Four Kings

by George Kimball

  With the first three categories more or less a push, then, it seemed, and still seems, to me that in the fourth−“Ring Generalship”−here was a clear-cut dominance on the part of Leonard. It was Leonard who dictated the terms under which this battle was waged. It was Ray who was able to lead Marvin around by the nose, forcing him to fight Leonard’s fight rather than his own. Leonard did what he wanted to do and denied Hagler what he wanted to do for the better part of the evening.

  The Boxing Bard of Scotland was passionate in his response to the judges’ verdict. Wrote McIlvanney:

  Ray Leonard’s real accomplishment lay in pulling off an epic countertrick, one that was a testament to the mischievous richness of his intelligence and the flawlessness of his nerve. The natural priority of most fighters is to seek to dominate their opponents, but throughout the thirty-six minutes of this match, Leonard was far less concerned with impressing Hagler than with manipulating the minds of the judges.

  His plan was to catch their attention with isolated but carefully timed flurries of flashy punches, relying on these superficially dramatic though rarely telling flourishes to blur the officials’ appreciation of how much time he was spending in retreat (and, occasionally, headlong flight) from the relentlessly chasing Hagler.

  Even Hagler’s corner seemed to have retrospective misgivings.

  “Marvin should have come out stronger,” conceded Pat Petronelli. “That was a mistake. But the fight should have been fifteen rounds. Leonard was out on his feet at the end, exhausted. A championship fight should be fifteen rounds, but Leonard’s people wouldn’t do it.”

  “I beat him and you know it,” moaned Hagler. “How can they take the title from the champion on a split decision when the other guy won’t fight?

  “A split decision,” he insisted, “should go to the champion.”

  The morning after the fight Leonard was having breakfast in the Café Roma at Caesars when he was joined by John Madden.

  “Madden was a big fight fan,” said Leonard. “He’d been at the gym the day Quincy Taylor put me on Queer Street, and he didn’t think there was any way I could win. That morning he sat down across the table from me and just stared, as if he couldn’t believe what he was looking at. He looked at me for about five minutes and never said a word. Then he got up and walked away.

  “My heart really went out to Marvin,” said Leonard. “I honestly wish there was some way I could have beaten him and then said, ‘Here’s your belt.’ That title meant the world to Marvin. It was his identification, and he’d finally been getting the recognition he thought he should have. Marvin’s stock rose while I was retired. He’d started doing commercials. Where was he going to go now? ”

  “I’m going to discourage him from fighting again,” said Pat Petronelli. “He doesn’t need it.”

  In Hagler’s mind, a rematch would have been a logical conclusion to the conspiracy theory.

  “I believe the boxing world wants me back,” he said, “and the only way they could keep me here was with a rematch.”

  Under the circumstances, Arum was reluctant to push Hagler toward a hasty decision.

  “I don’t know how things will work out, but it’s a fight I’d like to see again,” allowed the promoter.

  In the days following the fight, Leonard was not among those pressing for a rematch. On Monday night he had hinted at one direction in which he might go when he said, with a nod to Hearns’ newly acquired light-heavyweight title, “I’ll see you six months and fifteen pounds heavier from now.”

  • • •

  Ten days after the Super Fight, sportscaster John Dennis of Boston’s WNAC-TV reported that the Nevada State Athletic Commission was investigating a report that an unidentified gambler who had bet a large sum of money on Leonard had improperly influenced one of the judges to swing the fight to the challenger. I subsequently recapitulated the episode in the pages of Boxing Illustrated:

  As it turned out, an investigation was not underway, but following the widespread circulation of John Dennis’ story, Nevada officials were forced to initiate one. In order to avoid potential conflict of interest charges, Nevada commissioner Duane Ford turned the matter over to a special investigator representing the state attorney general’s department.

  It did not require the services of Sherlock Holmes to discern that the gambler in question was sometime fight manager Billy Baxter, and that the judge whose ethics had been called into question was not Guerra, but Moretti. After an investigation lasting several months both men were completely exonerated.

  The appearance of impropriety stemmed from the fact that Baxter and Moretti had discussed going into business together in a planned gymnasium in Las Vegas. Although it was never conclusively determined who had leaked the “fix” story to Dennis, Leonard’s people suspected that it had been someone in the Hagler camp, or perhaps even Arum himself.

  The episode did not exactly smooth the way for a rematch.

  “What gets me,” Mike Trainer told me at the time, “is that Ray never uttered a peep after he lost the first fight to Duran−one that in our minds was equally disputable. All this bellyaching, all this complaining, all these excuses, it’s made Ray very disappointed in Marvin. He hasn’t been a very good sport about the whole thing.”

  The combatants would continue to exchange recriminations in the weeks following the fight.

  “He called me a sissy,” complained Leonard, irate that Hagler did not respect him.

  “He fought like a girl,” muttered Hagler.

  Months later Hagler was back in Vegas, doing the color commentary for a middleweight fight between Sumbu Kalambay and Iran Barkley. Afterward he partied at a nightclub called Botany’s, where he had a chance encounter with Leonard in the men’s room.

  “Some fight, huh? ” said Leonard, attempting to make small talk.

  He got only an icy stare in return. As Hagler walked away, it was clear that there would be no rematch.

  Ollie Dunlap suggested that had Hagler simply emerged from the Super Fight saying, “Well, I thought I won, but I guess the judges saw it differently. Let’s do it again,” Ray might have said, “Sure.”

  “As it was,” said Dunlap, “everything Hagler and his people did over the next several months only soured Ray on the idea of fighting again−or at least, fighting Marvin again. But this whole sour-grapes attitude they’ve had since the moment they stepped out of the ring is not going to have its desired effect, I can tell you that. If they really wanted to fight Ray again, the last thing they should have been doing was running around telling people they got robbed and that the fight was fixed and all that bullshit.”

  Leonard convened another press conference, this time in Washington, to announce that he was relinquishing the WBC middleweight championship and−for the fourth time, if you include his post-Olympic announcement−that he was retiring from the ring.

  “Why should we believe you this time? ” he was asked. “You’re retired now, but will you ever fight again? ”

  “No,” Ray replied, but then broke into a grin. “But you guys know me . . . ”

  Even in retirement, though, Leonard left the door open for a possible Hagler fight. That autumn, he told a Washington television interviewer, “If Marvin wants to fight me, he has to come to me and talk about it first.”

  A few weeks later Leonard appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago, where he told the hostess, “Hagler never gave me credit. I beat him fair and square. He made allegations that some of the officials in Nevada were corrupt and what have you. I think it’s unprofessional, and I want to beat him up.”

  Hagler refused to rise to the bait.

  “Let Leonard go get another belt first,” he said. “If he really wanted to fight again, why did he give up the title? ”

  “All Marvin has to do is call me up,” said Ray.

  “If I ever do call him,” muttered Hagler, “it’ll be collect.”

  “A myth has grown up that Hagler wanted a rematch and I wouldn’
t give it to him,” Leonard reflected years later. “That’s bullshit. I knew the value of a rematch, and having beaten him once, I felt I’d beat him even easier the second time.

  “But as you know, Marvin is stubborn. When he says no, he means no, and he won’t change his mind no matter what.”

  In the aftermath of the Leonard fight, Hagler decided to take a long family vacation. He bought a van that would accommodate the entire brood and asked Angie Carlino to come along as his driver.

  “Marvin and Bertha had been having trouble even before the Leonard fight,” said Carlino. “Part of the reason for the trip was that he was hoping to patch things up with her. We spent nearly two months driving across the country and back−me, him, Bertha, and the kids−from New England out to the West Coast and then back again.

  “He was trying to be as incognito as a guy as recognizable as him could be, just trying to get away from everything. Bob Arum kept trying to contact him. It was no secret that Arum wanted him to fight again,” recalled Carlino. “On the last part of the trip we were driving through Canada, and in Montreal a reporter asked him about fighting Davey Hilton up there. Marvin said, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to fight again,’ and he sounded like he meant it.

  “From Montreal we drove down to New Hampshire. I dropped Marvin at his place there and drove Bertha and the kids back to Hanover. A few weeks after we got back from the trip, Bertha filed for divorce.”

  Bertha Hagler’s divorce petition was filed in Hingham District Court on June 30, 1987. Shortly thereafter she retained the services of a noted Los Angeles celebrity attorney, thereby cementing yet another bond among three of the Four Kings. Between divorce and custody proceedings, Hagler, Leonard, and Hearns shared another common opponent besides Roberto Duran: across a negotiating table, the three of them all went eyeball to eyeball with Marvin Mitchelson.

  Hagler eventually packed up his bags, moved to Europe, and never fought again.

  Chapter 9

  The War

  Hearns–Leonard II

  Caesars Palace, June 12, 1989

  In a predictable aftermath of the Hagler-Leonard fight, the middleweight title was shortly fragmented almost beyond recognition. For nearly seven years Hagler had reigned as the undisputed champion, but in a few short weeks that October, three new champions were created.

  On October 10 at Caesars Palace, American Frank Tate outpointed Canadian Michael Olajide for the IBF title. On October 23 in Livorno, Sumbu Kalambay, an Italian-based middleweight from Zaire, won a decision over New Yorker Iran Barkley to claim the WBA title. And, less than a week later, at the Las Vegas Hilton, Thomas Hearns became the third member of the triumvirate when he knocked out Juan Domingo Roldan to win the WBC championship vacated by Leonard.

  It was Hearns’ fourth world title, but his reign would be short-lived. In his first defense he was matched against Barkley the following June. By the end of two rounds, the Blade was bleeding badly and Hearns looked to be on his way to an easy night.

  Then in the third he walked right into a stunning right hand. It may have been the best punch Barkley ever threw.

  Once again Hearns’ chin proved his undoing. Only by force of will did he rise from the knockdown, but he was floundering around the ring, and when Barkley decked him again, Richard Steele wisely stopped it at 2:39 of the round. The fight would be voted The Ring magazine’s Upset of the Year.

  The reigns of the new crop of 160-pound champions were uniformly brief: Kalambay lost the WBA title the night he fought Mike McCallum, and Tate lost his IBF belt to Michael Nunn in his second.

  Barkley, having scored one monumental upset over Hearns, himself became the victim of one in his first defense. On February 24, 1989, in what would be acclaimed as The Ring ’s Fight of the Year, Barkley was floored in the eleventh round and lost his title on a split decision−to a thirty-seven-year-old Roberto Duran.

  Another title became available with the establishment of the World Boxing Organization, a spinoff sanctioning body established by a breakaway WBA faction headed up by Puerto Rican attorney Francisco Valcarcel. In the new body’s first-ever middleweight title fight, Doug DeWitt won a split decision over Robbie Sims to become the WBO champion. (DeWitt would lose it a year later to Nigel Benn.)

  “Hagler came back to the states and went to Atlantic City for his brother’s fight,” said J.D. Brown. “It was the first time I’d seen him since Sports Illustrated ran that story about me spying on him in Palm Springs. Marvin looked like he wanted to choke me.”

  The original agreement between Sugar Ray Leonard Inc. and Angelo Dundee had long expired. The maestro had returned to work the Howard and Hagler fights on the assumption that it would be under terms similar to his original arrangement. Angelo appears to have been satisfied with the paycheck he received from the Howard fight, but was plainly insulted by the $150,000 he was paid after the Hagler blockbuster.

  Cable television and the emerging pay-per-view industry had dramatically altered the boxing landscape in the decade since Dundee had first worked with Leonard. On one hand, Angelo was realistic enough to recognize that it would be ridiculous for a trainer to expect 15%−or even 10%−of the profligate purses now being tossed around. On the other hand, 1% seemed humiliating.

  When an entreaty from his lawyer to Mike Trainer elicited no response, Dundee decided to move on.

  Contrary to widespread assumption, Dundee never resigned. When Leonard decided to end retirement No. 4 by coming back to fight Donny Lalonde in 1988, Dundee was one of the first members of the old team to whom he reached out.

  “I had my lawyer send Mike Trainer a letter saying that I wanted a contract,” said Dundee. “This time I wanted to know exactly how much I was being paid.

  “We never got a response.”

  When Leonard went into training for the Lalonde fight, Janks Morton had been promoted to chief second. Angelo would never work with Ray again.

  Although Leonard himself must have signed off on the decision, to this day Angelo blames Trainer for the rift.

  Donny Lalonde was an unlikely boxer. Uncommonly handsome, he had worked as a model and actor, and in his spare time composed thoughtful poetry. Canadian by birth, he had come under the aegis of Dave Wolf, the former sportswriter who had turned Boom-Boom Mancini into a household name. Wolf had repackaged Lalonde as the “Golden Boy” (years before the world had heard of Oscar De La Hoya) and turned him into a marquee prizefighter.

  In 1987, Lalonde had won the vacant WBC light-heavyweight title with a second-round TKO of Eddie Davis in Trinidad and Tobago. The following spring he successfully defended it, stopping former WBA champion Leslie Stewart, a Trinidad native, in Port of Spain.

  As a result of negotiations for the Lalonde fight, Leonard once again emerged with a decided advantage. The WBC had recently joined the other sanctioning bodies in establishing a 168-pound super-middleweight division. Leonard and Trainer managed to persuade Wolf and Lalonde that history was there to be made were the fight the first ever to be simultaneously contested for world titles in two divisions.

  The WBC happily sanctioned Lalonde-Leonard as its inaugural super-middleweight title fight. Although the Golden Boy’s light-heavyweight title would also be on the line at Caesars Palace, Lalonde’s agreement to fight at 168 pounds was a significant concession by the naturally bigger man.

  The Lalonde-Leonard fight on November 7, 1988, was preceded by a junior welterweight title bout between Roger Mayweather and Vinny Pazienza. Mayweather, the champion, won rather easily, but the final bell precipitated a wild melee. An enraged Pazienza pushed past referee Mills Lane and continued to swing away, and both corners spilled into the ring to join the fracas.

  By the time security could restore order, Pazienza’s sixty-six-year-old trainer, Lou Duva, was bleeding profusely from a cut on his forehead. He was lifted off the floor, and a stretcher was summoned. I was no more than twenty feet away, but the confusion of bodies had rendered it impossible to see what had happened. Someone su
ggested that it had been a punch from Mayweather that decked Duva.

  When Lane descended the ring steps, I raced over to inquire: “Mills, did Mayweather actually hit Lou? ”

  “Yeah,” drawled the referee. “But it was the twelfth round. He didn’t have much left.”

  In the early going of Leonard’s fight against Lalonde it appeared that Sugar Ray had bitten off more then he could chew. Donny Lalonde might not have ranked among the pantheon of great or even good light-heavyweights, but he was a light-heavyweight nonetheless, while Leonard had strayed twenty-one pounds above what had been his optimal fighting weight.

  When Lalonde floored Leonard with a short right in the fourth, it was looking like déjà vu −in this case, Kevin Howard−all over again. Although Leonard bounced up and took Richard Steele’s eight-count, by the time the round was over, Ray was bleeding from a cut to his nose.

  But Leonard recovered and got back into the fight, and after eight rounds he led on two scorecards, while the third still had Lalonde in front. In the ninth, Lalonde appeared to have badly staggered Leonard, but Ray responded with a left hook that finished off the Canadian.

  Sugar Ray had won his fourth and fifth world titles on the same night. As when he won the junior middleweight championship from Ayub Kalule and the middleweight title from Hagler, Leonard would abdicate the light-heavyweight title without ever defending it.

  The super-middleweight title, on the other hand, he hung onto. It would become an important bargaining chip in the next phase of his plan.