Four Kings

by George Kimball

  Richard Steele, who had performed creditably in Hagler-Hearns two years earlier, was named the referee, with no objection from either side.

  The original panel of judges was to have comprised Lou Filippo, Dave Moretti and Harry Gibbs, but the Petronellis, still seething over Hagler’s treatment in London after the Minter fight seven years earlier, objected to the Englishman’s inclusion on the panel.

  “We want a Mexican judge!” demanded Pat Petronelli.

  He got one. Gibbs (who two years earlier had worked Hagler-Hearns without incident) was replaced by Jose Juan “Jo Jo” Guerra. Gibbs didn’t even stay for the fight. He packed his bags and flew home to England, arriving just in time to watch Hagler-Leonard on television.

  Although it was voiced by his co-manager, the challenge to Gibbs appears to have had the full support of Hagler himself.

  “I have nothing against the English people,” the champion explained, “but, you know, if you get bad food in a restaurant, you don’t want to go back there no more.”

  The capacity of the outdoor stadium at Caesars was supposed to be 15,236, but the officially announced attendance would be 15,366. Tickets, with a $700 top for ringside, had long been sold out, though 2,000 of the best seats were never offered to the public. The host casino held that many back for its preferred gambling customers.

  Hagler-Leonard was such a hot ticket that some of the A-list celebrities had been consigned to the bleachers, but Caesars released a list of guests that included the usual suspects−Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Tom Selleck, Billy Crystal, Bo Derek and David Brenner from the world of entertainment, Muhammad Ali, John McEnroe and Wilt Chamberlain from the world of sport−and a host of others, ranging from Timothy Hutton, Willie Nelson and Joan Collins to Chevy Chase, Tony Danza and the Pointer Sisters.

  Action on the bout was so heavy that Lou D’Amico, the sports book manager at Caesars, said, “No question, Hagler-Leonard couldn’t be out-done unless we built a stadium out back and got them to play the Super Bowl here.”

  The Aladdin, a hostelry down the street formerly owned by Wayne Newton, reopened just three days before Hagler-Leonard, after having had its gaming license revoked two years earlier.

  “We didn’t plan our reopening around the fight,” said Aladdin spokes-person Barbara Shimko. “But we sure don’t mind the windfall.”

  By fight time Hagler remained the favorite, but the odds had been bet down to 5-2.

  What was unquestionably the highlight of the undercard came during the first televised bout, between Lupe Aquino and Davey Moore. At the beginning of the second, a round-card girl who identified herself to Michael Globetti as Alechia Patch was negotiating her way into the ring between the ropes when she leaned too far forward and one of her breasts flopped out of her top.

  The unintended nudity was greeted by considerably more applause than either Lupino or Moore had received. (When she climbed through the ropes a round later and her boobs didn’t fall out, she was booed by the crowd.)

  “Tell me I’m not embarrassed,” Ms. Patch told Globetti. “It’s not the kind of exposure I was looking for. I was climbing through the wires and I looked down and, oops, I was in trouble!”

  Arum said he was paying the round-card girls $75 apiece for the night’s work, “but they get to sit in $700 seats.”

  There was no indication that Moore was distracted by Alechia Patch’s wardrobe malfunction, but the former champion was stopped by Aquino in the fifth. In the principal undercard bout that followed, Roldan bounced back from his loss to Hagler with an impressive ninth-round TKO of James Kinchen.

  Two young New England boxers had performed earlier in supporting roles: Brian Powers, a welterweight fighting out of the Petronelli Gym, out-pointed Celio Olivar in a four-rounder, while twenty-one-year-old Micky Ward, a junior welterweight from Lowell whom Teddy Brenner was touting as “the best New England prospect since Hagler,” ripped open a gash above Kelly Koble’s right eye with a left hook on the way to a fourth-round TKO that raised Ward’s record to 13-0.

  Marvelous Marvin Hagler was probably more confident of victory in the Leonard fight than he had been for any of his previous twelve defenses, and nothing that happened over the twelve rounds the two men shared in the ring that night disabused him of that notion. He was in fact so dismissive of Leonard’s threat that he allowed the fight to slip away from him.

  Twenty years later an incautious man could walk into the wrong Boston saloon and with just two words −“Leonard won”− almost guarantee himself an invitation to step outside.

  What unfolded that night was not unlike a baseball game between teams operating under diametrically opposite philosophies: One relying on the long ball, the other employing bunts, stolen bases, sacrifice flies, and perhaps even the hidden-ball trick. If at the end of nine innings the latter has more runs on the scoreboard than the former, it wins.

  Leonard understood the rules of the game they were playing that night better than did Hagler.

  And Marvin never did hit a home run.

  For reasons that have never been entirely clear, Hagler attempted to confuse Leonard by abandoning his southpaw attack to box out of an orthodox stance, and stubbornly clung to that strategy even after its futility had been demonstrated.

  Hagler never adequately explained his decision to come out right-handed, but Michael Katz offered an explanation as plausible as anything else we’ve heard.

  “Marvin told me once that he not only wanted to be the best worker on the assembly line at the shoe factory and the best bricklayer at Petronelli Brothers Construction, but that in addition to being the best middleweight in the world as a southpaw, he wanted to be the best from an orthodox stance as well,” recalled the Wolf Man. “I think he may have been trying to prove that against Ray.”

  The result was that the champion lost each of the first four rounds on the scorecards of two judges, as well as on my unofficial tally for the Boston Herald .

  Calling the fight on the pay-per-view telecast, Gil Clancy prophetically told colleague Tim Ryan, “If [Hagler] loses this fight because he gave away the first two rounds, he won’t be able to live with himself.”

  In the corner between rounds, Goody Petronelli could be heard directing Hagler to “rough him up,” although at this point Leonard didn’t have a mark on him.

  In the fourth, Leonard even embarrassed Hagler by winding up and throwing a right-handed bolo punch, although the blow landed waist-high and inflicted no damage.

  The fight took a turn in the fifth when Hagler erupted with a display of aggression. Dictating to his desk back in New York over a ringside telephone, the Associated Press’ Ed Schuyler described the final minute of the round:

  Hagler got in a left to the head, then a hook to the body. Hagler landed a short left to the face. Hagler got in a good left to the head in Leonard’s corner. Hagler got a good right and left to the head with thirty seconds left. They were finding the range. Hagler had Leonard against the ropes. Hagler landed a right at the bell.

  The intervention of the bell appeared to annoy Hagler. A look of disgust on his face, he gave Leonard a disdainful shove.

  In my own hastily composed report of the fight for the following morning’s paper I noted that “as the bell sounded ending the round, Leonard woozily eyed Hagler and then stumbled−no, staggered −back to his stool.”

  In a conversation a few months later, Leonard recapitulated that moment.

  “I was definitely in trouble,” he told me. “I thought I was gone. But then when I passed him on my way back to the corner I looked Marvin in the eye, and I realized at that moment, ‘He doesn’t even know I’m hurt! He doesn’t know it!’ I knew I had him right there.”

  The odd aspect of this epiphany was that it came at the conclusion of the first round Leonard had decisively lost. All three judges scored the fifth for Hagler. As I wrote in the Herald:

  Any delusions that the corner had been turned were quickly laid to rest the next round, as Hagler pressed the
attack, Leonard was a veritable will o’ the wisp, dancing about as Hagler’s mighty blows flew harmlessly all around him, pausing just long enough to land an effective flurry of his own just before the bell.

  “If I was Leonard,” Clancy suggested in the eighth round, “I’d load up and try to nail Hagler now. Hagler is getting overconfident−and he’s gasping, now, too.”

  But at this point Leonard wasn’t listening to the television analyst. He didn’t even seem to be listening to Angelo Dundee.

  “Ray is a smart fighter, maybe the smartest,” Dundee would later recall of this interlude. “He’s such an intelligent guy that you had to assume in the corner he knew just what he was doing.”

  “After Marvin gave away the first six or seven rounds, I knew he was figuring he had to finish strong to win a decision,” explained Leonard.

  In the ninth Hagler once again appeared to have Leonard in a world of trouble, but Ray rallied with a flurry at the end of the round.

  The timing of Leonard’s flashy eruptions was hardly an accident. In anticipation of the possibility that many rounds might be there for the taking, Ollie Dunlap, manning a stopwatch in the corner, had been directed to alert Leonard when thirty seconds remained in the stanza.

  Hagler had won the middle rounds, or won them everywhere save on the scorecard of Jo Jo Guerra, anyway, but he was clearly in for a fight.

  Although Hagler seemed to be landing the more telling blows, Leonard was landing more punches, and over the final third of the fight Ray would play the master toreador to Marvin’s increasingly enraged bull. It was as if Leonard had an invisible jet pack on his back, and when he sensed immediate malevolent intentions on Hagler’s part, it triggered some psychic button that whooshed him backward out of harm’s way.

  “That was the plan,” Sugar Ray would say later, “to cross his wires, to frustrate him and make him mad. You look back at that fight and you’ll see that Marvin rarely threw combinations except when he had me on the ropes. He hardly ever put two punches together. He was totally out of synch.”

  Indeed, as Hagler tried to maneuver Leonard to the ropes in an attempt to force the fight inside, Dundee shouted from the corner to Steele, “Watch that bald-headed sucker ’s head!”

  In the corner after the tenth Dundee told Leonard, “Six minutes to the title! Man, you can do six minutes in your sleep, can’t you? ”

  “He’s a miracle man, doing what he’s doing right now, and he’s winning in my opinion,” said Clancy on the telecast, adding that Hagler needed to win each of the last two rounds to win the fight.

  In the eleventh, Hagler nailed Leonard with a right jab, and followed with a combination. Leonard responded with a flurry of his own, took a step backward, and then lashed out to catch Hagler with a right-hand lead. For the first time all night, he seemed to be getting the better of the infighting even when he was backed against the ropes.

  As the twelfth and final round commenced Dundee dispatched Leonard from his corner with a shout of, “Three minutes, champ!” As he rose from his stool, Leonard held his gloves above his head in an unmistakable gesture of confidence. Hagler sneered and mocked him by raising his own gloves.

  Once again Hagler dutifully stalked his quarry, and once again Leonard avoided any serious engagement. In those final minutes, an expression of scorn etched on his face, Hagler seemed to be talking to Leonard.

  “He was,” referee Steele would later confirm.

  “But,” added the ordained minister, “they were words I wouldn’t repeat.”

  Well into that final stanza, Sugar Ray actually looked to his corner and shouted, “How much time? ”

  “One minute!” Ollie shouted back, and with that Leonard raised his right glove in triumph as he danced away. Hagler, snarling and huffing in pursuit, disdainfully raised his own glove.

  At the final bell, Leonard attempted the same celebratory backflip he had enacted in the Superdome ring once he realized Duran had quit. This time he miscalculated and landed flat on his back. He had to be carried back to his corner.

  Even as he was being toweled off and awaiting the verdict, Leonard swears that he looked out into the audience and already saw money changing hands.

  “What that meant was that in the eyes of some people I’d ‘won,’ just because I was still there at the end,” recalled Leonard. “From the third round on I’d been looking out in the audience and I could tell from the expression on some guys’ faces they were saying, ‘Shit, he’s still there!’ An amazing number of people didn’t think I would be.”

  Clancy, on the closed-circuit telecast, described Leonard’s as “the greatest performance I’ve ever seen by any boxer,” and Steele pronounced it “the greatest fight I’ve ever been involved in.”

  In the moments between the conclusion of the fight and the announcement of the decision, there had been a near-fistfight between two other old rivals. Although Don King had not been involved in the promotion, his allegiance was clear-cut: Hagler was Bob Arum’s fighter and Leonard was not, and, sensing the possibility of an upset, King had begun to climb the steps into Leonard’s corner to join in the celebration.

  Arum, behind him, tried to pull King back down the steps, but succeeded only in ripping the pocket of King’s expensive sport coat.

  The rival promoters squared off, but were quickly separated by a Caesars security guard, who restrained King and began to pull him away.

  King turned on the peacemaker, calling him “a lousy black motherfucker,” but he never did make it into the ring.

  “That man had nothing to do with the fight,” fumed Arum, who got high marks from ringsiders for his display of bravery in the brief set-to but refused to gloat.

  “I’m not going to drop in any way, shape, or fashion to that guy’s level,” said Arum.

  The writers at ringside that night were as divided as the judges turned out to be. Scoring for the Associated Press, Schuyler had Hagler winning 117-112, while I had Leonard narrowly ahead. Since my newspaper used the AP’s round-by-round for the press run that hit the streets immediately after the fight, readers who picked up the Herald bulldog edition must have been bewildered to read side-by-side accounts of a fight with two different winners.

  As they awaited the decision, Hagler appeared concerned that it had come to this. He hadn’t wanted to leave it in the hands of the judges. Leonard, on the other hand, seemed positively serene.

  “I thought I’d won the fight, but I didn’t really care that much one way or the other,” he said. “I’d proved something to myself. It was exciting. The event itself was exciting, and the anticipation on people’s faces right then told me that whatever the judges said, it had lived up to their expectations.”

  Filippo scored the fight 115-113, or 7-5 in rounds, for Hagler. Moretti had the same score, but in Leonard’s favor. The third judge, Guerra, had it 118-110 for Leonard−a whopping 10-2 margin so utterly at variance with reality that Pat Petronelli would proclaim “that Jo Jo Guerra is a disgrace. He ought to be put in jail. Ask Leonard if he thought Marvin Hagler only won two rounds.”

  Angelo Dundee did not seem to disagree with this assessment. “Unfortunately,” Leonard’s trainer would say the next morning, “one of the judges wasn’t with us last night.”

  Ironically, of course, Guerra had been empanelled only because Petronelli had demanded “a Mexican judge.” Harry Gibbs, who had flown back to England after being dismissed from the tribunal, watched the fight on television and scored it for Hagler.

  In mid-ring, Leonard approached a crestfallen Hagler. And as he attempted to embrace the ex-champion, he whispered, “You’re the champ” into his ear.

  Hagler would claim that Leonard was admitting, “You won the fight.”

  “We’re still friends, right? ” asked Leonard.

  When Marvin didn’t respond, Ray repeated the question. “We’re still friends? ”

  Hagler was still staring off into space.

  “It’s not fair,” he finally murmured.

>   Interviewed in the ring, Leonard pronounced it “a special conflict,” adding that “to me, Marvelous Marvin Hagler is still the middleweight champion of the world. It wasn’t his belt I wanted. I just wanted to beat him. ”

  In his dressing room, Hagler was almost inconsolable.

  “I beat him,” murmured Marvin. “I beat him, and he knows it. I told you about Vegas. They stole it. I stayed aggressive, and I won the fight. He told me himself, ‘You beat me.’ I feel in my heart that I’m still the champ.”

  Well over an hour elapsed before Hagler and his small entourage vacated the dressing room and began the long march back to the hotel. The crowd had long since dispersed to the gaming tables, and elsewhere on the grounds a Leonard victory party was already underway.

  The arena was deserted but for the cleanup crew. In the parking lot outside, a beer truck was loading up the remaining inventory from the concession stands. As Hagler passed by he called to one of the workers, “Hey, man, how about a six-pack? ”

  The fellow loading the truck didn’t even hesitate.

  “You’re the champ, Marvin,” he said, and handed over two cases of Budweiser for Hagler to take back to his suite.

  Six years, six months, and ten days after it had begun on a rainy night in London, Marvin Hagler’s championship reign had come to an end.

  The decision was immediately controversial. Two decades later, the debate has scarcely abated.

  After filing our post-fight stories, a dozen scribes reconvened in the bar at the Flame Steakhouse late that night, and a lively discourse ensued.

  The argument continued in the pages of several national magazines, and a few years later the editors of a British boxing anthology entitled Come Out Writing twinned divergent views (mine from Boxing Illustrated, Hugh McIlvanney’s from Sports Illustrated ) in sort of a Point/Counterpoint debate entitled “The Rumble of Dissent.” I wrote:

  Clearly, there is room for philosophical argument on both sides: Leonard’s punches never did any real damage, other than to pile up points, while Hagler’s were clearly more lethal—when they managed to connect. In terms of “clean punches,” the fight was no better than a wash. “Aggression? ” Hagler was obviously the aggressor for most of the night, but the operative word in this category is supposed to be effective aggression. And it seemed to me that Leonard’s mastery of another category of supposedly equal importance, “defense,” was at least sufficient to offset any supposed edge Hagler might have built up here.