My obituary of Alexis Arguello, the boxer and mayor of Managua, is in today's Independent, you can find it here. The list of his survivors was left vague; I believe he was survived by his third wife Carla, but another paper identified a different wife as his widow; the local papers in Spanish referred to Carla, and the other woman was definitely his wife at the time of an excellent 1985 Sports Illustrated article by Gary Smith, profiling Arguello at a low point (link to it here).The question of murder vs suicide is an interesting one; most of the speculation was circumstantial, in that there were people who probably didn't want him investigated for corruption, and the shot to the chest is not necessarily the best way to shoot yourself. The death marked a strange triumverate with those of Steve McNair (shot by a girlfriend who then killed herself) and Arturo Gatti (apparently strangled and stabbed by his wife, who then spent the next ten hours alone in the hotel room with the corpse and their one year old son).
1 comment :
The first line of the obit is right on the money. He was a pleasure to watch and must have been an absolute terror to step into the ring against. Farewell to a class act.
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