“My Guys Are Not Sunday School Kids”: The Wild World of John “Pops” Arthur

[thenonpareil]

John Arthur will be the first to admit that he should not be here today, breathing, telling you his story. He should have been found dead long ago on some sorry dirt patch in a foreign country—Thailand, Japan, Russia—after absorbing a fatal blow in one of the many underground deathmatches he participated in as a teenager.

Or on a cold, dark floor of a garish clip joint in Atlanta, after a drug bust gone wrong, back when he was a sting operator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Or perhaps Arthur’s demise would have come much sooner before he could have ever envisioned himself entering such violent professions: on some shabby street corner, laid out and bullet-ridden, the unintended victim in a crossfire somewhere in Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up as a child.

“I was talking to (boxing trainer) Buddy McGirt one day,” Arthur, who goes by “Pops,” said in a recent phone interview with Hannibal Boxing. “We were sitting around listening to some music. I told Buddy, ‘You know, Buddy, I’ve been shot, stabbed, everything, in the course of my life. I don’t even know why I’m living.’”

“I should’ve been dead a long time ago.”

https://hannibalboxing.com/my-guys-are- ... ps-arthur/