By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
Prichard Colon threw punches for a living. The one that ended his life came from someone else, eleven years ago, and it took over two decades for the story to finish.
Colon has died from injuries sustained in a 2015 boxing match, according to Al Jazeera, after the bout left him with neurological damage requiring emergency surgery and a coma that lasted 221 days. He never fully recovered.
There is a particular grief reserved for athletes who don't die in the ring but never really leave it either — who linger in the space between the fight that hurt them and whatever comes after. Colon spent more than two hundred days unconscious after that 2015 match, a stretch of time long enough that doctors, family, and fans had to reckon with the likelihood he might never wake at all. He did wake. But the man who opened his eyes again was not returning to the career that put him in that hospital bed.
Boxing has always carried this risk plainly, more plainly than most sports — it is, after all, a contest built on landing blows to the head. Colon's case became one of the sport's grimmer cautionary tales, cited by safety advocates pushing for tighter medical protocols around traumatic brain injury in combat sports.
Al Jazeera's report did not include further detail on Colon's age at death, the location, or the exact opponent and circumstances of the 2015 fight. We'll add those facts as they become available.
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.
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