Arguello Tries to Turn Back the Rolex : Ex-Champion Re-Seeks Fame and Fortune . . . Mostly Fortune

For Alexis Arguello, life is just one big lost-and-found. He loses something, a fortune for example, and he simply and naively steps forward to reclaim it. “I seem to have misplaced my wealth,” he might say. “Has anybody stumbled across five homes that do not seem familiar to them?”

Or: “Perhaps you could return my Rolex. Has it been seen? Has anybody recovered my place in history, my son, my country, my yacht, my dignity, my self-confidence, my Mercedes, my self-respect? I wonder if I might have them back?”

Isn’t that what he will be doing Sunday when, after a two-year retirement and a tune-up fight, he steps into the ring with another former champion, Billy Costello? Isn’t he showing up at the lost-and-found, yet one more time, looking for the things he has either thrown away or simply misplaced?

It’s what he always does.

For such a winner--he has held three boxing titles and been acclaimed the classic fighter of our time--Arguello’s life curiously is one of loss, epic losses that stir the imagination. And equally epic recoveries, true miracles at life’s lost-and-found.

In 1979, already a two-time champion and wealthy in proportion to his achievements, he was banished from his homeland. The Sandinistas, who had misinterpreted his Nicaraguan politics, seized his two houses, his Mercedes, his BMW, his boat and his bank account. Smuggled through the Panama Canal, he arrived in Miami with nothing more valuable in his pockets than his fists.

But what is it to reclaim your wealth? It is nothing when you are but 27 and your balled hands still have a leaden quality. He won yet another title, and by the time he was to engage Aaron Pryor in 1982, moving up to challenge for a fourth title--ring history--he was already among Miami’s landed gentry. And this was before income of $4 million in 1983 alone.

Rich again. Arguello says he disdains property. But his ambivalence is obvious; his trappings grew immense. He had a $250,000 yacht, five homes for himself and his family, a Mercedes, a BMW, his own corporation. Not to forget the $15,000 Rolex. Such trappings presumably made his retirement, mandated by the two brutal beatings he absorbed by Pryor, comfortable. Certainly he enjoyed his life of leisure. Wine and women, he admits with some shame now, were the least of his intoxicants.

And then, mysteriously, those trappings were gone, too. There was, at the very least, mismanagement. His corporation, a business that apparently served other purposes than Arguello’s, somehow frittered his wealth away. Tax liens lay unopened on unmanned desks. So it was that this time the country that seized his assets was the United States. But the difference was that the IRS didn’t just take everything, no. It levied back taxes of $600,000 as well. He was not simply broke, but in debt.

So it is that Arguello fights Sunday with the same elemental desperation that he fought in 1968, when he began. He fights to put food on the table, to survive, to reclaim what is his.

The official fight camp theme is “Four the Hard Way,” alluding to Arguello’s comeback, which is meant to end with a junior-welterweight title fight down the way, his fourth championship. It’s on the T-shirts being sold in the Coronado Room of the El Dorado Hotel, where Arguello trains daily. At press conferences he stands in his tuxedo and argues his quest for ring immortality. Nobody has ever won four boxing titles. This comeback is undertaken for the sake of history.

Still, it is no secret, in camp or out, that Arguello has a purer motivation than that. “He’s coming back for the money,” says Bill Miller, his manager and long-time agent. “Ring history, that sounds nice. But this is about money. Once you have it, I guess, you feel differently about it.”

Why else return to the grind of training, to arenas of violence. Especially now that Arguello knows of his own mortality.

We cannot forget the looks on his face after Pryor twice knocked him out. In the first knockout, coming after a fabulous 14 rounds, the valiant Arguello’s face was inexpressive, horrifyingly so. It was several minutes before he was even revived. The second knockout, after 10 rounds in their 1983 fight, was an improvement for Arguello as he at least remained conscious. Still, to see him on the seat of his pants, his eyes reflecting a tremendous resignation, was scary in its own way. It was the look of a man finally convinced of his own failure.

You can be sure that Arguello does not want to be here. But the sad fact of it is, he doesn’t belong anywhere else.

“From the time he was 15,” Miller explains, “he was a pro fighter. There was always someone around, telling him when to eat, when to run. He had no responsibility. Go to the fights and knock somebody out, that was it. Then, all of a sudden, he’s not a fighter anymore. He has nothing to do. You can only go fishing so much.”

But what of these business interests, overseen by longtime manager Eduardo Roman, the man who had discovered Arguello as a teen-ager, made him what he is. Well, they were entirely in Roman’s hands, for better or worse. “Alexis is not a CPA,” Miller gently reminds. “He can get dressed up and go to the office. And then he says, ‘Now what do we do?”’

In fact, the business interests were not going so well. The evidence would suggest, as Miller says, “they were, at the very least, mismanaged.” The IRS finally announced an end to the modest empire, brought down by who knows what. Arguello doesn’t want to know. “I said to press Roman on this,” Miller says. “And you know what he says? He says he doesn’t want to embarrass him. He still loves him.”

So why not box, that’s his trade. Miller said go run, “do something Spartan” before he decided. Arguello ran. So Miller put him through a battery of tests, physical and psychological. The doctors were impressed. He was tested on a treadmill and did 18 minutes with his heart beating 120 times a minute. Most athletes bail out at 10 minutes.

Longtime trainer Eddie Futch was equally impressed. “I was skeptical,” he says. “I thought it was an exercise in futility. After a two-year layoff, after seeing him in the second fight with Pryor, I thought he’d had it, he was all done. When I went to see him, I didn’t expect to find anything. But it was like he never left.”

So why not box, especially as retirement, a confusing time, seemed to put him more at risk than Pryor ever did.

There are things you can lose besides just your fortune. You can lose your family. Arguello’s notion of retirement was vague, but it certainly included beautiful women and cocaine. “I’m a normal human being,” he protests, “in the limelight. I thought it was a lot of fun--the women, the cocaine.”

His wife, Loretto, did not enjoy it, and she and their son moved out.

Alone, Arguello hatched other plans. He would return to Nicaragua and fight with the Contras. It was another well-intentioned but vague and ultimately disappointing plan. “I feel sorry I went there,” he says. “I learned that nobody is interested in winning the war. They are interested in making money.”

The tragedy was brought home to him, seeing a friend ripped by machine-gun fire in front of him and knowing that the death probably meant nothing. “He was in a war that didn’t even belong to him,” Arguello said.

Arguello returned, his idealism ripped from him. Retirement was not what it was cracked up to be. He couldn’t even be an elder statesman.

Still, the good times rolled. Not all his money was mismanaged by business associates. “I spent a lot,” he says cheerfully. The Miami economy was in good hands, until the night his 11-year-old boy, then staying with him, asked what the white powder was. “That,” Arguello decided, “was no good.”

Retirement was rougher than he expected, for sure. The call from his accountant was merely a finishing punch. Arguello was out on his feet when the knockout blow came. So why not box in an arena he felt comfortable in, against opponents he could see?

Why not, indeed. The comeback was made official in Anchorage, Alaska, last October when he stopped a cutie named Pat Jefferson in five rounds. It wasn’t the knockout that impressed Arguello’s handlers so much as the fact that Arguello was blocking everything thrown by the kind of slick fighter who can make someone rusty look real rusty.

His handlers were heartened, but Arguello, curiously, is not exactly bubbling with confidence. In public, he handles himself confidently, modest but yet forceful--the old pro come back to reclaim what belongs to him. Still there is a strange self-doubt about him.

The other day, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Lowell Cohn was stood up by Arguello, even though arrangements for an interview had been made in advance. Miller pressed Arguello to meet with the reporter but only pressed so far. Miller said he was afraid Arguello was just looking for a reason to back out of the fight. He didn’t want to give him one.

Then again the other day, after a workout, Arguello paused in front of Mort Sharnik of CBS, which is televising the fight, and asked, “Do you think I can do it?” It seemed as if he really wanted to know.

Arguello is closing in on 34. He has created fabulous fortunes but, ultimately, lost them. He has won 79 fights in 85, including three world titles, and knocked out 64 of his opponents. But he also suffered two of boxing’s most memorable beatings. It’s true that in America you can reinvent the future, equally true that you can not deny the past.

They tell this story about Arguello. When the IRS demanded that his fortune be liquidated, Arguello willingly put everything on the table, everything but his Rolex watch, which he couldn’t bare to leave behind. He loved that watch, wore it everywhere.

He even wore it in the water. It happened that the Miller beer people gathered all their celebrity/athletes for a Caribbean cruise last year. Arguello and his Rolex watch were there. Arguello even wore the watch while water-skiing. But then, somehow, it was ripped from his wrist and sank to the ocean bottom. Arguello was so disconsolate that Miller chipped in to buy a new one.

Arguello wears that watch today; it’s visible under the cuff of his tuxedo. It reminds him of what he lost and must find again.