Panama Brown :

Alfonso Teofilo Brown (July 5, 1902 – April 11, 1951), better known as Panama Al Brown, was a Panamanian professional boxer. He made history by becoming boxing’s first Latin American world champion, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest bantamweight boxers in history. After a brilliant career at the highest level that made him rich and famous, a descent into hell begins and bad weather comes : 

wikipédia :

With the advent of the Second World War, Brown moved to the United States, settled in Harlem and tried to find work of the cabaret sort he performed in Paris when not fighting.
Not long after, he was arrested for using cocaine and deported for a year. He went back to New York afterward and, in his late 40s, took a lot of beatings while serving as a sparring partner for up-and-comers at a gym in Harlem, making a dollar a round.

Brown died penniless of tuberculosis in New York City in 1951. He had fainted on 42nd Street. The police thought he was drunk and took him to the station. Eventually he was transferred to Sea View Hospital. He died there on April 11, unaware that not long before, one of the newspapers in Paris had begun talks about organizing a fund drive to pay for his trip home.

He left no money to pay for the funeral. As a result, his friends go to the Seaview hospital where he died to collect his body and go around to bars with the idea of collecting money to pay for his funeral. The gang of friends who drag the body of a great black boxer from bar to bar finally collect quite a lot of money, but this money is immediately drunk. At the end of the night, the little troop scatters, drunk, and the poor Panama Brown is forgotten on the bench of the last bar they visited.