Former Boxer, Once a Champ, Now in a Coma After Beating

In his day, he was one of the most graceful fighters around. A boxer of such natural talent that he not only won the world welterweight championship but drew notice in a division once dominated by the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson.

But if Don Jordan was destined for greatness, he could not sustain it. And like many a champion, his fall from grace was painfully slower than his ascent, the later rounds of his life sometimes punishing.

Once, he fought in Madison Square Garden. Once, he so ruled the 147-pound division that many expected his reign to last longer than the two years it did.

But then there were accusations that he went soft, didn’t try, and even took a dive against a lesser opponent. Mob figures were indicted on charges of trying to “muscle in” on his earnings. And the specter of corruption so angered him that he turned over all of his $50,000 purse from a Las Vegas fight to Mickey Cohen before ordering the mobster out of his dressing room.

The glory days for the onetime Geronimo Kid were so fleeting that they must have seemed as hazy as the fog that blankets the tough waterfront community of Wilmington.

It was there that the 62-year-old former boxing champion lived in quiet dignity and worked happily as a longshoreman in recent years. It was also where he was left for dead last week after what may be his life’s final indignity--a savage beating in broad daylight that put him in a coma.

“What can I say . . . I am just speechless,” said Danny De La’O, 66, who met Jordan in 1946 when the two were amateur boxers in Los Angeles. “I knew he wasn’t the kind of guy who went around looking for trouble.”

Jordan was found about 3 p.m. on Sept. 30 in a parking lot near the longshoremen’s hall on Broad Avenue and D Street. It would have been easy to assume he was just another anonymous victim of the neighborhood’s dicey streets.

Taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Jordan was admitted to the intensive care unit, where he remains in critical condition. A hospital official declined to discuss his injuries or prospects of recovery, but authorities, friends and family say he is on a life-support system.

“It’s a tragedy,” Jordan’s ex-wife, Lupe, said Wednesday.

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Because of the severity of Jordan’s beating, his case was turned over to the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide bureau, where detectives say they have a number of leads, including witnesses. They say a robbery might have prompted the attack, in which a weapon was used, perhaps a pipe.

When he first saw Jordan last week, De La’O recalled, “The only thing I could say was . . . ‘Don, how in the heck could you get yourself into this?’ ”

One of 22 children, Jordan grew up in East Los Angeles. He was 24 when he parlayed a sturdy chin, powerful hands and a dancer’s finesse to win boxing’s welterweight title in 1958.

In winning the crown, Jordan overwhelmed Virgil Akins of St. Louis in a December match in Los Angeles. Five months later, with some convinced his earlier victory was a fluke, Jordan held a rematch before Akins’ hometown crowd. Again, he beat Akins decisively, this time proving himself a puncher as well as a boxer.

“Jordan survived everything,” John De La Vega, then The Times’ boxing writer, wrote of the second fight. “He was all champion.”

But in September 1959, five boxing world figures were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of trying to extort money from Jordan’s earnings. The same month, his boxing license in California was suspended when he failed to appear for a physical exam. And the State Athletic Commission made it clear it was concerned about more than Jordan’s health. “We want to know why Jordan persists in palling around with [the late mobster] Mickey Cohen,” a commission officer said.

The prospect of being banned from the sport haunted Jordan.

After one fight in Las Vegas, when a TV camera caught Cohen going into Jordan’s dressing room, the boxer confronted the mobster, according to family and friends.

“He told me he gave Mickey Cohen the $50,000 [he won from the fight],” De La’O said. “He told him, ‘Now get the hell out of my dressing room and leave me alone.’ ”

By early 1960, with his personal life in disarray and his professional life tainted by scandals with boxing’s underworld, Jordan’s career went into a tailspin.

“He had great natural ability but abused it” by drinking and not training, fight manager Jack McCoy said in a 1987 interview with The Times about Jordan, the first of McCoy’s five world champion boxers. Jordan did not object at the time to McCoy’s assessment.

In 1960, Jordan lost the title in a Las Vegas bout in which, even as champion, he was a 3-1 underdog. Two years later, winless in other bouts, he returned to the Olympic Auditorium for the first time since he had been champion. But in the first round, he went down and never rose from the canvas in a fight that left the crowd screaming “Fix!” and the referee literally holding his nose, convinced that Jordan had taken a dive. Jordan was disqualified for “not trying” but an investigation failed to prove anything.

It was Jordan’s last fight.

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Ten years later, Jordan told The Times: “I left the sport with a bitter feeling. There was no fix on in my last fight and nobody wanted me to take a dive. I simply should not have taken the fight.”

His ex-wife Lupe said: “That’s a lie that he was fixing fights. There were some very unsavory characters around him at the time . . . and I think they killed [the sport] for him.”

In the 1970 interview with The Times, Jordan said bitterness about professional boxing had long since left him. After he left the sport, Jordan and Lupe, his second wife, lived in Compton with their three children. He worked in the tool repair division of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica after a string of jobs--from carpet layer to shipyard machinist--that never seemed to last. In 1970, he and Lupe divorced.

“People just couldn’t treat me as an ordinary man,” he said in 1970. “They thought I was a troublemaker because they believed a fighter would naturally have a terrible temper.”

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But in his years as a friend of Jordan, De La’O said, the opposite was true.

One time in a Compton bar, De La’O recalled, Jordan, who is African American, was called a racial epithet by a Latino. But while De La’O said he was outraged enough himself to finally confront and punch the bar patron, Jordan just ignored the man. “ ‘Danny, sit down,’ he told me. ‘I don’t want you wasting your time on that guy.’ ”

During the last decade, De La’O said, he lost touch with Jordan, who went to work on the docks with Local 13 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

But he would still hear stories about Jordan from mutual friends.

Buddy Azpeitia, 65, a longshoreman from Carson, recalled how he would drive home just before midnight and would see Jordan making the three-hour walk to work across the arching span of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.

“He never drove. He always walked everywhere,” said Lupe, recalling that Jordan, who quit smoking and drinking 20 years ago, remained in good shape.

And fearless.

Although friends and family would often urge him to move away from the seedy hotels and dangerous neighborhoods that were his home the past 10 years, Jordan listened politely but never obliged--even after he fought off a mugger seven years ago at the harbor.

“He always lived in a rough area. It’s unfortunate,” Lupe said. “But Donald had no fear. He always felt that if [money] is what they want, they can have it.”

Only days before Jordan was attacked, Azpeitia said, he dropped Jordan off at the local post office and again urged him to move to a safer place.

But Jordan said he didn’t plan to stay in the neighborhood forever. He would move away, he said, once he retired as a longshoreman next year.

“ ‘I got one more round left,’ ” Azpeitia said his friend told him. “And we just laughed.”