Kirk Douglas also became a frequent visitor to the tent outside the Americana Canyon Hotel that served as Hagler’s training camp.
Although it was widely assumed that Douglas was, like Hope, a reformed boxer, Old Spartacus revealed that while he had been a college wrestler at St. Lawrence, prior to his 1949 role in Champion, “I didn’t know the first thing about boxing.”
Douglas told me he had been tutored for that role by the old welterweight Mushy Callahan. Mushy must have done a great job, because Douglas was not only nominated for an Academy Award, he was convincing enough that for the rest of his life people sought his opinion on pugilistic matters.
He spent a lot of time watching Hagler, but when it came to picking the fight, Douglas was, like a lot of other people, squarely on the fence.
“They’re both such marvelous boxers that it’s difficult to pick a winner,” said the actor. “If there’s an edge it’s that one guy is moving up in weight class, and you don’t know about that. But one thing’s for certain: There’s going to be an awful lot of talent in the ring on April 15.”
Despite the seemingly constant presence of celebrities, Hagler was all business in the training ring.
“I’m not here to sign no autographs or make appearances,” he said. “In fact, I’ve heard people comment that I’m the hardest worker of any of the champions who’ve ever trained at this place.”
Still, the surroundings in California were absolutely opulent compared to his familiar digs in Provincetown. Better still, from Hagler’s standpoint, it was free.
“This didn’t just happen overnight, you know,” he told me one day. “It took me a long time to gain this kind of prestige. I think back to years ago, with me and Pat and Goody sharing one $15 hotel room. This is the way it should be for a champion. It’s finally happening to me, but, yeah, I feel like it’s something I’ve earned.
“I’m still me,” he added, “but I’m not ready to let all of this go.”
Hagler shared the training ring with Donald Curry, who would defend his WBA welterweight title against James “Hard Rock” Green in Dallas two weeks before Hagler-Hearns. Mark Gastineau, the New York Jets’ sack specialist, had set up something called “Mark Gastineau’s Intensive Training Camp,” at which he pumped iron for the edification of the hotel guests in another part of the tent.
With the fight still nearly a month away, Hagler spent much of his time in seclusion, thinking about Hearns.
“Tommy is a dangerous opponent, and he’s going to test me, but I know deep down in my soul that this man cannot whip me,” said Marvin. Hagler attributed Hearns’ self-assured demeanor to “false courage.”
“The thing is, see, I’ve been shook up but I’ve never been hurt. Tony Sibson shook me up with a left hook that I still remember. Even Juan Roldan hit me with a couple of good shots, but that’s where the conditioning pays off. I’ve been able to absorb those kind of shots,” reflected Hagler. “But Hearns has been stopped and I ain’t been stopped. I know he can go, but he don’t know if I can go. That’s what’s going to be worrying him.”
Hearns was attempting to become just the second 154-pound champion to win a 160-pound title (Nino Benvenuti had been the first), and going into The Fight, the Hit Man’s credentials as a full-blown middleweight were regarded as questionable.
Hearns had fought five times as a middleweight. Three of the opponents −Mike Colbert, Ernie Singletary and Murray Sutherland−had gone the distance, and Jeff McCracken had still been on his feet when his fight against Hearns was stopped in the eighth. Hearns had dispatched Marcos Geraldo, but it was so obvious the Mexican was in the tank (the “knockout” punch hit him in the shoulder) that even Emanuel Steward termed the fight “an embarrassment.”
“We were actually looking to get Tommy some work in that fight, but this guy had obviously decided that he didn’t want no part of it coming in. All it did was make the TV people mad at us,” said Steward.
Hearns had packed a killer knockout punch as a welterweight, but the jury was still out at the heavier weight.
“Usually a guy moving up in weight loses some of his punching power,” said Goody Petronelli. “I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets by saying Hearns has had that trouble, too.”
Michael Katz had gone to Miami Beach to watch Hearns train for Hagler. “One day while Emanuel was off preparing something for Tommy to eat, we discussed the upcoming fight,” said Katz. “I reminded him that in every fight there’s a boxer and there’s a puncher, and asked him which he would be in this one.
“Tommy said, ‘Of course, I’m always the boxer, but if I hurt him, then I’m going for the knockout,’” Katz recalled. “That’s when it occurred to me that the conventional wisdom−Hearns early, Hagler late−was probably wrong. Of course Tommy was going to hurt him. He was much faster, and he hit like a mule. But I also figured he couldn’t really hurt Hagler, and that by going for an early knockout he might put himself within Marvin’s reach−and in harm’s way.”
The WBC despots, whom I had taken to describing as “Los Bandidos,” had grown more insistent with each fight. When Hagler’s 1984 Madison Square Garden defense against Mustafa Hamsho was slated for fifteen rounds, the WBC stripped him of his middleweight title, even though Marvelous Marvin made the issue somewhat moot by dispatching the Syrian in three. Hagler took the issue to court, where a federal judge once again ordered Jose Sulaiman to restore his championship.
Going into this fight, Sulaiman opted for a new tactic: He turned the thumbscrews on Hearns, threatening to strip him of the 154-pound title he had held since 1982, when he captured a majority decision over Benitez in New Orleans.
Officially, the WBC position was that Hearns couldn’t fight Hagler without first facing its top-rated challenger, John “The Beast” Mugabi. Unofficially, Los Bandidos let it be known that Hearns would be granted dispensation on the matter, provided Hagler-Hearns was scheduled for twelve rounds and not fifteen.
While publicly expressing his respect for the traditional fifteen-round distance, in this instance Steward actually preferred the shorter limit, which he figured would be to his man’s advantage. (Remember, had the Hearns-Leonard fight four years earlier ended after twelve, the Hit Man would have won on the scorecards.)
The WBC’s decision to lean on Hearns, in any case, produced its desired effect. Rather than face yet another delay, which a Hearns-Mugabi fight would have entailed, the champion’s camp reluctantly acceded on the issue, and the Hearns fight became just the second of Marvin Hagler’s middleweight championship reign to be scheduled for twelve rounds.
The original panel of judges agreed upon by the WBC and the Nevada State Athletic Commission had consisted of Reno’s Herb Santos, Englishman Harry Gibbs and Rudy Ortega of Los Angeles. Pasquale Petronelli vociferously objected to Ortega, who, claimed Hagler’s co-handler, might be disposed to favor Hearns. For the record, the objection rested on the grounds that Ortega’s big-fight experience had been primarily as a referee, not a judge. Privately, Ortega’s cozy relationship with the WBC and its president worried the Hagler camp, as well as his promoter.
“I don’t want to see them try to steal it from Marvin,” said Arum.
“It’s no secret that Jose Sulaiman and Emanuel Steward are like cousins,” added Petronelli. “We’ve been at odds with Sulaiman for years [mostly on the fifteen-round issue], so I’m not surprised that they’d try to pull something like this. We’re not going to sit by and let them try to railroad The Fight.”
The dispute was aired at a closed-door meeting, and Nevada commission chairman Sig Rogich agreed to replace Ortega. The replacement, according to Arum, was supposed to be Texan Dickie Cole, but by fight time Californian Dick Young was sitting in the third judge’s chair.
Not for the last time, the Petronellis apparently outsmarted themselves. On the night of the fight Young, the replacement judge, scored both completed rounds for Hearns. Santos and Gibbs scored both for Hagler.
Richard Steele, no
minated to be the referee, had been at the center of some controversy for his handling of a Michael Dokes-Randy Cobb fiasco a few weeks earlier. Steele was a casino executive at the Riviera up the strip (where Arum’s archrival, Don King, also maintained offices), but neither side objected to his presence as the third man in the ring.
“It’s not only my biggest fight, it’s the biggest fight there’s ever been, ” said Steele. “Of course I’m excited, but I’m going to try to approach it no differently than if it were another ESPN undercard fight.
“What I have to keep in mind at all times is that these are two human beings I have to protect,” the referee added. “I want to make sure they can both walk out of the ring when it’s over.”
When it had been announced in December, The Fight had been posted at 13-10, with Hagler the favorite, but the punters had quickly bet it down to a 6-5 pick, and as the date approached the odds vacillated between one man and the other. Five days before the bout, a big influx of Motown money had temporarily made Hearns the favorite.
Convinced in his own mind that gambling interests had been behind his disputed 1979 draw with Vito Antuofermo, Marvin was almost phobic about betting odds, but one day he overheard me telling someone that Hearns had gotten a nose in front at the sports book that morning and was now narrowly favored.
“See,” exclaimed Marvin. “The pressure is on Thomas Hearns, not me. A lot of people are probably looking at our fights against Duran and figuring he can beat me, and I’m just hoping he’s fool enough to believe them, because he’s going to find his ass on the deck.
“I’m glad you told me that,” Marvin said with a grin. “I hope Las Vegas makes him ten to one.”
Art Manteris, the sports book director at Caesars, predicted that Hagler-Hearns would be the most heavily bet fight in Las Vegas history, and could approach the record set by the Super Bowl a few months earlier.
On the Thursday night before the big fight, ESPN celebrated the fifth anniversary of its Top Rank Boxing series with a card at the Showboat. Terrence Alli, who was to have fought Choo-Choo Brown, pulled out on the evening of the fight, citing illness, thus promoting the Brett Summers-Chris Calvin co-feature to main event status.
Summers, a young lightweight trained by Stewart, was unbeaten at 22-0, while Calvin, 15-3-2, was a well-traveled Nashville fireman who had battled Hagler stablemate Eddie Curet to a draw at the Boston Garden two years earlier.
Calvin, the self-proclaimed “Southern Rebel,” jumped right on Summers, pummeling him all over the ring in the first. He appeared to have won the fight in the third, when he knocked Summers down three times for what should have been an automatic stoppage, but Joey Curtis bewilderingly ruled one of the knockdowns a slip.
“Joey may be a lousy referee, but he saved the show,” Al Bernstein would say later. (Just a couple of years earlier, Curtis had suspiciously stopped Michael Dokes’ fight against Mike Weaver after just sixty-three seconds.)
Summers was down nine times in all before Curtis stopped the fight in the tenth. The Kronk Boxing Team, which by then included at least thirty professionals, had been out in force for the Calvin-Summers fight, and they filed out of the arena disappointed in the result.
The rest of us would later shudder at the thought of what might have happened had Joey Curtis, and not Richard Steele, been assigned to work Hagler-Hearns a few nights later.
Once the principals arrived in Vegas, Hearns had halted his sparring on Tuesday−six days before the fight−while Hagler engaged in a few closed-door workouts with Watts and Holly across town at Johnny Tocco’s Ringside Gym.
“After Palm Springs,” said Hagler, “I need to get used to the smell of a gym again.”
Hagler said that the decision to work out privately was not a cloak-and-dagger operation. “It’s not that we’ve got any secrets,” said the middle-weight champion. “It’s just that we’re trying to be serious about business. Over at Caesars, every time you fart it winds up on television, and when the corner’s trying to tell you something there’s always a microphone stuck in your face.”
Emanuel Steward defended his decision to cut Hearns’ sparring a week before The Fight.
“We’ve learned from some of the mistakes we made with the Leonard fight,” said Steward. “We trained a little too hard for Leonard, but we’ve learned to adjust.”
In fact, Steward expressed surprise that Hagler was still sparring a few days before The Fight.
“Every trainer knows his own fighter best, and I’d certainly never criticize Goody, but I really think Marvin’s working himself too hard,” said Steward. “I think he’s so hyper for this fight that around the sixth round he’s going to be exhausted.”
Although Hagler had been a middleweight throughout his career and Hearns was moving up from the lighter weight classes, the Hit Man, at 6’1”, towered over the champion, whom he tauntingly called “a midget,” by at least four inches.
Hagler responded by describing Hearns as “a freak.”
“He ought to be playing basketball instead of trying to fight me,” said Marvelous Marvin.
Apart from obligatory press appearances, Hagler remained sequestered in his room at Caesars. Hearns, on the other hand, strolled around the premises accompanied by his sizeable entourage from Detroit. One evening a few of us were walking through the casino and encountered what I described at the time as “one of the great mismatches of the week: Thomas Hearns against a craps table.”
Anticipation over The Fight made Hagler-Hearns the casino’s hottest affair in years, and “with an event this big, the whole pecking order changes,” explained a Caesars spokesman. A customer with a five-figure credit line might have been accustomed to a two-bedroom suite, but he was going to have to make do with a single room, because the million-dollar bettors had first crack at the suites.
The champion’s own quarters at Caesars consisted of a two-bedroom suite whose décor was best described as Early American Whorehouse. The walls were purple, with mirrors installed on the ceilings above the beds. A brass plaque, presumably temporary, on the door identified it as the “Marvelous Marvin Hagler Suite.”
“I guess I’m getting a little seniority around here by now,” Hagler remarked with a laugh when he saw his digs.
By the weekend the glitterati were flocking to Caesars, and the local press solicited opinions from seemingly all of them. Tom Selleck, Tip O’Neill and Julius Erving were all picking Hagler, while Eddie Murphy, Steve Jobs and Buddy Hackett liked Hearns. Siegfried and Roy were divided in their opinions, while the members of the Fifth Dimension split 3-2 in Hagler’s favor.
Even Lee Liberace got into the act.
“Marvelous Marvin Hagler once asked me if I knew how to fight,” Liberace told a Las Vegas magazine. “I told him that when you dress the way I do, you’d better know how to fight.”
Eighty-nine-year-old George Burns joined Kirk Douglas in ducking the issue.
“Hagler and Hearns are both tough,” said the man who once played God. “I could pick a winner, but I wouldn’t want the other one to get mad at me. I may be old, but I want to get older.”
The Detroit News even managed to track down Cave Man Lee in the sneezer. Three years earlier Hearns’ onetime stablemate had been knocked out by Hagler in sixty-seven seconds. Now he was doing hard time in the state pen in Jackson, Michigan, after an unsuccessful bank robbery.
“Tell Tommy I love him and I’m pulling for him all the way,” Cave Man told the News ’ Mike O’Hara. “I got twenty bucks riding on him−and in here I only make sixty a month.”
Katz, based on his analysis following the training camp conversation with Hearns, went on the record, picking Hagler in three.
Two days before The Fight, Jake LaMotta was married for the sixth time, around the corner from Caesars at the Maxim’s wedding chapel. Sugar Ray Robinson, who had in his heyday engaged the Raging Bull in six brutal fights (and won five of them), was the best man.
Midway through the ceremony a telephone rang. H
earing the bell, LaMotta asked, “What round is it? ”
“Sixth,” somebody replied.
ABC’s Good Morning America was in town, with plans to originate its programming from a remote location set up in the outdoor ring at Caesars both Monday and Tuesday morning, airing profiles of Hagler and Hearns, with David Hartman interviewing Goody Petronelli and Emanuel Steward the morning of The Fight. (On Tuesday, Hartman promised to interview the winner, along with special guest Ray Leonard−who was at the time a CBS employee.)
The weigh-in took place the morning of the fight, and given the verbal sparring that had preceded the bout, the final pre-fight encounter proceeded with dignity. Hagler weighed 159 1/ 4 , Hearns half a pound more.
The two exchanged glances, but no words, and quickly repaired to their respective rooms.
The celebrity-studded audience at the outdoor arena numbered 15,200 on Monday night, but the closed-circuit numbers would, in Arum’s estimate, fail to meet expectations. Although an estimated 1.2 million viewers bought Hagler-Hearns, it fell short of the 1971 record set by the Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali “Fight of the Century.”
While an undistinguished undercard played out in the stadium a hundred yards away, Hagler sat sequestered in his dressing room. He could hear the whoops and hollers from Hearns’ quarters down the hall, where seemingly the entire Kronk team had gathered.
“That’s all right,” Marvin told Tony Petronelli. “He can’t take them all into the ring with him. It’s just going to be me and him.”
“I never got a chance to finish wrapping Hearns’ hands the way I wanted to that night,” revealed Emanuel Steward. “While I was in the middle of wrapping his hands, an argument broke out between Tommy’s brother Billy and one of the security people, and I had to leave in the middle of my wrapping to go take care of that.”
With over $10 million committed to the main event, there evidently wasn’t much left for the preliminary fighters. For an event of its magnitude, The Fight was accompanied by a disappointing undercard.
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