Despite his credentials, few boxing types gave Mugabi much chance against Hagler.
“I think Hagler will stop him inside six rounds,” supposed Ray Leonard. “Marvin’s just got too much artillery for him, and I’ll tell you something else: Hagler’s used to all of this, but I think the atmosphere is going to get to Mugabi. He’ll be in awe.”
Hagler-Mugabi was televised not by HBO, but by rival Showtime, which inaugurated its “Showtime Championship Boxing” series with the bout. That night’s undercard included another middleweight fight of significance: Thomas Hearns had been matched against undefeated James Shuler for the NABF title.
Shuler was 22-0, although the roster of his victims was comparable to Mugabi’s. He had reached the No. 1 spot in the WBA rankings the previous year, only to be overtaken by Mugabi.
Like Hagler, Hearns had not fought since their eight-minute war eleven months earlier. Arum, hoping that the victor’s stock would be boosted by a high-profile win, had “guaranteed” the Hearns-Shuler winner the next shot at Hagler.
Shuler was trained by the venerable Eddie Futch, who reckoned that the beating Hagler had inflicted on the Hit Man a year earlier might have increased his man’s chances. “There’s no question that a man can’t get destroyed the way he got destroyed and not have some residual damage,” said Futch.
“The only damage was to my ego,” maintained Hearns. “It was bruised, all right, but that’s just like my car. It hurts, but you can take it to the body shop and get it fixed.”
In preparation for The Beast, Hagler sparred with brother Robbie Sims, along with Alex Ramos and Bobby Patterson. In his final session at Johnny Tocco’s gym the Thursday night before the fight, Patterson caught Hagler off balance and floored him with a left hook. Hagler dismissed the incident, claiming that it had been a slip, but when pressed, Goody Petronelli concurred with the assessment of the handful of reporters who had been present: had the knockdown occurred in a real fight, Marvelous Marvin would have taken a count from the referee.
Lest anyone attach too much significance to the workout knockdown, Johnny Tocco noted that two years earlier, a sparring partner named Larry Davis, wearing sixteen-ounce gloves, had flattened Mugabi in the same ring. Freddie Roach recalled that he had been present when a journeyman named Dennis Fikes knocked Mugabi out in a training session.
A day before the championship fight, Sims was matched against John Collins in what was supposed to be the pièce de résistance of that afternoon’s NBC Sportsworld presentation. Collins, a highly regarded middle-weight prospect from Chicago once trained by Emanuel Steward, had lost just once−to Tony Sibson−in thirty-six pro fights.
The network wound up with a lot of time to fill, as Sims scored a first-round TKO. Afterward, Arum announced plans to match Hagler’s brother against Roberto Duran that summer.
“Robbie was always a hell of a prospect,” said the promoter, “but he always screwed around too much. This time we put his fight on at the same time as Marvin’s and sent them to training camp together in Palm Springs. With Marvin around, he had to behave himself.”
On Monday morning at the Sports Pavilion, Hagler weighed 159 1/ 2 , Mugabi 157. Mills Lane, the Reno district attorney who had refereed Hagler’s 1979 draw with Antuofermo, was appointed to work Hagler-Mugabi, while Richard Steele drew the Hearns-Shuler fight. Carlos Padilla was named to work Richie Sandoval’s bantamweight title defense against Gaby Canizales.
Although few expected the verdict would go to the scorecards, an all-Nevada slate of Dave Moretti, Dalby Shirley and Jerry Roth was assigned to judge the main event.
In his first taste of combat since being knocked out by Hagler a year earlier, Hearns required just over a minute to dispose of Shuler. The Hit Man got Shuler’s attention with a series of early jabs before catching him with a left hook that forced the Philadelphian to drop his hands. Tommy drove his opponent into the neutral corner with a right hand, and then delivered another big right that sent Shuler to the floor. Shuler showed little interest in getting up as Steele counted him out.
The other featured bout on the undercard produced a frightening outcome. Canizales knocked Sandoval down five times in seven rounds, the last of which left the champion twitching in convulsions as Padilla and ringside physicians tried to remove his mouthpiece.
Following the seizure, Sandoval was rushed to Valley Hospital, and although he recovered, it was his last fight. Arum offered him a job as a publicist- cum -translator with Top Rank in exchange for a promise he would never fight again, and Sandoval, sensibly, accepted.
Canizales, who visited Sandoval in the hospital the next morning, joined most ringsiders in criticizing Padilla’s handling of the fight.
“I think he should have stopped it after the second knockdown,” said the new champion. “I knew I’d really hurt him then, and he was ready to go.”
Padilla−the man, remember, who had stopped Leonard-Benitez with six seconds on the clock−lamely explained: “If I stop the fight too early, then the crowd is not allowed to see it to its conclusion.” (When Katz spoke to him later that night, the referee claimed that it wasn’t his job, but that of Sandoval’s corner, to stop the fight.)
There had been two ambulances stationed outside the dressing rooms. One of them had been used to rush Sandoval to the hospital, and the other was revving up its engines to take James Shuler there as well. Shuler revived and walked out of the arena on his own steam that night, but a week after his first loss he was dead at twenty-six, killed in a motorcycle accident. Thomas Hearns not only flew to Philadelphia for the funeral, but also returned the NABF belt he had won from Shuler so that his fallen foe could be buried with it.
It had rained for much of the day and throughout the undercard, and the nearly 15,000 in attendance had been issued plastic garbage bags to protect their expensive clothing. The downpour subsided just before Hagler (to the strains of James Brown’s “Living in America” ) and Mugabi entered the arena.
Marvin Hagler successfully defended his middleweight title for the twelfth time that night, but it was scarcely the cakewalk many had anticipated.
In an attempt to confuse Mugabi, Hagler opened up from an orthodox stance, but The Beast hardly appeared to notice. “I came out right-handed early just to try and confuse him, but then I had to retreat a little bit and try to wear him down,” Hagler recalled later.
Hagler appeared to have the Ugandan in a world of trouble in the sixth, when he battered him around the ring, but by the end of that round the champion was also bleeding from the nose. “I got caught with a lot of shots,” admitted Hagler, “but that was mainly because I had to take the fight to him.”
Lane took a point from Hagler for a low blow in the seventh, and as the evening wore on with Mugabi still on his feet, chants of “Beast! Beast!” began to emanate from the crowd.
Although Hagler was landing right jabs virtually at will, he was repeatedly frustrated when he tried to set up the left behind it. Time and again, Hagler’s sweeping left flew over Mugabi’s head.
Hagler appeared to have The Beast on the run again in the ninth, but Lane halted the action and took Mugabi back to his corner for repairs on some loose tape on one of his gloves.
Recognizing the respite as a fortunate break, Duff, even as he re-wrapped Mugabi’s glove, told his fighter, “Congratulations. You just got back in the fight.”
By the eleventh Hagler’s right eye was nearly closed, but the war of attrition had taken its toll on the challenger. Midway through the round, Hagler landed four straight punches−a right, a left, and two more right hooks−that ended the fight.
The Beast reached out and tried to grab the ring rope as he fell to the canvas, but once he hit the floor there was no getting up. The best he could do was roll over into a sitting position as Lane counted him out.
“If he had gotten back up and [Lane] had let him go on, the man could have been badly hurt,” said Hagler.
When he was interviewed by Al Bernstein in the ring immed
iately afterward, Hagler suggested that the Mugabi fight “might have been my last.”
“Aren’t you going to miss me? ” he asked the broadcaster.
That night the Petronellis met with Hagler in his suite to discuss his future.
“Right now he’s tired, he’s sore, and he hurts, but I think he’ll be ready to fight Tommy Hearns again in November,” said Pat Petronelli. “I just told him, ‘Hey, you’re the one that’s hurting right now. Goody and me, we ain’t got a pimple on us, so you take your time and make up your mind.’”
“This guy’s been fighting for a long, long time, and he was in one of his toughest fights last night,” said Goody the next morning.
I had covered every one of Hagler’s dozen defenses, and I’d seen ominous signs in the Mugabi fight that I’d never seen before. Two days later, my column on the back page of Wednesday’s Boston Herald summarized my position:
IT’S TIME TO QUIT, MARVIN
Against Mugabi, for the first time in memory, Marvin Hagler found himself unable to accomplish things he wanted to do in the ring. Time and again—on perhaps fifteen occasions in all—Hagler threw the jab ahead of a sweeping left, only to watch the punch, one that would have connected two or three or five years earlier, either sail wide of the mark or whistle over The Beast’s head.
And when he took the fight to Mugabi to throw his once-lethal and well-practiced combinations, the routine was repeatedly interrupted by hard counterpunches that Hagler once would have been able to avoid.
Marvin Hagler’s place in history is already secure, and the thinking here is that the time to get out is now.
The Petronellis did not disagree with my assessment, but, said Pat, “you know you can’t push Marvin into anything.
“I still think he’s going to keep fighting,” added the manager, “but if he decides he wants to retire, we’ll certainly respect that, too. We’ve all had a great ride, and if that’s what he wants, it’ll be fine with us.”
With Hagler-Mugabi on Showtime, Ray Leonard was not part of the broadcast team. He watched the fight as a civilian, from a seat near ringside, where he sat drinking beer with Ollie Dunlap and the actor Michael J. Fox. As the bout wore on he found himself noticing the same things I had noticed.
“When the fight was over we ran into Whoopi Goldberg, and we all wound up going to a party in somebody’s suite,” recalled Dunlap. “There was a party going on all around him, but Ray was sitting there by himself. You could see he was thinking, and then all of a sudden he turned around and said to Michael Fox: ‘Know what? I can beat this guy!’”
“Ray,” Ollie asked gently, “how many drinks you had, anyway? ”
“Plenty, and I’m going to have another one,” said Leonard. “But I’m telling you, I can beat Hagler.”
Later that evening, Leonard telephoned Mike Trainer, who told him he was nuts. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” said Trainer, who went back to bed. When Ray phoned again the next day the lawyer realized it hadn’t just been the booze talking. By the following week, Ray had quietly returned to the gym.
“A couple of months after the Mugabi fight, Mike Trainer and I opened our restaurant−Jameson’s, in Bethesda−and Marvin came down for the grand opening,” said Leonard. “I picked him up at the airport, and we sat around together having a few drinks.”
“So what’s next? ” Leonard recalled asking Hagler.
“I don’t know, Ray, I’m finding it hard to get motivated,” replied Hagler.
“No shit,” agreed Leonard, as he poured another glass of champagne for Hagler.
“The two of us sat up all night, drinking and talking,” said Leonard. “We never discussed the fight, but I knew I’d already baited the hook by planting it in his head.”
A few weeks later Trainer relayed a proposed challenge to Bob Arum, who passed it on to the Petronellis. There was no immediate response from Hagler.
While he awaited Hagler’s answer, Arum had other things on his mind. Three months after Hagler-Mugabi, the promoter was staging a summertime show at Caesars Palace, one he had christened the “Triple Hitter.”
Designed to appeal to a wide cross-section of boxing fans, the bill included two world championship bouts−Ireland’s Barry McGuigan defending his featherweight title against Argentine Fernando Sosa, and a WBC 154-pound title bout between Hearns and Mark Medal−along with what figured to be a grudge match, with Hagler’s younger brother Robbie Sims fighting the aging Roberto Duran.
Enormously popular in his homeland, McGuigan had managed to unite all of Ireland with a deliberately apolitical agenda that appealed to Catholics and Protestants alike. The Clones Cyclone had a huge following in Britain as well: Over 25,000 had packed Queens Park Rangers Stadium in London the night he defeated Eusebio Pedroza to win his championship. Now he was testing American waters for the first time as champion, and Arum made the wee Irishman the centerpiece of a cross-country promotional tour.
At one stop in Boston, the Triple Hitter lineup, sans Duran, appeared before a group of inner-city schoolchildren in Roxbury. After Hearns and Sims addressed the children, Sosa’s remarks were relayed by an interpreter.
When it came McGuigan’s turn to speak, it became apparent that the youngsters were having difficulty grasping his Hibernian brogue. Hearns playfully leapt to the microphone and began to “interpret,” explaining to the children: “What Barry say . . . ”
The tour was barely over when Sosa was diagnosed with two detached retinas and scratched from the card. His place as McGuigan’s challenger was assumed by Steve Cruz, an unknown and largely untested boxer from Texas who worked as a full-time apprentice plumber by day. Cruz wore the logo “Fort Worth Plumbing and Heating” on his trunks.
At least 3,000 of McGuigan’s countrymen came to Las Vegas to witness his introduction to America. McGuigan’s father, Pat, a professional entertainer who traditionally sang “Danny Boy” (in lieu of national anthems) before his son’s fights, was booked for a weekend-long engagement at Caesars’ Olympia Lounge.
June 23, 1986, proved to be one of the hottest days in Las Vegas history, and one of the blackest nights in the annals of Irish boxing. Overcome by the 110-degree heat and badly dehydrated, a legless McGuigan was knocked down three times, two of them in the final round. He barely finished on his feet before collapsing, and after losing his title was taken by ambulance to a Las Vegas hospital.
In the main event, Hearns stopped Medal in the eighth round of their title fight. In the other bout, Sims won a split decision over Duran in what was widely assumed to have been the final fight of Cholo’s career.
Leonard had proposed that he would emerge from retirement for one fight and one fight only−against Marvelous Marvin Hagler, for the middleweight championship of the world. There would be no tune-up fight, and the notion of discussing options was utterly moot. Even if he beat Hagler, Leonard insisted, he would never defend the title.
Hagler was torn. Leonard was the one fight he’d always coveted, but four years later, he still resented the way Ray had played him at that Baltimore retirement ceremony, and he felt he had been an ill-used pawn in the Kevin Howard comeback fight as well. How could he be sure this wasn’t just another ruse?
Hagler also saw it as a no-win situation. Beating a one-eyed welter-weight who’d fought just once in five years would hardly put an exclamation point on his career. In fact, if he went on to break Monzon’s record and the Leonard fight was one of them, future boxing historians might mark his achievement with an asterisk.
And although he insists to this day that he never considered the possibility that he might not win, somewhere in Hagler’s mind he must have realized what effect losing to Leonard under these circumstances might have upon his legacy.
While a Leonard fight figured to make him millions, there was another, unspoken reason for Hagler’s misgivings over the prospect of Ray’s return to the limelight.
Between Leonard’s absence and the sensational nature of his win over Hearns, Ha
gler had by the mid-1980s become the sport’s most visible active practitioner. Playing off his menacing demeanor and fearsome reputation, an advertising agency had imaginatively cast him in a series of deodorant commercials (for Right Guard) in which Marvin, playing the genteel country squire, eloquently delivered lines like “One wouldn’t want to offend, would one? ” and “Anything less would be uncivilized.”
Those commercials had been well-received, but Leonard was unquestionably the King of the Q-Factor, and his return to the ring threatened to displace Hagler’s newfound position.
Duran and Hearns, by contrast, never made a significant impact on Madison Avenue. Duran’s opportunities had been limited by the language barrier (his only significant exposure had come in playing the foil to Leonard in those 1980 soft drink commercials), while Hearns sometimes had nearly as much trouble with English as Duran did. Early in his career, Kronk publicist Jackie Kallen had arranged auditions for Hearns to endorse several Detroit-based products, Stroh’s beer and Vernor’s soft drinks among them, but Tommy had so hopelessly bungled his lines in the studio that the commercials never made it to the screen.
Leonard would later suggest that the 109 days it took Hagler to accept his challenge was an indication that the champion wasn’t sure he wanted to fight him at all.
“Oh, yeah? ” Hagler bristled. “Well, how come it took Ray four years to make up his mind? He didn’t want me then .”
Hagler’s agreeing to fight was only the first step. Months of negotiations culminated in a record purse of $23 million, of which Hagler was guaranteed $12 million.
It was just the third time in Leonard’s career (Benitez and Duran II were the others) that he would be paid less than his opponent, but Hagler’s representatives made several concessions in other important areas that more than offset the cosmetic difference in the purses.
The date was set for April 6, 1987. Although other venues were briefly discussed, there was no realistic possibility that a fight of this magnitude could take place anywhere other than Caesars Palace.
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