Life'll Kill Ya: Bizarre Boxing Deaths

From the President of the United States
To the lowliest rock and roll star
The doctor is in and he'll see you now
He don't care who you are
Some get the awful, awful diseases
Some get the knife, some get the gun
Some get to die in their sleep
At the age of a hundred and one

Life'll kill ya
That's what I said
Life'll kill ya
Then you'll be dead
Life'll find ya
Wherever you go
Requiescat in pace
That's all she wrote

-Warren Zevon, "Life'll Kill Ya"

They go in threes, the old sages say.

Dead celebrities, fallen rock stars, debauched Hollywood stars, crooked politicians, aging sports icons; all parts of our celebrity obsessed culture, but a celeb's strange demise always lights the fire of the public, ravenous for every bit of gossip about their celluloid heroes.

Dirty laundry. Death voyeurs. Long dirt naps.

And of course everyone has that same human feeling, or failing, that I'm damn glad I wasn't doomed to die today.

Hang on to that ticket, sonny, don't worry, everyone's Styx is stewing. The train is coming round the bend for sure; just some tickets are punched quicker, and stranger, than others.

Boxing had its trio of "gone too soon stars" in the last few weeks.

Alexis Arguello, the man who battled the Hawk Pryor, died by suicide in Nicaragua.

But life and politics along the old Mosquito Coast can be nasty, brutish, and short, so it's whispered the shot through the heart which slew the Explosive Thin man might have been fired by another party, disenchanted with Arguello's politics.

Like the Ring, Revolutions are known to eat their own.

Arturo Gatti certainly met the reaper in a strange way. The fighter was found strangled by his wife's purse strings in a hotel room in Brazil.

The 21-year-old widow says suicide. The authorities say she is a Brazilian Black Widow. The man who gave us so many memorable fights checked out in a bizarre way, and when the police in Pernambuco put the puzzle together, it will surely get stranger.

Vernon Forrest, a champion who gave so very much back to his community, was in the end slain by members of it.

Robbed while fixing a flat, the fighter made a fatal choice and followed his thief down a dark alley. Gun in hand, Forrest chased the cretins.

Gunfire sliced the shadows of a dark alley. The Champ, Vernon the Viper, down and dead in an Atlanta alley. Eight shots in the back and head.

More than any other sport, boxers have met bizarre and savage ends.

The great Stanley Ketchel, perhaps the best middle weight of them all, was laid low by a single .22 slug in his back. Fired, as a sports writer said, by the common law husband of the women cooking him breakfast.

Ketchel had grown up hard and mean. Fighting in Montana mining towns and brutal western saloons before hard-eyed men with guns, but the "Michigan Assassin" was assassinated in Missouri, shot dead over his eggs at 24.

Both husband and wife were convicted of Ketchel's murder and many considered it a premeditated robbery, not a crime of passion. Either way, Ketchel was down for the count, dying, at last, on a final desperate train trip to find a miracle worker of a doctor to save the champ.

Harry Greb, the violent Human Windmill, was one of the greatest fighters in history. A middleweight, he was the only man to ever beat heavyweight champ Gene Tunney.

And he beat him viciously leaving, Tunney a bloody mess. Greb was a vicious attacking fighter who knew every nasty trick in the deep, dark black book of boxing and enjoyed using them. Combined with superior defensive skills that rendered him near impossible to hit, Greb truly was a man-eating windmill in the ring.

The frightening thing was that Greb accomplished all of his many feats, despite being blind in one eye after getting badly thumbed early in his career.

His blindness was only revealed after Greb died at the age of 32 in an Atlantic City hospital, due to complications from an anesthetic during surgery to repair his nose, damaged in his many fights and car crashes.

Planes take their toll on not only rock stars, but also athletes. Boxers are no exception.

Marcel Cerdan was a beloved French middleweight who won the title from Tony Zale and lost it to the Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta.

While Cerdan trained for the rematch with LaMotta, he decided to hop a plane from Paris to New York to hear his mistress Edith Piaf sing.

The plane went down in the Azores and the married famous fighter's ill-fated fling with the saucy songbird became world headlines, and later spawned a movie starring Cerdan's son as his own father.

Rocky Marciano retired as the only undefeated heavyweight champ and is considered one of the greatest heavyweights of all time.

The Rock, always on the lookout for more bucks, began a second career as a speaker and VIP for special appearances. This career would doom the man from Massachusetts.

On the eve of his 46th birthday, after a stormy fight with his wife, the Rock decided to book a late flight to Iowa to make a dinner appearance.

The weather was bad, it was night, and worse yet, his Cessna pilot had very little flight time and almost none at night.

The pilot's inexperience and Rocky's rush to Iowa would be a fatal combination. Low on fuel, confused by a night flight in stormy weather, the poorly prepared young pilot tried to make an emergency landing at a small airfield in Newton, Iowa.

The plane came up two miles short and was shattered by a tree. The Rock, who never lost his head in the ring, was decapitated and killed instantly.

Argentine heavyweight contender Oscar Bonavena, called "Ringo" because of his Beatles haircut, fought most of the great heavyweights of the Golden Era of the sixties and seventies.

Oscar also liked the ladies.  

One lady in particular, named Sally Burgess, Ringo especially liked: 26 years older than the fighter, and the wife of Joe Conforte, who owned the famous Mustang Ranch in Reno, Nevada.

Ringo lived and trained, if eating, drinking and whoring are considered training, on the grounds around the brothel and circulated among the "guests as a celebrity greeter and meeter."

Sally soon become his manager and Bonavena bragged that soon the Mustang ranch would be his.

Mister Conforte begged to differ and banned Bonavena and Sally.

Bonavena raged and returned, roaring at the locked gate.

A shot rang out. A 30.06 shot straight through the heart dropped Ringo dead. The Argentine Strong Boy had a .38 in his boot, a bullet in his heart, and the Big Sleep in  Argentina ahead.

A Mustang Ranch guard was convicted and served 15 months for the slaying.

Sally went back to Joe. Ringo was shipped south and laid in state as 150,000 sad-eyed Argentines shuffled passed the pugilists remains.

Then there's Battling Siki, the colorful Senegalese light heavyweight champion and French veteran of the Great War who loved to carousel the night clubs of Paris and New York with his string of women, a pair of revolvers, and two massive Great Danes trained to dance to the sound of their owners gunfire.

Battling Siki's last battle was fought in mysterious circumstances. After leaving a Gotham speakeasy, staggering drunk, Siki was found dead at 28 in an alley, two bullets in his back.

Many of the doomed fighters' ends were sudden and violent.

The last man to fight Muhammad Ali, troubled Trevor Berbick, was beaten to death with a lead pipe by his nephew and two friends in his native Jamaica.

Sergei Kobozev, the Russian Cruiserweight, was murdered by Russian mobsters in New York and buried in New Jersey.

Al "Bummy" Davis grew up on the same tough Brownsville streets that formed the infamous Murder Incorporated in the 1940's. Davis, who made the Ring Magazine list of the 100 greatest punchers of all time, was murdered when attempting to stop four armed men from robbing a bar he was drinking in.

Bummy took three bullets in the bar and was chasing the gunman down the street when the fourth and fatal one found the fighter.

And what of the mystery of the Night Train, Sonny Liston?

Did the Night Train check out from an accidental overdose? An intentional overdose? Or a hot shot of heroin stuck in his arm by men sent to murder him?

Liston was the last heavyweight champ in deep with mobsters and their seedy ilk. The Bear was also rumored to be involved with some very bad things in Las Vegas.

So what happened to the Night Train?

We will never know.

But his epitaph, carved in his tombstone, speaks for all those who checked out early.

"A Man."