Héctor Camacho, 1962–2012

Héctor Camacho was both a champion prizefighter and a drug-abusing lawbreaker. Last week, his tempestuous lifestyle caught up with him when he was shot to death in a parked car in Puerto Rico, surrounded by 10 bags of cocaine. Asked how he thought his son would like to be remembered, his father said, “As he always was—loco.”

Camacho moved from Puerto Rico to New York at the age of 3, said The Washington Post, and soon got into trouble. He stole his first car at 12 and had been expelled from six schools by the age of 15. By the time he was 17, he was in jail, where he “fought so often with other inmates that he was placed in solitary confinement.” But he poured his aggression into amateur boxing and turned professional at the age of 18. After he won the World Boxing Council super-featherweight championship in 1983, Sports Illustrated called his lightning-fast, southpaw style “part oil slick, part fastest gun in the West, part Fred Astaire.”

Camacho “could be considered a bridge between boxing’s past and its future,” said YahooSports.com. Raised as a street fighter, he would fight anyone, from legends like Sugar Ray Leonard to younger champions like Oscar De La Hoya. His “anytime, anywhere mentality” stood in stark contrast to today’s celebrity fighters, with their pay-per-view deals and purse-split percentages. But he was among the first in his sport to market himself as an attraction, dressing in garish Roman gladiator and Trojan warrior costumes and sporting a ubiquitous curl on his forehead. “He could sell a fight as well as anyone who ever lived.”

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But the only thing “faster than Camacho’s hands,” said USA Today, “was his lifestyle.” The self-styled “Macho Man” womanized, partied, and repeatedly broke the law. He owned 15 cars but had no driver’s license. He was once arrested for trying to take an M-16 rifle on an airplane, and was famously pulled over in his Ferrari by a Florida trooper while driving and making love to a woman. “I tried to be a fighter, a lover, and a fly guy,” he said in an interview several years ago. “I’m lucky, really, to be alive the way I’ve lived.”