Aaron "The Hawk"
Pryor

October 20, 1955. Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. October is Aaron Pryor’s month, and it is the Blotter’s month for him. He was one of seven children raised by his mother, Sara Shelery, a strong-willed woman who ran a house of seven on a 9 p.m. curfew and enforced it. His father was not part of his childhood, and Pryor was 17 when he learned who his father was. He grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city and never hid it. “I grew up in a poor section of Cincinnati and I’ve been on welfare,” he said. What he built, he built himself, starting with a gym on Race Street.

That is where the toughness came from. At 13, in 1968, he was already fighting in the street, and an instructor who saw him invited him into the Emanuel Center on Race Street. Pryor walked in and asked to be matched with someone. The gym gave him a different kind of structure: rules, a clean sport, a goal. “My family would drink and have parties,” he said. “I would always go to the gym because I hated that.” Muhammad Ali was his hero. He followed fights on the radio when he wasn’t training, and he fought with a non-stop, punch-a-second style. Frankie Sims, who worked his corner, said of him, “He was relentless. He was fearless and he fought with a desire.” Pryor later put it in five words: “I was fighting for nothing.” A kid with nothing to lose and nowhere else to be fought like it.

The foundation is documented. He went 204–16 as an amateur, won the National AAU lightweight title in 1973 and 1975, took silver at the 1975 Pan American Games, and beat Thomas Hearns in the final of the 1976 National Golden Gloves. He lost to Howard Davis Jr. at the 1976 Olympic Trials, a result the record still calls controversial, and went to Montreal as an alternate. He turned pro that November with a second-round knockout. He finished 39–1 with 35 knockouts, and his only defeat came at welterweight, 29 months after his last fight and long after the best of him had been spent. At junior welterweight he never lost.

On August 2, 1980, in his home town, he knocked out Antonio Cervantes in four rounds and took the WBA junior welterweight title. He made 11 title fights from there and won all 11, nine of them by stoppage. On November 12, 1982, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, he met Alexis Argüello, a 12–5 favorite who was trying to become the first man to win titles in four weight divisions. It went 14 rounds. Pryor stopped him with nearly twenty unanswered punches and Argüello refused to fall until the referee stepped in. The Ring named it the Fight of the Decade. He knocked Argüello out in ten in the rematch on September 9, 1983, after dropping him three times.

The bottle. The Blotter will not skip it. Between rounds 13 and 14 of the first fight, HBO microphones picked up trainer Panama Lewis asking for “the other bottle, the one I mixed.” Lewis said it held peppermint schnapps. Frankie Sims, Pryor’s earlier trainer, said it contained water, peppermint essence and spirits of ammonia, and told reporters, “There weren’t any drugs, but it was illegal.” No post-fight drug test was taken. Skeptics suspected a stimulant. Lewis later lost his license for a different offense, removing padding from the gloves of Luis Resto in 1983. None of that proves what was in the bottle. What the record shows is that Lewis mixed a drink for his fighter, that Sims himself called it illegal, that the result was never changed, and that Pryor then won the rematch by knockout in ten rounds with Emanuel Steward in his corner. The Blotter holds both: the corner crossed a line, and the fighter was the better man in the rematch.

Four Kings. Zero fights. Leonard, Hearns, Durán and Hagler are the names the decade is remembered by, and Pryor never fought one of them as a professional. The reasons are documented and they are not all the same. Leonard and Pryor sparred in 1979. Pryor’s early trainer said Pryor was getting the best of it in the third round; Leonard says it went both ways. A deal was signed for 1982, and then Leonard’s retina detached. Pryor said he pulled off the road and cried when he heard. Durán is a different story: a fight was proposed, a reported $750,000 deal came and went in the middle of Pryor’s promotional fights, and a 150-pound catchweight was discussed. Pryor himself reportedly turned down Leonard money in 1980. Hearns is the only one Pryor ever met in a ring, and Pryor won it, at the 1976 Golden Gloves. Hagler never came up.

So the Blotter makes no duck call here, and says why. The record shows injury, money and promoters. It does not show a king running from Aaron Pryor. What it shows is a 140-pounder who beat every man put in front of him, stayed at the weight that made him, and was never given the fight that would have measured him against the best of his era. That is a debt the sport owes him. The Four Kings have the greater legend, and Pryor was in the same decade, in the same sport, undefeated at 140, the entire time.

The fall came fast. Both men retired after the rematch. Pryor came back in 1984, won the first IBF junior welterweight title over Nick Furlano in Toronto, and survived a split decision over Gary Hinton in March 1985 before he was stripped for inactivity that December. A planned multimillion-dollar fight with Ray Mancini died when Livingstone Bramble beat Mancini, and promoter Bob Arum said Pryor cried. The cocaine had taken over. His 1987 comeback ended in the loss to Bobby Joe Young at welterweight. In 1990 he had surgery to repair a detached retina; three states refused to license him and Nevada found him legally blind in his left eye. Wisconsin licensed him with a waiver and he stopped Darryl Jones in three. His last fight was a seventh-round stoppage of Roger Choate on December 4, 1990.

What he did after the ring is part of the record. He stayed clean from 1993 until his death, became a deacon and then an associate minister at New Friendship Baptist Church, and trained fighters in Cincinnati, Adrien Broner among them. His son said it best: “He made his biggest comeback outside of the ring.” Aaron Pryor died at his home on October 9, 2016, eleven days before his 61st birthday.

The International Boxing Hall of Fame inducted him in 1996. The Ring ranked him among the greatest fighters of its first eight decades. He was at 140 pounds, undefeated, in the middle of the Four Kings era, and the Blotter says it out loud.