Goodnight, Hawk: Aaron Pryor 1955-2016
“a parable on how little people valued poor people”
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Fighters have had a greater importance in disadvantaged communities because they are a manifestation of the counter-punches they want to land on oppressive structures. Their narratives--where they came from, and how society responds to them when they become nationally known figures--become intensified. Because their events are so personal and singular, staged in large arenas, prone to a physicality more suited for grand theater, their memories linger longer than almost any team sports athletes. Their successes and failures conflate in a narrative in which the world is stacked against them.
Aaron “The Hawk” Pryor might not have had the grandest narrative of any boxer in the 20th century, and he might not have been the most known fighter. In the Black communities I grew up in (and the drug infested housing project of Hillside Terrace) no fighter’s story resonated more. Pryor was the most openly “ghetto” athlete in the early 80’s, a wounded street kid who didn’t have any crossover social graces, an easy mark for respectability politicans who wanted to make cheap moralist statements about the blacks. Pryor didn’t have any trait to make people forget that he came from the most haunting of backgrounds, and it became easier for people to just shame him.
It also became easier to forget--and I’m speaking of his sober prime of the 80’s--that he was one of the greatest fighters in the last 50 years. Even his style was intellectually discounted: basic fight critics only saw a wild volume of punches of every round, but beneath it was a frenetic sense of theory. Using his boxing skills, movement and footwork, Pryor threw every punch from an unorthodox angle. In boxing, the hardest punches are the ones you don’t see coming, and what made Pryor devastating was that everything that came from him was a surprise.
What made Pryor’s story devastating was his fall. He became most known for his fights with Alexis Arguello, a brilliant fighter most known for his sportsmanship and own horrific upbringing. Their first fight was one of the greatest fights the sport has ever seen. Their second fight, Pryor put on one of the greatest performances the sport has ever seen. Immediately afterword, people were finally comparing him to one of the greatest fighters of all time. A few days afterword (in Pryor’s own words) he tried freebase cocaine. Five years later he was homeless and mentally ill.
Yet his fall was so public, so examined, and in so many stages filled with people who would rather take pictures of his decline than try to get him into rehab, that it was impossible for people who have had their lives affected by drugs to feel for him. In the crack era, when public policy amounted to nothing but mass incarceration and public shaming of poor people, Pryor’s fall became something more than just about Aaron Pryor. His story, morality porn for so many people, became a parable on how little people valued poor people, and how disingenuous people are when we fall.
But dear god, Pryor didn’t stay down. After his frightening 10-year decent into drug addiction, Pryor got clean, got the family love he never received as a young person, and spent the last 23 years a model father, grandfather, and citizen. The beautiful irony of his last act was that it was so tranquilly private, peerless, and un-shameable that it couldn’t help but force the sporting public to reexamine his legacy. He spent the last years of his life recognized by so many people as (next to Sugar Ray Leonard) the greatest American fighter since Muhammad Ali. More than that, he spent them happy, and loved.
Good night, Hawk. The streets loved you even when you were on the ground. May we jack Gabriel trumpets and blow happy sounds on you getting back up and flying home.
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Header image courtesy of Dan Witz. To view a gallery of his painting, go here.
