Four Kings

by George Kimball

  In chronicling his early career, Sam Toperoff noted that Sugar Ray Leonard had amassed a net worth of over three million dollars before he even fought “a truly first-class opponent.”

  And as Trainer pointed out at the time, Leonard could have retired after the first Duran fight in 1980 and lived comfortably off his investments−and he made almost $100 million after that. Despite a more-than-comfortable lifestyle (and a divorce that didn’t come cheaply), Leonard left boxing with more money than he would ever need. Neither his multiple comebacks nor his subsequent dabblings in the promotional field and his involvement with The Contender were undertaken because he was strapped for cash.

  “I live in an incredible neighborhood and my kids go to great schools,” said Leonard. “Mike Trainer set me up to be secure for the rest of my life. Anything I do now, I do it because I enjoy it. I enjoy The Contender because it gives me a chance to be around the sport, even though those kids look at me as an old grand-dad of yesteryear.”

  Leonard’s investment strategy looked like that of a riverboat gambler alongside Marvin Hagler’s. Peter Mareb, the Brockton adviser who handled Hagler’s money during his championship reign, avoided the tax-shelter dodge altogether, preferring instead to pay the IRS off the top, leaving any subsequent investments free and clear of subsequent tax liability. Hagler has been able to live like a movie star despite having only made three films in twenty years.

  “When he was still fighting, even though he was making millions, Marvin didn’t change his lifestyle much,” said Arum. “He provided for his future very well−and Goody Petronelli was even more conservative than Marvin was. Whatever he made from his share of Marvin’s purses, Goody put in the bank. He lived on his Navy pension check.”

  Pat Petronelli’s fortunes, on the other hand, came to a sadder end. A gambler by nature (he and his son Tony owned and trained a string of low-rent claimers they raced on the New England fairgrounds circuit), Pat and Tony lodged a significant portion of their earnings from the Duran, Hearns, and Leonard fights with attorney Morris Goldings, who had promised them a substantial return on the investment.

  They had retained the mild-mannered lawyer because he represented a contrast to Steve Wainwright’s flamboyance, and the scholarly Goldings was regarded as a pillar of the community. It was shocking, then, when in early 2001 Goldings was accused of having embezzled as much as $17 million from client accounts maintained by his Beacon Hill law firm, Mahoney, Hawkes, and Goldings.

  Goldings initially checked himself into a mental hospital but eventually stood trial, where he pleaded guilty to twenty-five counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Sentenced to three years in prison and three years of supervised probation, he was ordered to make restitution of $12.3 million. Goldings was disbarred, and Mahoney, Hawkes, and Goldings dissolved into bankruptcy.

  Pasquale and Anthony Petronelli filed a lawsuit seeking $1.6 million they claimed Goldings had misappropriated, but received only a small fraction as the result of the bankruptcy settlement.

  Newspaper accounts of the episode carefully noted that Hagler’s money was not involved.

  In 2000 Thomas Hearns returned to big-time boxing as the promoter of Tyson’s fight against Andrew Golota at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His old acquaintances were pleased to discover that, rumors to the contrary, the always quick-witted Hearns was not only not punchy, but was perhaps funnier than ever in his entrepreneurial role.

  Although Tyson-Golota tickets moved so slowly that Hearns had to slash prices on the eve of the fight, he maintained his sense of humor. He even had Tyson laughing−and this was in a week during which the hot topic of debate was whether Tyson should be allowed to fight on liquid Zoloft.

  “I never got involved in Tommy Hearns’ money; he had other people helping him invest it,” said Emanuel Steward. “But you can see that he’s very comfortably fixed. He has a big beautiful house on about ten acres, and he buys a new Bentley every year.”

  In addition to his palatial estate in Southfield, Hearns maintains residences in Phoenix and in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, along with a forty-six-foot boat he keeps in the Detroit River.

  Roberto Duran’s capacity for extravagance was legendary, but when it came to money, he wasn’t even the most profligate member of his own family.

  “Duran’s wife was a crazy gambler,” said Bob Arum. “She’d bet on anything .”

  After taxes, Duran’s take from the No Mas fight in New Orleans had been nearly $6 million. Carlos Eleta told Giudice that he had placed $2 million in a “ring-fenced” escrow account in a Panamanian bank that was supposed to provide for Duran’s future. Both Roberto and his wife, Felicidad, had signed a consent form that supposedly put the money beyond reach for ten years, but by 1982 Felicidad Duran persuaded Colonel Rubén Darío Paredes−the pro-tem strongman who ruled the country between Omar Torrijos’ death and Noriega’s consolidation of power−to accompany her to the bank and get someone there to hand over the money.

  “His wife bet thousands and thousands of dollars daily,” Eleta told Giudice. “His friends took money from him. I just lost control of him.”

  Less than two years after the New Orleans fight, the nest egg was gone. But for Duran, it had always been a matter of easy come, easy go.

  “In 1989, after the Barkley fight, the IRS mistakenly issued Roberto a $1.6 million refund,” Mike Acri told me. “He went through some of it right away, and then decided to take what was left−$800,000−back to Panama. He split it up in $100,000 bundles, which he, his family, and a few of his friends put in their carry-on luggage. When they got to the airport there were more carry-on bags than there were passengers, so they wouldn’t let them carry one bag on. They checked it as luggage. The airline lost the bag with the hundred grand in it. He never saw it again.”

  The conclusion of the rivalry among the Four Kings precipitated an almost immediate decline in the sport. There have been “big” fights since, but none has recaptured the magical aura created by their internecine battles.

  Mike Tyson, who had won the WBC heavyweight title in 1986 and unified it over the next two years, appeared to be positioned to assume the standard-bearer’s role for the sport, but in February 1990, just two months after Duran-Leonard III, Tyson was knocked out by a journeyman named James “Buster” Douglas in Tokyo. Before he got another crack at his title, Tyson was arrested on rape charges and spent over three years in an Indiana prison. After his release, his career continued on a downward spiral that often verged on self-parody.

  It has now been more than ten years since Tyson held any part of the heavyweight title, yet his probably remains the most recognizable boxing name to the man on the street, evidence of the way the sport distanced itself from the mainstream sports fan after the era of the Four Kings.

  There were flashes of brilliance from individual boxers, men like Oscar De La Hoya, Julio Cesar Chavez and Pernell Whitaker, Roy Jones, Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis, but in the absence of great natural rivalries, none captured the imagination of the public the way the Four Kings had.

  The middleweight division was particularly hard-hit. Beyond the fragmentation of the title, the division lost two of its more promising practitioners when Briton Michael Watson and Emanuel Steward–trained WBC champion Gerald McClellan suffered career-ending brain injuries at the hands of Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn in fights in London in the 1990s. Both were rendered paraplegics.

  What had been a glamour division was also affected by the establishment of yet another bastard weight class, the 168-pound super-middleweight division. Men who earlier might have had to train religiously to maintain a 160-pound fighting trim could now compete for world championships without having to be as committed.

  Although the American public never enthusiastically embraced the supermiddleweights, the 168-pounders, at least in their WBO guise, became stars in Great Britain, where Benn, Eubank, the Irishman Steve Collins and current super-middleweight champ Joe Calzaghe would rule for
fifteen years without the title ever leaving the British Isles. American middleweights Roy Jones and James Toney made only brief stopovers at 160 pounds, shortly graduating to super-middle and then to light-heavyweight.

  The system in place today almost discourages the development of great natural rivalries like those that engaged Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran. Promoters, sanctioning bodies, and even cable networks protect their interests with options and exclusivity agreements, ensuring that many of the top fighters never face one another. In any other business, or in a more respectable sport, this might be considered restraint of trade.

  “The climate was different back in the ’70s, because unless you were Don King, promoters didn’t sign fighters to exclusive contracts,” said Russell Peltz, then the matchmaker at the Spectrum in Philly who now serves in an advisory capacity for ESPN. “Because we had no vested interest in protecting a fighter’s record, we could make the best fights, which was all we wanted to do.

  “In those days at the Spectrum, we had to persuade 10,000 people we had a good product. Today all you have to do is convince Kery Davis [of HBO] or Ken Hershman [Showtime].”

  The writer Pete Hamill once asked the great trainer Gil Clancy about the vacuum created after Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran departed center stage. Clancy, a New York schoolteacher before he immersed himself in boxing, had a one-word explanation:

  “Crack.”

  It may be oversimplifying the case, but a good argument could be made that the crack epidemic of the early 1990s consumed an entire generation of inner-city kids who might have become boxers.

  The ones who weren’t using crack were selling it, and they quickly figured out that there was a lot more money to be made peddling quick-fix drugs than in training in gyms for hoped-for preliminary bouts. This in turn led to violent turf wars, in which the alpha males who a generation earlier might have settled their differences in the ring were now shooting each other over the right to sell crack on a particular street corner.

  Which is not to say that the world of drugs was unknown to the Four Kings. Testimony at the divorce trials of both Leonard and Hagler included allegations of cocaine use, though there was never any suggestion then that drugs had interfered with their training or preparation for a fight.

  After Leonard’s 1991 loss to Terry Norris, he pleaded with Randy Gordon, then the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, to be excused from taking a post-fight drug test. Since the NYAC was aware of the local anesthetic that had been administered to mask the rib injury, there was plainly a concern that a urinalysis might reveal something more incriminating.

  “When I threatened to have a commission doctor draw blood with a horse-needle, Ray finally agreed to pee for me,” said Gordon. “He passed.”

  But remember, in those pre-crack days, cocaine was almost regarded as glamorous, the signature recreational substance of the rich and famous, and in the late 1980s its use was endemic among athletes of many sports.

  “People don’t realize that when I first retired I was still in my twenties,” said Leonard. “I had the fame and the money and a lot of time on my hands, and cocaine was enticing. It wasn’t just movie stars and baseball players who were doing it, it was lawyers and politicians, too. But I admit it. I experimented. More than I should have.”

  Leonard, in any case, hasn’t gone near drugs for over fifteen years now, and a few years ago the man who once prided himself on his wine cellar also gave up drinking. “The triumph,” he said, “comes in where you are now, not what you’ve done.”

  Although drugs were prevalent among the entourages of both Hearns and Duran, there have been no allegations that either man dabbled. Duran’s capacity for alcohol was legendary, but he was almost phobic about drugs, which he had watched kill many friends and acquaintances on his journey from Chorrillo to the limelight.

  “My repeating a story he once told me led to a falling-out between me and Roberto,” recalled Acri. “I’d told Christian Giudice about an incident where Duran picked up this girl and took her back to his room, where she smoked a bunch of marijuana before he screwed her. Apparently it was rapturous sex, and she got so excited that she was hyperventilating and gasping for air. He was naturally pleased with himself, but he had to ask her, you know, ‘Was it me or was it the drug? ’

  “‘Neither one,’ she told him. ‘I have asthma.’

  “Well, when that got into the book, he was really pissed off at me,” said Acri. “Not about the girl or the sex−in fact, Duran told me that story in front of his wife−but because the way it came out in the book suggested that he had also smoked the marijuana.”

  “While it was taking place I didn’t have the sense of what an historical era it was,” said Emanuel Steward as he wistfully recalled the time of the Four Kings. “I had no idea at the time it would be the greatest rivalry in history. I guess back then I just assumed that other boxers would come along to replace the Leonards, the Haglers, the Hearns, and the Durans, but that didn’t happen.

  “Today’s boxers just fight for money,” said Steward. “Wherever they can make the most money, they go up and down in weight divisions. They’re businessmen. Every fighter is his own manager. They’re interested in maximizing their earnings, but they’re not interested in becoming good prizefighters.

  “Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran was a great, great era, but remember, Ray, Marvin, and Tommy all had substantial amateur backgrounds, and Duran had been fighting since he was sixteen. They had a foundation today’s boxers don’t seem to have, and I blame the trainers for that,” said Steward.

  “When I came along,” explained Steward, “the guys up there were Eddie [Futch], Jackie McCoy, Angelo, Arcel, Freddie Brown, but there haven’t been that many true trainers come along since then. You’ve got guys everybody runs to. People put money up for a fighter and they say, ‘Hey, Buddy, will you train this guy? ’

  “Nowadays you’ve got promoters and managers and publicists. You’ve got nutritionists and strength and conditioning coaches, and the guy who’s the expert in how to jump over the sticks and then jump back over the sticks, but nobody who really teaches boxing.”

  Steward sees his share of fights in his role as an HBO commentator, but finds himself turned off by much of what is served up these days.

  “Not long ago Andy Lee came in when I had a fight on television between two former light-heavyweight champions,” recalled Steward. “He asked me what I thought, and I had to admit I wasn’t even paying attention. I was reading a book and I was paying more attention to the book than to what was on TV. It was just awful. I told Andy, ‘See, this is why people aren’t watching boxing anymore.’ There are no exciting fights. Nobody punches, nobody wants to take chances. As a boxing person I don’t even care about a lot of these fights anymore.”

  It could be argued whether the television networks abandoned boxing or boxing abandoned the networks, but where Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran had established their early reputations with weekend appearances on ABC, CBS, and NBC, by the mid-1990s all three networks had forsaken the sport. Boxing aficionados could still find weekly shows on ESPN and USA, and big fights on HBO and Showtime, but the absence of weekend afternoon programming rendered boxing a virtual stranger to armchair America, a condition that continues to this day. A contemporary man-on-the-street survey would be hard-pressed to turn up one person in fifty who could even name the middleweight champion.

  Similarly, Sports Illustrated not only covered all nine of the fights between Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran, but also featured seven of them on its cover. America’s premier sports magazine rarely covers fights at all nowadays. The New York Times, which had at least two staffers on hand for each of the Four Kings’ internecine fights, hasn’t had a regular boxing writer for the past half-dozen years, and rarely covers fights even in New York.

  A fundamental precept of baseball, the dynamic between the pitcher and the hitter, is based on deception and the knowledge that being hit by a ball thr
own at 90 mph is going to hurt. At its most elementary level, the curve ball is effective when it leads the batter to flinch from a pitch he thinks is coming straight at him, only to have it break over the plate. A fearsome slugger is discouraged from becoming comfortable at the plate by a pitch judiciously directed at his belly button. An untimely home run is likely to be followed by a pitch at the ensuing batter’s chin, just to remind him of the possibility of pain.

  In the boxing ring, pain is not merely a possibility, but a certainty. The most accomplished of boxers is still going to absorb his share of punches, and they are going to hurt. (Remember that one punch in the nose sufficed to keep eight-year-old Ray Leonard away from the gym for five years.) The courage to persevere in the face of that pain distinguishes the boxer from the ordinary man, but the ability to avoid debilitating punishment can be the difference between a good boxer and a great one.

  The evidence suggests that Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran were superior defensive fighters−at least when they weren’t fighting one another −and they were all to a degree gifted with that intangible boxing quality known as “chin”−the capacity for tolerating punches that might render another man senseless.

  Although no authority in either the boxing or medical field was ever able to conclusively demonstrate a connection, an MRI administered to Hagler following a training camp injury in the early 1980s revealed that he was possessed of an abnormally thick skull. (Tommy Hearns, who broke his right hand hitting that skull, would probably argue that it was a factor in Marvelous Marvin’s resiliency.) The fact remains that in sixty-seven professional bouts, Hagler tasted the canvas just once−in the Roldan fight, and from what Marvin to this day maintains, it should have been ruled a slip.