Four Kings

by George Kimball

  This time the bell saved Leonard.

  “He was dead, ” Hearns would recall. “But you know what? He came back. I didn’t think he had such a great heart.”

  “After two knockdowns, I didn’t know what the judges were thinking,” Leonard would later reveal. “I figured I’d better give them something else to think about.”

  Leonard proceeded to stage a twelfth round that was a fair approximation of the thirteenth in their fight eight years earlier, battering Hearns all around the ring. Hearns’ legs appeared even more spent than they had in the Kinchen fight, and he could offer but token resistance. Steele was eyeing Hearns warily, and appeared to be on the verge of stopping it when the final bell intervened. A plainly relieved Hearns managed to smile, revealing a blood-drenched mouthpiece.

  With Leonard having made two trips to the canvas, much of the audience assumed that the underdog Hearns had won. Most of the scribes scoring at ringside also had Hearns slightly ahead (in our case, the margin was 113-112), but a significant minority scored it for Leonard. (Ed Schuyler’s Associated Press card had it 113-112, Leonard.) An air of suspense still gripped the arena when Michael Buffer announced the scorecards that counted−those of the judges.

  Roth also scored it for Hearns, 113-112, while Kaczmarek had Leonard winning by the same narrow margin. The third official, Shirley, scored it 112-112, the result was a draw, one that by any standard seemed just. My account in the Herald read like this:

  For the better part of twelve rounds Ray Charles Leonard and Thomas Hearns bombarded one another in a test of wills. It was a spirited and savage, if technically imperfect match in which the advantage repeatedly changed hands, and at its conclusion three judges determined that it had been a fight neither deserved to lose.

  Seven years, seven months, and twenty-seven days had elapsed since their first fight, and if both Leonard and Hearns had slipped a bit with the passage of time, they had fallen to nearly the same place. The War revealed that, if anything, they were more evenly matched than ever.

  There were the predictable cries of “Robbery!” and worse from the crowd, but not from either of the competitors.

  Leonard allowed that he was “very pleased by the outcome.” Hearns believed he had won, but when he added with a shrug, “I guess the judges saw it differently,” he was hardly the picture of outrage.

  The razor-thin margin by which Leonard had pulled out the draw−Dalby Shirley scored the fifth 10-8, despite the absence of a knockdown−led to almost immediate talk of a rematch, though none of it came from Leonard.

  “I want to go back, relax and think,” said Leonard, who sounded like a football coach when he added, “I haven’t looked at the film yet.”

  Another school of thought held that since The War seemed a perfectly appropriate note for both men to go out on, Leonard and Hearns should both retire.

  “We’re talking about some serious stuff here,” said Bob Arum. “It’s a fundamental question. This is an extremely tough sport. If you have the money, do you have to take chances?

  “Look,” Arum tried to explain, “this was a great night for boxing. It definitely had redeeming social value. But nobody makes them fight. If a guy needs money, sometimes he has to keep fighting, but for a fighter like Ray Leonard, who’s meant so much to boxing, to risk permanent injury at this stage would be unconscionable.”

  Leonard and Hearns were mutually gracious when they jointly met with the press the following morning.

  “Tommy came into this fight seeking redemption,” said Leonard, “and he got that.”

  “When I woke up this morning my mind was clear,” said Hearns. “I was laying there in bed thinking, ‘Hmm. I wonder who Ray is thinking about this morning? ’

  “I still love this man,” added Tommy.

  Asked if he believed he had won the fight, Leonard diplomatically replied, “I think we both showed what we’re made of.”

  The sports books, which had been under siege from Hearns bettors in the hours before the fight, were even more relieved than Leonard by the outcome. Although the result was a push, refunding winning bets on both fighters was a small price to pay compared to the bath they would have taken had the verdict gone to Hearns.

  And as it turned out, many of those refunds were never collected anyway. Thousands of boxing fans, believing their bets on Leonard and Hearns had been lost, discarded their betting slips that night. That proved to be a windfall for the Caesars cleanup crew the next morning. The stoopers made a fortune.

  Chapter 10

  Uno Mas

  Duran–Leonard III

  The Mirage, Las Vegas, December 7, 1989

  Six months later, Leonard was back in the ring again. It was his shortest hiatus between fights since 1981.

  A third fight with Hearns or another against Hagler might have been even more lucrative, but this time Ray set his sights on Duran.

  Ray appeared to want no part of Hearns, and a Hagler rematch seemed even less likely. Although Marvelous Marvin had yet to officially retire, and in fact had taken to periodically lobbing verbal hand grenades from Italy, the enmity between the rivals was so pronounced that each seemed inclined, out of spite, to deny the other the huge payday a second fight would have produced.

  Duran had been chasing Leonard for years, pointing out that their rivalry stood 1-1 and needed to be settled with a rubber match. Of course, if Duran were motivated by the prospect of evening scores, he had lost to Hearns as well, but Cholo was no more anxious to fight the Hit Man again than was Leonard.

  Although much of the shine had gone off the thirty-eight-year-old Panamanian, he remained the only man alive to have beaten Leonard, and there was just enough luster left in their fading reputations to make a Duran-Leonard matchup−the tie-breaker no one had wanted to see nine years earlier−a viable proposition.

  Although Leonard had fifteen million reasons for fighting Duran, he claimed an even more important motivation for returning to the ring. “When my two sons look at the tapes of my last fight,” he said, “I don’t want them looking at that damn draw with Hearns.”

  Leonard prepared with an almost monastic camp in Safety Harbor, Florida. The old entourage had been pared from twenty-one to six. Dave Jacobs was gone again, this time for good. For the Duran fight, Pepe Correa would be the lone voice in the corner.

  While both men tried to play down the residue of the events in New Orleans nine years earlier, the fight’s promoters seemed happy enough to use the No Mas fight as a selling point. Lest anyone miss the point, Duran-Leonard III would officially be entitled “Uno Mas.”

  It would be the first time since 1980 that a bout involving two of the Four Kings was staged anywhere other than Caesars Palace. Steve Wynn, the owner of the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas, had just completed construction of the Mirage, a sparkling new hotel on the Strip, replete with a periodically erupting volcano outside and a shark-filled aquarium in the lobby. Wynn was so anxious to christen his new hostelry by luring the Duran-Leonard fight from Caesars that he outbid his deep-pocketed rivals with a pre-emptive multimillion-dollar site-fee offer.

  Arum was the lead promoter, but he and Trainer had buried the hatchet, and each man seemed to welcome the innovative concepts of the other. Wynn’s involvement was another matter.

  This time there was no press tour, and the television advertising blitz commenced only a few weeks before the fight. Although it made not a few closed-circuit exhibitors and cable system operators nervous, the promoters were convinced that they were on the right track.

  “Running ads months before a big fight doesn’t really sell tickets,” Arum explained. “The purpose of the early commercials and the promotional tours was mainly to attract exhibitors−and to keep them in line. They want some reassurance that you’re helping them out, but for this fight, you didn’t need it.”

  “Before the [second] Hearns fight, for instance, you had to sell Tommy,” noted Trainer. “The public perception was that Hearns was somehow an unworthy oppo
nent, but once you put the two of them out in front of people where they could see Hearns express his confidence, it helped change that image.

  “The reverse was true when Ray fought Hagler,” Trainer added. “Everybody thought Ray was nuts for coming back. Since nobody gave him a chance, you had to build him up. But for this fight, you didn’t have to sell either guy to the public.”

  The advertising campaign was supposed to kick off a month before the fight, with the first scheduled spot slated for NBC just before the final race on the Breeders Cup telecast, but Wynn was dissatisfied with the footage of the Mirage and ordered the spot pulled from the air.

  Once the commercials did begin to air, they didn’t cost the promoters a dime. Trainer had come up with a scheme by which Budweiser and the Mutual Broadcasting System were brought in as sponsors. (They were the “official beer” and the “official pre-fight radio station,” respectively.) What might have looked like pre-fight TV promos were in fact Anheuser-Busch commercials. (In return, the Bud logo would be conspicuously displayed on the ring mat.)

  Still, Leonard had been guaranteed $13 million and Duran $7.6 million. With a $20 million nut on the line, one would have thought the promoters were a bit worried about their money.

  “No,” chuckled Mike Trainer. “We’re just going to count it.”

  Although Wynn had operated successful casinos in Atlantic City and in Las Vegas, the Mirage was his first venture on the Strip. (It would shortly be joined by its next-door neighbor, Treasure Island.) The hotelier was a relative neophyte when it came to the boxing game, and Arum shortly became annoyed by what he considered the casino magnate’s constant interference.

  “Steve Wynn thinks he invented the wheel,” fumed Arum. “This fight should have been held at Caesars Palace.”

  “I blame Bob Halloran for part of that,” Arum reflected years later. (Wynn had persuaded Halloran, the longtime president of sports for Caesars World, to move down the street and head up his boxing operation.) “For years when he was at Caesars he’d been trying to tell them, ‘Why do we need promoters? Why don’t we put on the fights ourselves? ’ Henry Gluck, who was the chairman of the board, was smart enough to realize that was the last thing in the world they needed. Whether it was Top Rank or Don King or somebody else, Caesars allowed the promoters to do what they do best, which was to promote.”

  At the urging of Halloran, who had decided that Michael Nunn was the heir apparent to Hagler as the next great middleweight, Wynn had already attempted to sign the IBF champion to a long-term promotional contract that would have tied him exclusively to the Mirage. And the week before the Leonard fight, Wynn went behind his putative partners’ backs in an attempt to steal Duran away as well.

  “I had a guy from Chile named Alfonso Riat assigned to the Duran camp,” Arum recalled two decades later. “He served as an interpreter, and as a liaison with Duran’s people, much the way Ricardo Jimenez does for me now.

  “A lot of people, including Wynn, thought Duran was going to win that fight. A week before the fight he approached Riat and told him after Roberto won the title he should dump his promoters and throw in with him,” said Arum. “Wynn didn’t realize Riat worked for me. He thought he worked for Duran. So of course Riat patiently listened to his proposal and then came straight back and told me about it.

  “Wynn had no experience in boxing whatsoever,” sighed Arum. “A year after we did the Duran-Leonard fight, he put on the Holyfield-Buster Douglas fight himself. He lost a fortune.”

  The Mirage’s outdoor stadium, designed for a capacity crowd of 16,300, was still under construction as the fight approached. Leonard had opened as a 3-1 favorite, but a few days before the fight the odds had dropped to slightly under 2-1.

  Of course, the way Leonard sarcastically poor-mouthed his chances probably contributed to the rush of Duran money.

  “I’ll try to move,” Leonard, feigning concern, said at the press conference. “They say it’s not there anymore, and I really won’t know until the seventh round or so. I’ve slowed down a great deal. I’m susceptible to being hit by the right hand. It’s got me puzzled right now. I’ve just got to get back to the gym and figure out something.”

  The fight would be Leonard’s second defense of the WBC super-middleweight title, and while he said, “I’m seriously considering the possibility that this will be my last one,” this time he knew better than to write it in stone.

  “I’ve made a promise to myself never to announce retirements again, because they don’t seem to last that long,” Ray said. “The best way to do this is to just fade into the sunset. I guess if you don’t see me in another ten years, I won’t be fighting anymore.”

  Leonard closed his workouts to both the press and the public, but Duran had been publicly sparring for weeks at a ring set up at the Tropicana casino.

  Cholo had engaged the services of a new trainer, Carlos Hibbard. Panamanian by birth, Hibbard described himself as an “Israelite” and had a gold filling in a front tooth shaped like the Star of David. He had been a gypsy cab driver in New York and a sometime salsa singer in Florida, and while he had worked with some kick-boxers in the gym, Duran was the first boxer he had ever trained.

  “Roberto almost got out of boxing on a real sour note,” Hibbard described their initial encounter. “I was singing in Miami, some months after the Robbie Sims fight, and when I met Roberto I told him that in watching that one, he’d run out of gas, but that it looked to me like the reflexes were still there.

  “I told him what I thought I could do, which was first of all putting him on a concentrated weight-loss program,” said Hibbard. “Roberto likes Miller Lite. And Budweiser, too.

  “He went back to Panama for the holidays, and when he got back to the states, we started. No gym, just exercise, some extra therapy, and lots of road work. Then I said, ‘Now let’s get back to the gym and see what we’ve got.’”

  That was Carlos Hibbard’s version of Duran’s reincarnation, anyway. In Hands of Stone, Duran described the pivotal moment to Christian Giudice as an evening drinking in the company of a pair of prostitutes.

  “I love whores,” Duran explained. “The hookers told me, ‘You need to screw with us and then go out and beat the living shit out of that black man.’ They start kissing me and I told them, ‘You’re right.’ I come home and tell my woman that it’s the last time I drink. Then I start to sharpen myself, and by now I’m praying for the rematch.”

  In Las Vegas, however, Duran said, “I give Carlos not ninety-nine percent, but one-hundred percent of the credit for where I am today.”

  “Roberto had always blown up after every fight, some worse than others,” noted Hibbard. “He’s a human being, remember, and he almost lost it all. After New Orleans he had few friends, and he was real down.”

  “I have won two world titles since then,” interjected Duran. “But still all people ask me about is No Mas. I always knew I would fight him again some day.”

  A week or so before the Leonard fight, Angie Carlino dropped by the Tropicana to watch Duran spar.

  “I was just a fly on the wall. He didn’t even know I was there,” reported Carlino. “I don’t speak much Spanish, but all I know is whenever he started talking about Leonard, every other word was maricon. ”

  Three days before the bout, Duran went three rounds with sparring partner (and future opponent) Carlos Montero at the Mirage, and then agreed to a brief meeting with the press. When one enterprising scribe asked Manos de Piedra if he was “still hungry,” Duran all but elbowed Riat off the stage to answer the question himself.

  “I am hungry now,” said Cholo. “I must eat some eggs and some hams.”

  How Leonard, who was sparring behind closed doors, fared against his sparring partners remained a matter of speculation, but word did leak out that he had accidentally decked Pepe Correa. The trainer, wielding the mitts while Leonard practiced combinations, got caught and flattened by an unexpected punch.

  Leonard seemed uncharacteristic
ally distant and moody in the days preceding the bout. Seemingly every day, as a fresh wave of reporters arrived from around the world, he found himself enduring some variant of the same question: Why are you still doing this?

  “My motivation,” he explained at one media gathering, “is instinctive. I just get upset with people continually trying to psychoanalyze me. They’re trying to look inside my head and find out what makes Ray Leonard tick, and it bothers me. It would bother anybody.”

  “They say wealthy men shouldn’t be fighting,” said Trainer. “But Ray Leonard fights because he enjoys the sport, not for the money.”

  Leonard seemed almost as annoyed by the frequent No Mas references as Duran was.

  “In New Orleans, Duran became the story,” Leonard complained. “All everyone talked about was him quitting. He got more attention for quitting than I did for winning the fight.”

  Although the bout was for Leonard’s 168-pound title, the contractual weight limit was 162 pounds. Should either contestant have exceeded that, he would have paid a heavy financial penalty.

  Not only were Leonard and Duran nine years older and fifteen pounds heavier, but the Tale of the Tape revealed that between their first fight in Montreal and their final encounter in Las Vegas, Duran’s waist size had gone from thirty inches to thirty-four.

  The fighters and much of the media had already arrived in Las Vegas a week before the fight, when came the shocking news from London that promoter Frank Warren had been shot. Warren was standing on the sidewalk outside the Broadway Theatre in Barking, where he was running a boxing card, when an assailant wearing a ski mask opened fire and then, leaving the promoter for dead, made good his escape.