Jake Long, agreed to a five-year, $57.75 million deal with the Miami Dolphins.)
In the NBA, the real money comes with the second and third contracts. Remember almost a decade ago, the second contract of Wright State’s Vitaly Potapenko — who had been a first-round pick — was worth $36 million for six years.
All this said, Brown just needs to remember guys like this: Manu Ginobli, Michael Redd, Carlos Boozer, Gilbert Arenas, Rashard Lewis, Cedric Ceballos, Dennis Rodman, Mark Price, Jerome Kersey and Jeff Hornacek.
They were all second-round picks. They all did have or are having good (some great) NBA careers and they became multi-millionaires doing so.
Eager to share the collection she had put together over the past few months, she led the way — enthusiastically telling one story after another — toward the back dining room, now The Sports Room, to show you part of what Don Donoher called “a little mini-museum.”
She never made it that far.
Just before the doorway — hanging on the wall above the corner booth in the main dining area of Hickory Bar-B-Q — her eye caught the artist’s rendering of an incredible scene at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
Margo Fisher kicked off her shoes, hopped up into the booth and soon was detailing the spectacle like some earnest schoolgirl with a science project:
“This was the day Goldsmith Maid, the most famous horse in America, came to the Fairgrounds to try to break the world (trotting) record. Look at all those people. There was a grandstand on one side for men. On the other, for women. The infield’s full, the whole track is surrounded by a crowd. One newspaper report said there were 75,000 people. Imagine that.”
It was October 2, 1874 and it’s doubtful Dayton ever has had a single sporting day quite like it.
City officials issued a traffic flow pattern to get to the new fairgrounds which, back then, were on the outskirts of town. Wagons and buggies going to the track from downtown had to take Main Street. Those returning had to come up Warren Street.
Passenger trains coming to Dayton were jammed. According to one newspaper account, at the Miamisburg rail station alone, over 1,000 people were left stranded on the platform, unable to cram into the over-loaded passenger cars.
Hotels were filled. At the track, there were so many people, they spilled out onto the racing surface where they continually were pushed back by mounted police.
Everybody was here to see the fabled harness mare, Goldsmith Maid, who was unbeaten from 1871 to 1874 and in her career would won 350 heats, 95 of 123 races and $364,200, a mark that stood 60 years. The crowd that saw her in Dayton — when she tied the record of 2:18 — was the biggest of her career.
“Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Margo gushed. “Now look back here.”
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LANDMARK GETS FACE-LIFT
She led you into The Sports Room, where a collection of 37 photos of Dayton sports personalities and teams covered the walls.
Margo and her husband Gary — who own the Hickory with Margo’s sister Shirley and their 86-year-old mother, Irene — recently wanted to spruce up the landmark Brown Street restaurant that Irene and her late husband Joe Kiss launched with Irene’s brother and his wife in 1962.
Turning the front dining room into a Dayton History Room and dedicating the back to sports was Margo’s project.
Her work was unveiled at a reception last week that drew quite an assortment of sports types, including: Olympic gold medalist Lucinda Adams, current women’s pro basketball player Megan Duffy, 81-year-old power-lifter Felix Nichalson, hockey’s Moe Benoit, former Major League pitcher Fred Sherman, 91-year-old former Detroit Lions tackle Tony Furst, softball legend Jerry Raiff, Donoher and four Dayton Flyers who played in the NBA, Bucky Bockhorn, Jim Paxson Sr., Monk Meineke and Don May.
The families and friends of another two dozen sports figures also were at the gathering.
“We had three generations all together and it was definitely a neat experience,” Duffy said. “I got to meet some of the Dayton sports legends from back in the day and I thought it was pretty cool, too, that I’m up there on the wall, right next to Tamika Williams and Brandie Hoskins, all of us connected like we are. (They starred at Chaminade Julienne and in college before playing in the WNBA).”
Bucky Bockhorn agreed: “It was a good time. (Margo) did a hell of a job with all the photos and bringing us together. I knew her dad and I’ll tell you, he’d be proud of this.”
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HE LIVED THE AMERICAN DREAM
Joe Kiss, a Hungarian from Romania, immigrated to the United States in 1930. He was just 11 years old.
“He came all by himself with his name safety pinned to his coat,” said George Smith, the longtime Dayton area thoroughbred owner and former Ohio State golf star. “He got off the boat at Ellis Island , couldn’t speak the language and look what he made. He lived the American Dream.”
After Irene, whose also of Hungarian descent from Romania, married Joe, they had three daughters — Jo Ann, Shirley and Margo — and the whole family, as well as in-laws and now grandkids, have worked at the restaurant.
The place became known for ribs, steaks and cabbage rolls and developed quite a following. Beyond his restaurant, one of Joe’s biggest passions was thoroughbreds. He owned several that were handled by Jim Morgan — the former Louisville All America basketball player from Stivers — who launched his celebrated training career on a financial stake from Kiss.
Margo pointed to a Winner’s Circle picture of Grand Action — the Morgan-trained horse owned by her dad and Joe Samu — that had won the Ohio Millionaire Stakes at Thistledown:
“With the race there was a contest tied into the Ohio Lottery and a man named Omar Watts, a Cherokee Indian chief, won $1 million dollars because (through the luck of the draw) he’d been pared with Grand Action.
“He was very poor (according to a newspaper account Watts made $113 a week as a night watchman), had had three heart attacks in four years and two of his kids were living in foster care. When Grand Action won, (Watts) became the first $1 million lottery winner and was able to get his children back home.
“How about that.”
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“I WAS A HELL OF A STUD”
Over the past couple of months, Margo immersed herself in the photo project.
“Her cell phone bill last month jumped from $56 to $400,” said husband Gary, smiling but shaking his head.
With the help of Nancy Horlacher, the history specialist at the Dayton Metro Library, Margo gathered some interesting photos from the city’s past — check out the circus elephants taking a dip in the old Miami-Erie Canal downtown — for the main dining room.
For the pictures in the sports room, she tracked down current and former athletes or their families.
She also put on display a big photo from the Dayton Flyers 1962 NIT victory that her dad had hanging in his office since the 1970s.
Taken on the floor of Madison Square Garden just after UD had beaten St. John’s, it shows fans mobbing coach Tom Blackburn, Flyers big man Bill Chmielewski and teammate Garry Roggenburk.
Some of my favorite photos include one of Donoher — the runners-up trophy in one hand — and then athletics director Tom Frericks standing on the airport tarmac after just getting off the their flight from the NCAA Championship Game in 1967.
There’s also shot of Furst, his mug filling up his leather helmet — which, back then, came with no face mask — running straight at you, just as he would defenders he was about to flatten for Byron “Whizzer” White in the 1940s.
And then there’s the photo of a well-muscled, flat-topped Bockhorn, ripping down a rebound. “Hey, I was a hell of a stud — 6-4, 210,” laughed the 75-year-old Bockhorn when asked about it. Then, with self-deprecating deflection, he said, “Naah, I’m just kidding.”
But the picture shows he was telling the truth and as you go photo to photo, you are left with so many more memorable images.
“Joe Kiss was just the nicest guy of all time, without a doubt,” said Smith. ” He bought more rounds for folks coming into his place than any restaurateur anyplace — ever. You always got something you weren’t quite expecting when you came into his place.”
Here are three of my favorite videos of Michael Jackson in the sports world.
The first is with Muhammad Ali in 1977. Then there’s the 1992 session he had with Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan for his video “Jam.” Finally, there’s his performance at the 1993 Super Bowl. It’s probably the best halftime performance I’ve seen in 30 years of covering the Super Bowl.
As Joey Votto walked off the field following batting practice before the Reds Futures Game April 4 at Fifth Third Field, I met him at the dugout steps and asked if we could talk for a few minutes.
The Cincinnati Reds first baseman led the way to the end of the dugout, where I asked him something about how it felt being back in Dayton again since he’d played for the Dragons in 2003 and 2004 and was very close to his host family here.
He offered up a couple of Dayton memories with a smile, after which I happened to bring up his dad, who had died last August. I had no agenda, other than I knew I had found it pretty tough when my dad died.
I asked something along the lines of “The season starts in two days and this will be your first Opening Day ever without your dad. Is that tough to deal with? Do you have any special memories of him on Opening Day?”
His face drained. His smile melted and for a good while he said absolutely nothing. “I’m not going to talk about this,” he finally said in little more than a whisper. “I’m not going there.”
I felt bad and it took me a few seconds to regroup. He never did quite refocus on our conversation, which ended a couple of minutes later.
I wrote about that encounter last Saturday night after Votto — who had missed most of a month for what, at the time, was only said to be “a stress-related” incident — played nine innings with the Dragons on a rehab assignment here.
In the Saturday blog, I wrote: “He’s scheduled to play for the Dragons Sunday and that may be especially challenging. It’s Father’s Day and last summer when his dad, Joseph — a Toronto chef and his son’s biggest supporter — died, Votto took the loss especially hard. He took a week off for bereavement, then returned to the Reds and was given some extra time out of the line-up by manager Dusty Baker.
“Before he left, he had asked the club to keep the death quiet until his return. Since then, he’s only talked on a couple of occasions — and very briefly — about losing his father … Sunday, I imagine thoughts of his dad will be swirling beneath the surface.”
By the next day — as is too often the case in the blogosphere — some real cretins came out of the woodwork.
In the internet chat rooms, the sports blogs and every other open web forum, people are able to hide behind a fake name, a catchy moniker — freyourmind and million dollar baby come to mind in this instance — and never have to reveal their identity or take responsibility for what they say.
And so somebody like freyourmind writes: “stress related, what a pus. hey million dollar baby we all have stress I say get over it and get back to your job. In my opinion they are all spoiled brats. peace”
Of course many people were sympathetic, but there were also ones whose comments were so nasty that I either killed them off my blog or erased them from my phone messages. To me you are a coward if you attack someone, but refuse to use your name.
The people who tried to make Votto a pinata — not just on my blog, but at other internet sites and on some sports talk radio shows — questioned everything from his sexuality to his toughness and his commitment and care for his teammates. Their common thread often was their lack of civility and that’s what I hate about the whole blog, open-forum free-for-all that’s now so popular.
Athletes are human, too. Some of these comments hurt them and their families and none of us is any richer for the vilest rants.
And as everyone now knows — three nights after he appeared here in Dayton — Votto, back with the Reds, told reporters in Toronto that the loss of his dad is the thing that put him into the mental tailspin he’s still trying to recover from.
He told how he’s been hospitalized twice, how he experienced panic attacks and called 9-1-1 in Cincinnati. He said he thought he was going to die.
My heart goes out to Votto. To me, it took real courage to address the situation publicly. He’s now working to make himself better. He’s getting counseling, he’s likely got some medication and he should have all our understanding and support.
As for the always-at-the-ready attackers, my guess is they’re not shamed or chastened by any of this. They’ll continue to cloak themselves in their anonymity and wait for someone else to tear down and besmirch.
Kentucky sent him a fancy notice made to look like it was from ESPN announcing he’d just committed to the Wildcats.
Tennessee, Adreian Payne said, has sent him “stacks and stacks of stuff.”
Ohio State just added assistant coach Jeff Boals, who has a close relationship with him and now is trying to lure the 6-foot-10 Jefferson High senior to Columbus next year.
And then there’s the University of Dayton, which, among other things, has Juwan Staten, the UD-bound guard, doing its bidding.
“We’ll both be out with our buddies and I never know quite when it’s gonna happen, but I do know it IS going to happen,” Payne laughed. “Pretty soon Wan will go, ‘C’mon, go with me (to UD).”
When it comes to Payne, Staten is like a travelling salesman because he’s also pitching Oak Hill Academy, the national prep school in Virginia he’s transferred to out of Thurgood Marshall High.
“Oak Hill says they don’t recruit, but they do,” Payne said. “They have Wan calling me a lot trying to get me to go with him. I looked into it, but I don’t see the point for me.”
This is what’s its like to be one of the best uncommitted players in the nation.
Payne told people at the NBA Top 100 camp that he took part in last week in Virginia, that he’s already received a dozen scholarship offers. In its prep prospect rankings, rivals.com rates him the eighth best player in the class of 2010. Staten is No 59.
Payne was at Daequan Cook’s basketball camp Tuesday, June 23, when the Portland Trail Blazers 7-foot center Greg Oden — Cook’s pal and former OSU teammate — walked in.
Soon Payne and Oden were talking. “You playing out here today?” Oden asked.
Payne shook his head and camp director Albert Powell explained: “I won’t let him. I don’t want to risk anything. He has too much at stake.”
Over the next two weeks Payne travels to Phoenix to take part in the camp run Suns’ big man A’mare Stoudemire and then San Diego for LeBron James’ camp. The rest of the summer he’ll travel the country with his All Ohio Red AAU team, which includes Staten and the OSU bound pair, Jared Sullinger and Jordan Sibert.
After Oden met with Payne, he recalled another Dayton-bred talent he met for the first time. He was playing for an Indiana AAU team coached by Mike Conley Sr., who brought the players to Dayton’s McFarland Junior High for some workouts.
“We already had Aaron Pogue on the team and then they brought this other kid in for a tryout who was supposed to be pretty good,” Oden smiled. “I figured he was just some street ball player.”
Cook remembered that meeting, too. “I walked in for my tryout and the first guy I saw was Greg. It’s pretty rare to see a 7-footer when you’re as young as we were, but it didn’t bother me.”
Oden laughed: “As soon as we started playing, he just killed everybody. Right then I knew Dayton has some pretty good talent.”
As his basketball talents took him from one glorious pinnacle to the next — from state title at Dunbar High to Ohio State to a first round pick in the NBA — Daequan Cook said his mom continually reminded him of one thing:
“Don’t forget where you came from. It’s important to give back to your community and when that moment comes, step up.”
Sad as it was, that moment came when he heard that DaQuan Sales — a 12-year old Dayton boy who idolized him, a kid who used to pretend he was Cook every time he played basketball and continually asked his aunt if he looked like his hero — was killed by a car while riding his bicycle, June 13.
“You always get a sign from somewhere and I felt this was my sign,” said Cook, who already was returning to Dayton for his youth camp which opened Monday and continues today at Dunbar — a camp DaQuan had signed up for and according to his 76-year-old great granddad, Garfield Sales, “had been counting down the days to until that terrible day.”
Cook said he’d help pay for the funeral, would dedicate the annual scholarship he plans to start in Dayton in DaQuan’s name and invited the Sales family to his camp.
Monday DaQuan’s mom, sister, little brother, aunt and his wheelchair-bound great grandfather took him up on the offer and — in as touching of a meeting as you can imagine — Cook spent nearly an hour with them.
“I’ll be up ‘til all hours of the night telling my wife about all that happened,” Garfield said. “Daequan really cared. You could see it in his eyes, in his face. My grandson picked the perfect role model and now I’m in awe just like he was.”
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.
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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.
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