Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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Panama Lewis would go on to serve a prison sentence for removing the padding from the gloves of Luis Resto in a 1983 fight against Billy Collins Jr. “I had seen Panama Lewis getting to do this with Aaron one time,” recalls Frankie Sims, former co-trainer of Pryor. “He was getting ready to cut the inside of the gloves and take the pads out. I looked right at him and shook my head. ‘Don't do that man.’ He knew I was dead serious, and so he didn't cut out the pads, but he was very crooked in my opinion. He didn't help Aaron's reputation at all.”

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Pryor essentially trained himself for the rematch with Arguello in 1983. Sparring numberless rounds sans headgear, Pryor was hospitalized for a thunderous migraine. Under-conditioned, surrounded by chaos, and already battling a drug addiction that would leave him on the brink of death more than once, Pryor battered Arguello in Las Vegas, scoring a tenth-round TKO and leaving the limelight for a life on the margins.

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After being introduced to crack by his wife, Pryor spent the next ten years in a perpetual haze. A Sports Illustrated profile in 1985 revealed Pryor, death-in-life, gray and skeletal, his surroundings as dreary as those of a drifter wandering the streets from day to dire day. For Pryor, nothing mattered now except the rush. He placed his life and his career on a funeral pyre. “Miami is the drug capital of the U.S. There are drugs at every other door. Living in that environment, I reached out for some help,” Pryor recalled. “My wife had divorced me. I was so hurt by rumors of the black bottle that I had no energy. I reached out and certain people did not give me their right hand. They gave me drugs.”