EVERETT — As a boy he loved baseball, and he was a pure power hitter right from the start. The ball just jumped off his bat, and by his senior season at Monroe High School major league scouts were showing up to see him play.
Even then, Ibar Arrington was known as a slugger.
Later, with his baseball career stalled by four years in the Navy, Arrington, who now lives in Minot, N.D., ended up in boxing, another sport he’d tried as a youngster. Now he was a power hitter of a different sort, and with a remarkable ability to give and take punches — not once in his pro career was he ever knocked out — he became one of the premier heavyweights in the Pacific Northwest.
In the ring he displayed a terrific left jab and a mighty right, but his best asset might have been an ability to absorb punishment. He had, in boxing parlance, a great chin, meaning he could take even the most vicious blows and remain upright.
Opposing boxers “couldn’t knock me out,” Arrington said in a recent interview held during a trip back to his home state to visit relatives. “It just couldn’t be done.”
In a pro career that stretched from 1974 to 1982, Arrington posted a 29-7-2 record with 20 knockouts. He was good enough to get bouts against several top national and international contenders, including a memorable meeting with soon-to-be World Boxing Council champion Larry Holmes at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, a bout Arrington came within a whisker of winning.
Among those he didn’t fight were Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, probably the two premier heavyweights of the era.
“I would’ve loved to have fought either one of them,” the 55-year-old Arrington said. “Especially Ali because of his notoriety. But I would’ve loved to have stood toe to toe with George Foreman, too. I would’ve absolutely loved it.”
Sometimes, he said, “I think about who I could have fought and who I should have fought. But it’s not like it left a sour taste in my mouth. I just fought whoever came along.”
Still, Arrington was on the threshold of stardom on Nov. 5, 1977, which was the night he fought Holmes in a 10-round main event before a Las Vegas celebrity crowd that included Ali, Bill Cosby, Cher, Joan Collins, Redd Foxx and Walter Matthau at ringside. Thousands of other fans crowded into the outdoor venue at Caesar’s Palace and at the end, he remembers, “they were all on their feet.”
Arrington lasted into the 10th round, taking the best the heavy-hitting Holmes could dish out and giving back plenty of his own. Then, with about a half-minute to go, the referee stopped the fight, citing bloody cuts over both of Arrington’s eyes.
“It was a good fight, a close fight, a real tough fight,” Arrington said. “(Holmes) was in his prime. He was hitting me as hard as he could, and I was just smiling at him. He didn’t like that. But I was like, ‘C’mon, man, hit me. I know you can hit harder than that.’ I was egging him on. I was arrogant.”
Between rounds, Arrington looked over at Ali, sitting nearby, and saw him slowly shaking his head with amazement.
“I don’t know if he had disbelief that I could take the punishment or disbelief that I wanted to,” Arrington said with a smile.
Although the bout went into the books as a technical knockout — the only non-decision loss of Arrington’s pro career — “I could have easily finished the fight,” he said.
Seven months later, Holmes defeated Ken Norton to win the World Boxing Council heavyweight title.
Arrington received $20,000 for fighting Holmes, the top payday of his career. A month earlier, he’d picked up $10,000 for traveling to London to fight Englishman John L. Gardner, the European heavyweight champ, whom Arrington floored with a vicious right in the first round, his earliest pro knockout.
Otherwise, Arrington was usually paid anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a fight. Put all his winnings together and he figures he earned “maybe a couple hundred thousand” dollars from boxing, much of which he was wise enough to invest in real estate.
His mistake, though, was fighting in the day before cable and pay-per-view broadcasts, which today can bring a monetary windfall for top fighters. Even now, Arrington occasionally bumps into promoters he knew from years ago, “and they tell me, ‘Ibar, if I had you today you’d be a multimillionaire.’”
In the last five months of 1978, Arrington lost consecutive 10-round decisions to Marvin Camel (later the WBC and International Boxing Federation cruiserweight champion), Charles Johnson and Gerrie Coetzee (later the World Boxing Association heavyweight champion). Those defeats sent him into retirement, though he returned to fight three times in 1982 before getting out for good.
After leaving boxing, Arrington stayed in the Everett area for several years, working first as a car salesman, then at a shingle mill and later as a deputy sheriff in Island County. The latter job led him to take additional law enforcement training, and he became a federal police officer for almost 17 years, first for the U.S. Department of Defense in Susanville, Calif., and then for the Veterans Affairs office in Omaha, Neb.
He left police work in June, largely because of something else he’d left a while back — his old lifestyle.
Prodded by his wife, Karen, Arrington became a Christian about eight years ago, and he works today in the maintenance department of the Horizon Broadcast Network in Minot. It is a Christian company, and Arrington participates in daily prayer sessions with his fellow employees. He also attends a Wednesday night Bible study and Sunday morning services at his church.
Becoming a Christian, he said, “was the greatest thing I did in my life. I just turned myself over to God.”
His faith is the main reason Arrington has no longing — unlike some retired fighters — to return to the ring.
“The Bible teaches love,” he explained. “But when I was a boxer, I didn’t love my opponents. I’d just as soon kill them as look at them. That killer instinct they say you have to have (to succeed), well, I had it. There were a couple of times when I really tried my best to kill them.
“But now I just don’t see how you can (hit a man) and say that it’s with love. I just don’t see that’s God’s way of doing things.”
The violent part of his life, he said, “is over. There’s not even a desire anymore. I do work out. I punch a heavy bag, but that’s just to stay in shape. It has nothing to do with making a comeback.”
Longtime boxers often leave their sport with more than just memories. Repeated blows often produce lasting mental impairment, and goodness knows Arrington took his share. Yet 25 years later he remains remarkably sharp.
“I used to have people come up to me after fights and say, ‘Ibar, don’t those punches hurt?’ And maybe with the punches I took, I should be dead. Or if not dead, maybe I should at least be brain-dead.”
But for Arrington, not so.
“I am,” he said with a laugh, “just as crazy as I ever was.”
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