Alexis Arguello....DEAD!

[El Mudo]

Link (http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=4299144)


I remember him from that epic series HBO had on great fights, and that rivalry he had with Aaron Pryor was awesome...great stuff

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[Gvac]

Wow. Sad news.

Arguello was a phenomenal fighter with the heart of a lion.

Looks like yet another boxer who could never adjust to life outside the ring.

[Freakshow]

no one thinks this is even slightly fishy? Nicaragua isn't exactly famous for being a stable place.

Anyone who gets a line in a Warren Zevon song is alright by me. Have we checked the whereabouts of Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?

[El Mudo]

no one thinks this is even slightly fishy? Nicaragua isn't exactly famous for being a stable place.

Anyone who gets a line in a Warren Zevon song is alright by me. Have we checked the whereabouts of Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?


Well, at least according to Deadspin, he tried to kill himself back in the 80s too

Link (http://deadspin.com/5305779/alexis-arguellos-death-prefigured)

In 1984, when Alexis Arguello was 32, he sat on his boat in the ocean one morning and stared down the black shaft of a loaded automatic pistol. It was as good a place as any to die.

A.J. sat across from him, crying, begging him not to do it. Arguello cried too, saying that he must. There was no other sound except the ocean lapping at the boat, on which was painted THE CHAMP.

Arguello ached from the contradiction of his life, the way it lurched between opposites. Could it be that the distance between opposites was-nothing? So much seemed incomprehensible. No cause was pure, no motive clean, no external thing could be trusted. Everything a man needed to believe in in order to feel secure, life could rub his face again and again until he understood its opposite might also be true.

No resolution is possible in this life, a voice suggested. No, he cried-as long as he held this gun to his head, one resolution was possible.

[MattyIceVA]

One hell of a fighter thats for sure. In one of the fights of the century.

[Freakshow]

Well, at least according to Deadspin, he tried to kill himself back in the 80s too

Link (http://deadspin.com/5305779/alexis-arguellos-death-prefigured)

but on the flip side:

Plus, there were flings with Lady Cocaine and other ladies of the night, bouts of depression and at least one flirtation with suicide by gunshot as he sat in a rowboat with his young son in 1984.

If Alexis Arguello didn't pull the trigger that day, there's no way he did it yesterday, not after having pulled his life together once again so spectacularly - more than 20 years after fighting in the jungles of Nicaragua for the Contras, Arguello was elected mayor of Managua only last November.

And over so trivial and nebulous a matter as, according to one report, suspicions of "improper financial dealings?'' Preposterous.


and he continues

I sat next to him one night in Miami, where he was living at the time, watching his old nemesis-turned-good friend Pryor was fighting a journeyman named Bobby Joe Young. Pryor took a bad beating and at one point was so out of it that after absorbing one crushing right, he took a knee and began making the sign-of-the-cross.

I turned to look at Arguello and he was crying. He climbed into the ring even before they stopped the fight and grabbed the man who had viciously stopped him twice in a protective embrace. He wanted to make sure that Pryor would not get hit again that night.

I can't believe a man with a heart like that would ever put a bullet into it. The Alexis Arguello I knew would have found a way to fight back even when common sense said the fight was over.

Wallace Matthews column (http://www.newsday.com/sports/custom/boxing/ny-spwallyweb0212936801jul01,0,4606048.column)