Four Kings

by George Kimball

  “The bout might have ended there had the bell not intervened,” I wrote in the Herald. “A wobbly Duran barely made it back to the corner, and when he did it was to the wrong one.”

  In eighty-one fights Duran had been knocked down just twice, both times at the hands of DeJesus, and that had been ten years earlier. Now he had been down twice in three minutes.

  As Cholo sat there on the stool contemplating what had just occurred, he had to know what was coming next, even as he pleaded with Spada not to stop the fight.

  In my mind it represented an epiphany of sorts. It might not have explained the bewildering turn of events of New Orleans three and a half years earlier−I’d never bought the stomach-ache story−but it surely eliminated the other widely held theory. Duran might have been undisciplined, he might have been arrogant, and he might have been, as Steward maintained, a bully, but he was also uncommonly brave.

  The man who got up off his stool and charged back at Hearns in the second round in Las Vegas that night was not, and could never have been, a coward.

  “You have to keep your hands up!” Spada, stating the obvious, reminded him as he replaced the mouthpiece.

  Duran appeared to have regained his senses, as well as his footing, as the second commenced, but the recovery was illusory. He wrestled Hearns into a clinch and actually landed a couple of punches, but the revival would prove short-lived.

  “I had to stop and regroup and get myself together,” recalled Hearns, and for a moment the two seemed to stand still, silhouetted against the sunset, as they studied one another.

  Hearns backed Duran up with two quick jabs, and then landed the thunderous roundhouse right to the chin that ended the fight.

  Duran, knocked out for the first time in his career, was lifted right off his feet, and appeared to lose consciousness before even hitting the deck. When he saw Duran plow face-first into the ring mat, Luis Spada struggled through the ropes and into the ring.

  Padilla didn’t even see Spada’s charge from the corner, but Duran was so obviously indisposed that the referee waved the fight off without a count, instead rolling him over onto his back so he could retrieve the mouthpiece.

  The official end came at 1:07 of the second. The fight had consumed less time than the playing of the Panamanian national anthem. With no one left to hit, a jubilant Hearns trotted happily around the ring, throwing phantom punches at the desert sky.

  Once he regained consciousness, Duran was lifted to his feet, and Spada and Plomo literally dragged him back to his stool. Cholo appeared sheepish and embarrassed, but seemed otherwise unhurt. Hearns walked across the ring to embrace him, and then lifted him off the floor.

  “I was fighting a legend,” Hearns said that night. “Roberto Duran is probably the greatest fighter I’ve ever been in the ring with, but the respect I have for Duran I refused to take into the ring with me.”

  Plainly, Hearns was nearly as relieved that he had been able to use his business hand without injury as he was pleased by the victory itself.

  “The Hit Man has been away for a while,” said Hearns. “He’s been on vacation, but he’s back now. I was able let the power in my right hand go.”

  Hearns used the occasion to call out the middleweight champion.

  “In my next fight I’d like to challenge Marvin Hagler,” he said. “I could just see him in my mind, shaking like the leafs on a tree.”

  Pat Putnam visited Duran in his suite at Caesars later that night.

  “My problem was that I brawled with him and lost my head,” said Duran. “That’s when I screwed up. My corner told me something after that first round, but I can’t remember what it was because I am still a little dizzy. Damn, I tried to get under those long arms, and he knocked me crazy with that right hand.

  “Now,” added Duran, “I have to go home to Panama to see what they think.”

  Duran’s return to his homeland would once again demonstrate the fickleness of his countrymen. The military junta that controlled the Panamanian government had recently honored him by putting his face on a postage stamp. When landed in Panama after the Hearns fight, Roberto Duran was promptly arrested and locked up in a Panamanian jail.

  Since he was never charged, the cause of Duran’s humiliating incarceration was never precisely spelled out. Whether Cholo became obstreperous, as police claimed, or whether the officer in charge was, as has been suggested, a disgruntled bettor who, having lost money on the Hearns fight, was determined to break his balls, is unclear. Duran was, in any case, released the following morning.

  Marvin Hagler’s immediate future was already spoken for. An injury had delayed his mandatory rematch against Mustafa Hamsho, but that fight was already on the books for October.

  But Hearns’ convincing defeat of a man against whom Hagler had struggled just months earlier made it clear what the next big fight for both men would be. As I wrote in the next morning’s paper, “The only questions now are When, Where, and How Much? ”

  Chapter 7

  The Fight

  Hagler–Hearns

  Caesars Palace, April 15, 1985

  Nearly a quarter-century later the 1985 fight between Hagler and Hearns remains a high point of boxing in the latter half of the twentieth century. Knowledgeable experts have described it as the greatest short fight in boxing history. Its ferocious first round, which to this day remains the standard against which all others are measured, was undoubtedly the most exciting in middleweight annals, and one of the two or three best opening stanzas of all time.

  In an age in which it had already become obligatory to sell every big fight−and many smaller ones−with a catchy slogan, Arum christened the matchup between Marvelous Marvin and the Hit Man as, simply, “The Fight.”

  Events proved Arum prescient. It was, indeed, The Fight.

  Although its official buildup consumed several months beginning in late 1984, The Fight had been at least three years in the making. In 1982, with Ray Leonard vacillating toward retirement and Roberto Duran still tainted by the disgrace of his No Mas performance in New Orleans, Hagler and Hearns were the two premier boxers in the game, and a showdown seemed inevitable.

  In early 1982 Arum, Hagler’s lawyer, Steve Wainwright, and Emanuel Steward had entered into a unique three-fight contract pitting Hagler against a trio of middleweights from Steward’s Kronk Gymnasium. Under the terms of the arrangement, the middleweight champion would fight, in order, Mickey Goodwin, William “Cave Man” Lee, and, in the grand finale of the trilogy, Thomas Hearns. Round One, the Goodwin bout, was to have taken place that March in Italy, with Rodolfo Sabbatini, Arum’s silent partner in the middleweight sweepstakes, serving as the co-promoter, but Goodwin broke his hand in training. Lee, considered a less worthy challenger, was rushed into the breach, and the fight was moved from San Remo to Atlantic City, where Hagler required barely a minute to send Lee back to his cave.

  With Goodwin still indisposed, the decision was made to go straight to the Hearns fight, which was scheduled for May 24, 1982, in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit. The posters were printed, as were the tickets, but the fight didn’t happen.

  The unraveling of the Windsor fight remains shrouded in mystery. The only way to make the fighters’ promised nut was to sell the fight on closed-circuit, but HBO, which had a multi-fight contract with Hagler through Top Rank, believed it had the right of first refusal and filed for an injunction.

  In what seemed a transparent attempt to stage an end-run around HBO, the Windsor card was to be promoted not by Top Rank, but by “Bob Arum Enterprises.” (In the past, that corporate name had been used to promote Arum’s South African ventures, presumably to shield Top Rank had there been repercussions from anti-apartheid activists.)

  The lawyers were poised to have a field day, but the billable hours were somewhat curtailed after it was reported that Hearns had, conveniently, broken the pinky on his right hand. “A day after the injury to Hearns, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in HBO’s favor,
” recalled Arum. “We would have appealed if Tommy hadn’t been hurt, but it would have dragged on for some time and the fight would have been in jeopardy.”

  Hagler-Hearns was off, in any case, and would not be revived for nearly three years. Hagler went to Italy later that year and disposed of both Arum’s obligation to Sabbatini and the unfortunate Fulgencio Obelmejias in the same evening.

  By the time they were scheduled to meet again, the price of poker had gone up. A guaranteed $10.5 million minimum now sat in the pot.

  The Fight was announced in December 1984 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Hagler and Hearns were all smiles, looking more like co-conspirators than adversaries, probably because they shared the knowledge that each would earn more than $5 million from their joint enterprise.

  In January and February Hagler, Hearns, and Arum embarked on what its participants would recall as the “Magical Mystery Tour.” Designed to beat the drums for the closed-circuit sale, the itinerary called for the boxers to visit twenty-two cities in two weeks. The combatants traveled in separate corporate jets.

  Caesars owned one of the planes, a state-of-the-art Gulfstream G-II with its own Pac-Man machine. Arum leased a second jet, a Falcon, which was slightly less luxurious and a bit slower. The plan called for Hagler to fly on the Gulfstream when the parties were flying west. Once they reached Las Vegas they would switch airplanes. “But when we got to Vegas, Pat Petronelli called to tell me we had a problem,” recalled Arum. “Hagler said he was going home if he didn’t get to stay on the G-II. He refused to continue the tour if he had to fly on the Falcon.

  “I tried to explain this to Emanuel Steward, but then Tommy had a shit-fit,” said Arum. “He said he was going home if he didn’t get to fly in the Caesars plane.”

  In the end, Arum had to turn the second plane in and lease another G-II, identical to the first, so that the boxers could have separate-but-equal modes of transportation for the remainder of the tour.

  Neither man was exactly a polished public speaker, but Hearns, along with the rest of the Kronk boxing team, had been the beneficiary of locution lessons administered by Steward’s resident schoolmarm, Jackie Kallen. He would thoughtfully digest questions and then invariably begin his answer with, “Well, basically . . . ”

  “I think,” supposed Leigh Montville, “Jackie Kallen must have told him, ‘Tommy, every time you want to say motherfucker, stop yourself. Then instead say, well, basically . . . ’ ”

  Hearns did his best to sell The Fight on this whistle-stop tour, but seemingly every time he opened his mouth he managed to rankle Hagler with what Marvin perceived to be evidence of disrespect. Hagler habitually tried to psych himself up for fights by convincing himself that he disliked his opponents, and the Hit Man played right into his hands. Every turn of phrase meant to boost the closed-circuit sale seemed to further antagonize Hagler.

  Steward confirms that Hearns did an inordinate amount of trash-talking, “but it was strictly business.

  “People don’t realize how out of character it was for Tommy to do that,” said the Hall of Fame trainer.

  All it did was make Marvin Hagler mad.

  “That tour did me good,” Hagler said once it was over. “I might have had some respect for Tommy Hearns before I spent all that time with him, but by the time we got done I came away hating his ass. I respect him as a boxer but I don’t respect him as a person. I’m going to remind him what it’s like to be on the bottom and have to work back up again.

  “He’s on an ego trip, especially after knocking out Duran the way he did after watching me [go the distance] with Duran,” groused Marvelous Marvin. “Well, he should have fought the winner of that fight, not the loser, ’cause he didn’t prove anything. This is the best time for me to get him now, while he’s still walking around on that cloud. I’m going to do to him what I did to Alan Minter.”

  In retrospect, that was prophetic, at least when it came to the duration of The Fight. When Hagler won the title from Minter in London five years earlier, the slugfest had ended at 1:45 of the third round. The Hearns fight would last but a few seconds longer.

  Hagler and Hearns were supposed to have one more face-to-face encounter after the tour ended. On the last day of February, the boxers were summoned to New York, where Sports Illustrated would shoot the cover picture for its fight-week issue. Hagler and Hearns had also agreed to participate in the filming of the video for the upcoming release of “I’m a Fighter,” by the band Van Zant.

  Hagler, still battling the effects of a cold he had caught on the tour, telephoned his regrets on the morning of the photo shoot. Hearns was in Los Angeles, where he had attended the Grammy Awards ceremonies and received his Fighter of the Year award at a WBC dinner.

  Unaware of Hagler’s withdrawal, Hearns boarded a flight for New York, but the United 767 developed mechanical problems and had to return to the gate, where it remained for two hours. When it finally took off, one of the plane’s two engines caught fire, forcing an emergency landing in Salt Lake City.

  “It could have been,” said Arum, “the ultimate Sports Illustrated jinx.”

  The magazine could wait, but in New York, Van Zant had leased Gleason’s Gym for the day. The band went ahead with the video, subbing with a pair of New York fighters, Kevin Moley and Alberto Ramos. (Footage shot of Hagler in Provincetown earlier was later spliced in.)

  Hearns had intended to fly from New York to Europe to work with his Kronk teammate Milton McCrory, who was defending his WBC welter-weight title against Pedro Vilella in Paris, but, said SI boxing editor Ted Beitchman, “Tommy is so shook up right now he may never get on a plane again. They may have to move The Fight to Salt Lake City.”

  The initial plan had called for Hagler to begin training in Provincetown, as he had for each of his previous twenty-five fights, before moving to Palm Springs in mid-March, but the champion was nursing such a bad cold that Goody convinced him to proceed straight to the California desert, where the Americana Canyon Hotel had already offered the champion the run of the premises.

  In Palm Springs Hagler sparred with Boogaloo Watts and Jerry Holly, both tall and rangy like Hearns. The Petronellis had also lined up Marcos Geraldo, who had fought both Hearns and Hagler, but when Marcos failed to show up he was replaced by Larry Davis, who didn’t last long. Larry fell by the wayside after Marvin busted his eardrum with a left to the head in a sparring session.

  Watts, once ranked the No. 2 middleweight in the world, had been the first man to defeat Hagler when he captured a hometown majority decision in Philadelphia nine years earlier. The controversial loss had been subsequently avenged, and Watts eventually emerged as a loyal and respected member of the Hagler camp. Two years earlier he, along with fellow Philadelphian Buster Drayton, had traveled to Italy to spar with Hagler before Obelmejias II in San Remo. “Bobby might have been a champion himself if I hadn’t been there,” said Hagler of Watts. “He’s smart. He knows who I’m fighting. He’ll lay against the ropes, throw overhand rights and hooks to the body, fight in spurts, do all the things Hearns is likely to do.

  “And the other kid [Holly], watch him. He’s a younger, taller, bigger version of Thomas Hearns, plus he’s got something Tommy don’t have. He’s got guts.”

  • • •

  I didn’t think for a moment Marvin actually believed that assessment of Hearns’ mettle, but the events of April 15 would surely prove him wrong.

  The challenge to Hagler had forced a radical departure from Hearns’ traditional training modus operandi . Steward’s Kronk fighters normally sparred against one another, without regard to weight class, and there was such an abundance of talent in the Detroit gym that they usually got all they wanted and more. “You can’t get any better boxing than we give them in our own gym, but except for Milton [McCrory], who can switch up, we just don’t have any southpaws,” said Kronk assistant trainer Prentiss Byrd.

  Hearns trained at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach, where Steward imported a trio of lefthanders−middleweig
hts Cecil Pettigrew of Tulsa and Brian Muller of Guyana, along with Kansas City light-heavyweight Charles “Hollywood” Henderson−to prep the Hit Man for The Fight.

  Although Hearns had faced a few lefties in his amateur days, only one of his forty-one professional opponents had been a southpaw, the immortal Saensak Muangsurin of Thailand. Muangsurin, said Byrd, “was a former world champion and all, but he still wasn’t no Marvin Hagler.”

  Hearns’ crash course in left-handedness also had to take into account the fact that Hagler, the best switch-hitter since Mickey Mantle, could, and almost certainly would, switch over to orthodox at moments not even the champion could predict. “It just kind of takes over, depending on how the fight is going, ” Hagler explained. “I don’t even think about it. It just happens.”

  One afternoon in Palm Springs, the Brothers Petronelli had accompanied Hagler on a brisk walk around the adjacent golf course when they came upon a small grove of citrus trees. A child of the city streets, Marvin couldn’t resist.

  “I mean, I guess if I’d ever thought about it, I knew oranges grew on trees, but here was all this fresh fruit that nobody had ever touched before,” recalled Hagler. “Pat was saying, ‘Naw, come on, Stuff, you’re not gonna do it,’ but I said, ‘Just watch!’”

  The middleweight champion of the world was in short order up the tree and filling a sack with purloined fruit. At that moment a golf cart came puttering along. One of the occupants was Palm Springs’ most famous resident.

  On Bob Hope’s eightieth birthday two years earlier, he had briefly shared a ring with Hagler in the boxing skit.

  “He couldn’t believe this,” said Hagler. “Bob says, ‘Marvin, what you doin’ up there? ’ and I said, ‘Hey, I’m picking me some oranges, Bob. That all right? ’

  “Next thing you know he invited me and Pat and Goody over to his house.”