How did I end up here?
That question ran through my head as I sat on Aaron Pryor’s sofa in Cincinnati, watching him excitedly search for HBO’s Legendary Nights episode about his rivalry with Alexis Arguello.
Only the night before I’d been sleeping in one of the worst hostels in America. Now I was sitting beside a Hall of Famer as he prepared to relive the greatest fight of his career.
This was crazy to me for several reasons.
One, that Legendary Nights series was arguably the height of my fandom and that particular episode was one of the best.
Two, I thought Pryor was a spectacular fighter and would have given any of the three smaller kings – Duran, Leonard and Hearns – more than a run for their money.
Thirdly, I’d met Arguello and found him to be, as everyone said, a class act.
Once Arguello knew I was okay by Pryor, I was absolutely fine by him.
(Author’s collection: With Alexis Arguello at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002)
I would love to say being in Cincinnati with Aaron was a pinch me moment, being there with Aaron, but I was, frankly, dumbstruck.
At 22, I had no idea how my love of boxing had carried me from a small village in the UK to moments like this.
*
Aaron Pryor had already done an interview with me at his kitchen table before he decided to put on the Legendary Nights episode.
Once that was playing, there was no going back. There was no pause on either the show or Pryor as he excitedly narrated his way through the entire show. He rode through the highs and lows like a kid watching a cartoon and as though he was seeing it all for the very first time, even though the actual fight had taken place in the Miami Orange Bowl in November 1982.
At the start, when the voiceover described Aaron as “a bad luck kid” and said “he always had everything against him,” he looked at me as if to say, “Watch this and see what I came through to get there.”
Then, there was a resigned look when he listened to experts saying he could never “be the matinee guy” or “the good guy.”
He could do little more than shrug.
There was a line in the programme when Pryor talked about fighting internationally as an amateur and wishing not only that he’d had some support on the way up, but that those closest to him had even realised he was gone.
That was something he’d said to me several times.
The story recounts some of Pryor’s great amateur lore. It shows a brief highlight of him defeating Tommy Hearns in the amateurs and promoter Butch Lewis tells the story of Ray Leonard choosing to move up in weight to compete in the 1976 Olympics rather than go through the trials and face Pryor.
Pryor, instead, got shafted in the trials and Howard Davis went on and won gold.
Pryor looked sombre as the talking heads on the show recounted the details.
“When he saw them get the big contracts and the money,” said childhood friend Steve Reece. “It broke his heart…. He always felt he belonged in that class.”
One of Pryor’s first jobs after the Olympics was over was as a sparring partner… for Davis.
“I was sparring him for $500 a week, I beat him up a couple of times, I lost my job,” he sighed.
Pryor was on about $2,000 a fight while those who’d made it onto network TV draped in gold were getting the seven-figure treatment.
Pryor was a tough inner-city kid.
“What time is it?” he cried wherever he went.
“Hawk time,” replied the hangers-on.
He kept calling out Leonard, but was repeatedly resisted and when, after about seven minutes of the show, Arguello is introduced by Bert Sugar as the marquee name Pryor had needed to legitimise his claim of being one of the sport’s best fighters, Pryor almost welled up in front of me in a clear mark of his respect for the great Nicaraguan.
But, come the fight, Aaron’s gaze steadied at what was before him.
He stared down the great four-weight champion and – as he did in the ring – pointed a fist in the direction of Arguello. We were a quarter of a century on and he and Alexis were now firm friends, but he was coming for him.
**
