The Daniels contest may have been a slip for Clay, but it was no knockdown. He had won, and his undefeated record stood fast. All he needed to continue his ascent was a convincing victory over a contender. With his keen sense for fighters just beginning their decline, Angelo Dundee accepted an offer against Alejandro Lavorante in Los Angeles.
In November 1961, Lavorante, bare-chested, his fists up in a fighter’s pose, appeared on the cover of The Ring. In the accompanying feature story, Nat Fleischer made him seem like the future of the division. Pinky George, his American manager, asserted that the twenty-five-year-old was ready to fight anyone. “This is the year of the astronaut,” he told the magazine’s editor. “Everyone is shooting for the moon. We’re doing the same.”3
It wasn’t all hyperbole. Lavorante knocked out highly rated Zora Folley and became a ranked contender. But he fought too often and was brought along too fast. On March 30, 1962, former light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore gave Lavorante a cruel boxing lesson. Struggling to compete, swallowing too much of his own blood, the Argentine boxer absorbed a frightful beating. After the referee stopped the bout in the tenth round, Lavorante slumped to the ropes and had to be taken to his dressing room on a stretcher.4
Less than four months after the defeat, Lavorante was back in the ring against a younger, stronger, better-conditioned boxer than ancient Archie Moore. He was at a crossroads. A loss to Clay would be more significant, indicating that his career was sinking, and boxing insiders recognized it. “When two fighters are on the way up, they avoid each other as scrupulously as two women wearing the same dress at a party,” wrote Jim Murray. Before the Moore fight, Angelo Dundee would have never matched Cassius against Lavorante. But Archie had exposed him, and it was clear to Dundee that “the tango was over” for the Argentine.5
Clay dominated the bout from the opening bell. He staggered Lavorante in the second, opened a cut over his left eye in the fourth, and knocked him down twice in the fifth. Sprawled wide-legged on the canvas after the second knockdown, the Argentine took a full ten count.6
Lavorante rose slowly but recovered before heading back to the dressing room. His manager was grim. A few days before the contest, Pinky George had commented that the fight was critical to his boxer’s future. “It’s back to the minors if we lose,” he predicted.7
Two months after losing to Clay he fought Johnny Riggins, a preliminary boxer who had lost seven of his previous nine matches. In the sixth round Riggins landed a series of punches, the final one a vicious uppercut that twisted Lavorante’s brain stem, causing threadlike veins to hemorrhage. His head swiveled violently and his eyes rolled to the tops of the sockets. He did not so much fall as crumble, finally coming to rest in an awkward sitting position against the lower rope, his head dropping in a sleeping position toward his chest and his arms falling lifeless into his lap.8
An ambulance rushed Lavorante to California Lutheran Hospital, and a surgeon operated immediately to remove blood clots and relieve pressure on his brain. But the fighter never recovered. He sank into a coma, and on April Fool’s Day 1964, nineteen months after his last boxing match, he died. He had arrived in America just over four years before. An overly ambitious manager had filled his head with dreams of shooting for the moon, but in the ring, Alejandro Lavorante was like “a child playing in traffic, a blind man heading for a cliff.” And rather than intervening, “people PAID to see it.”9
THE FATE OF Alejandro Lavorante epitomized the state of boxing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the years between the emergence of Joe Louis in 1935 and the retirement of Rocky Marciano in 1956, the sport luxuriated in a golden age of great fighters and matches, enormous attention and popularity, and million-dollar gates. When World War II ended, television, just in its infancy, fell in love with pugilism, and by the mid-1950s a fight was being broadcast virtually every night of the week. As comedian Red Skelton quipped, “The Monday fight, scheduled for Tuesday this Wednesday, has been postponed till Thursday and rescheduled for Friday this Saturday because Sunday’s a holiday.”10