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Boxers, like recently paroled felons, often have difficulty adjusting to the “outside” when their careers are over, and in this respect, Jordan was no different. He struggled with alcoholism, divorced for a second time, and found it difficult to make a living. “I went from job to job,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970, “I was a swamper in a produce market, a machinist in the shipyards, and a carpet layer. I found there were more people in public against me than there were when I was fighting.”

A few steady years working for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica were followed by a stint as a longshoreman in Wilmington. It was there, in the rugged waterfront district of Southern California, that Jordan was savagely beaten during a robbery on September 30, 1996. Two thugs attacked Jordan in broad daylight and left him for dead in a parking lot. He lingered in a coma for nearly five months before dying on February 13, 1997. He was sixty-two years old. Two men suspected of the murder were later released due to insufficient evidence. His senseless and tragic death was a fitting exclamation point to the unruly life of a boxer who once muttered the bleakest of aphorisms: “But all man knows when he fights he must lose.”

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