MIAMI — For most of Alexis Arguello’s life as a three-division world champion, “home” was a foreign concept. Yet few knew a classier guest, whether as a Nicaraguan exile living in Miami or as a boxer beating people up in places where “hostile environment” meant winning the fight only started the battle for survival.

That’s the tidy summary. That covers much of what boxing fans in the 1970s and ’80s knew of Arguello. Those Arguello memories spur today’s coverage, including what you’re reading now.
Few people are so two-dimensional. Almost by definition, such neatness falls incomplete when discussing a 57-year-old man who made and lost at least two fortunes; flip-flopped like a fish on the bottom of a hot canoe when it came to politics; had several marriages; and reportedly almost committed suicide in a 20-year span.
Arguello died on Wednesday in Managua of a gunshot wound to the chest.
So, as it is with many athletes and entertainers whose public lives bleed over into the messy worlds of politics or crime, it comes down to if you separate or how you separate. What do you choose to remember best? Or do you remember it all and accept it for what it is?
Whatever demons — his own and those masquerading as his friends — rapidly razed the plush life he had built in Miami, whatever shadiness dogged his election as Managua’s mayor last year, and whatever problems he had with his own family do not change his comprehensive brilliance in the ring and his comportment out of it during his championship years.
Boxing fans often fall into three categories: those who claim affinity for the great technicians, those who love the destruction wrought by sluggers and those who snootily claim to be the former because they’re too uncomfortable with being the latter. Arguello satiated all three groups.
His tough chin and jab would get him through the early rounds while he analyzed his opponent.
Then, those skinny arms would start punching at a seemingly stately pace but obviously moving fast enough to land explosive blows.
Once Arguello got an opponent hurt, the almost aristocratic boxer became the executioner.
He carried his power from featherweight to junior lightweight to lightweight. Only when he moved up to junior welterweight and faced Aaron Pryor in their 1982 Orange Bowl fight did he find himself without enough bop in his gloves. In the 13th round, he smashed Pryor with a right hand that nearly bounced the back of Pryor’s head off his rhomboid muscles.
That and the Joe Frazier left hook that had Muhammad Ali wobbling in six different directions at once during the 11th round of their 1971 fight are the two hardest punches I have seen that didn’t result in a knockdown. The next round, Pryor rocked Arguello and pounced with 23 consecutive punches. Arguello dropped, ending what Ring Magazine rated as the 1982 Fight of the Year and the Fight of the Decade of the 1980s.
Ironically, that loss was one of Arguello’s few big fights as the hometown fighter. He won the featherweight title against Mexican Ruben Oliveras in Los Angeles, which might as well be North Mexico on fight nights. “Rockabye Ruben” got a left hook lullaby from Arguello in the 13th round.
BIG VICTORIES
He took out Alfredo Escalera in Puerto Rico for the junior lightweight and solidly decisioned Scot Jim Watt in London for the lightweight title. And he left each place almost as popular with the locals as the fighter he beat.
Arguello was the antidote to an era of many bad Ali imitators. Ali trash-talked opponents, but, with the large exception of Joe Frazier and Ernie Terrell, it was hard to ignore the twinkle in his eyes and voice. Most successors who followed with Ali’s words possessed no twinkle to leaven the meanness. They just sounded nastily belligerent.
Arguello, who grew up poor, comported himself as a prince who recalled what it was like to be a pauper. No smack talk about an opponent. No critical words about the city, fight officials or anything around the fight, no matter how aligned with the opponent they might seem. Service industry or high roller, Arguello treated all with the same etiquette.
A ROLE MODEL
No matter what else Arguello meant to anybody else, in this way at that time, he was unsurpassed as a role model for athletes.
That’s the part of him most of us will remember.