Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing

by George Kimball

  “Marvin was at his best over the first half of that fight,” recalled Michael Katz. “He was landing combinations, hitting Antuofermo with everything he threw. Only Vito’s chin kept him in that fight.”

  After twelve rounds, Hagler appeared to have built up such a commanding lead that he could not possibly lose. Warned by the Petronellis to stay out of the corners and away from the ropes, he boxed conservatively down the stretch.

  “I think it was more than protecting a lead,” opined Katz. “Remember, at this point Hagler had never gone fifteen rounds, and he’d only gone twelve once. He seemed to be trying to husband his energy to conserve himself for the later rounds, and the more cautious he became, the more Antuofermo came on.”

  By the fourteenth Vito could sense his title slipping away, and charged headlong at Hagler, resulting in a spirited exchange from which Antuofermo emerged having sprung a few new leaks. And in the fifteenth, although Antuofermo fought furiously, Hagler caught him with at least one uppercut that nearly lifted him off the floor.

  As the combatants and their handlers milled about in the ring after the final bell, referee Mills Lane asked Pat and Goody Petronelli to move to one side.

  “I want to be facing the camera when I raise Marvin’s hand,” explained Lane.

  Then came the announcement of the judges’ cards. Duane Ford had it 145-141 in Hagler’s favor, reflecting the opinion of most ringside observers, but his scorecard was offset by that of Dalby Shirley, who had scored the fight 144-142 for Antuofermo. The third judge, Hal Miller, had it even at 143-143, thus rendering the verdict a draw that allowed the Mosquito to retain the title.

  “I promoted both Antuofermo and Hagler, but I thought Marvin won at least eight rounds and Vito no more than four,” said Arum.

  There were howls of protest from the crowd, and most sportswriters excoriated the decision. The long-suffering Hagler, whose paranoia didn’t need much prodding, was convinced that he had been victimized by “Vegas judges” in a betting coup.

  “It was a terrible decision,” said Katz. “If they’d had punch-stats back then, they probably would have had Hagler outlanding Antuofermo 3 to 1−and remember, Vito couldn’t punch.”

  It was unquestionably a bad decision, but on the other hand, neither did the fifteen rounds of the Antuofermo fight, taken in sum, represent Hagler’s finest hour as a boxer.

  As he walked toward his dressing room at Caesars that night, Hagler was intercepted by Joe Louis.

  “You won that fight,” the Brown Bomber told him. “Don’t give up.”

  Through gritted teeth Hagler replied, “I’ll be back in the gym tomorrow.”

  Bob Halloran was himself a Massachusetts native. Later that night he ran into the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tip O’Neill was no more pleased by the decision than Hagler was.

  “You can tell the promoters,” O’Neill warned Halloran, “that if Marvin doesn’t get another title shot, there will be an investigation.”

  Divorced, Hagler had recently taken up with Bertha Walker, a single mother of two from Brockton. He had promised that the two would wed once he won the title, and she had flown to Las Vegas in anticipation of that outcome.

  “Late that night, I was at a post-fight party at Caesars when I stepped out into the corridor and ran into Marvin and Bertha,” remembered Michael Katz. “They were walking hand-in-hand down the hall.”

  “We’re getting married anyway,” Hagler told the Wolf Man. “No matter what the judges said, as far as I’m concerned I am the middleweight champion. I know I won that fight tonight.”

  Hagler’s indignation would be exacerbated when Leonard dispatched the previously unbeaten Benitez in a performance so sparkling that by midnight, any residual outrage over the Antuofermo verdict had been relegated to a footnote.

  Born in the Bronx but raised in Puerto Rico, Wilfredo Benitez had been a boxing prodigy. He had turned pro two months after his fifteenth birthday, and was only sixteen when he topped a bill at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum in New York. Benitez became the youngest world champion in boxing history when, at seventeen, he outpointed Colombian Antonio Cervantes to win the WBA light-welterweight title, and three years later he won the WBC welterweight crown when he dethroned the legendary Carlos Palomino at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan.

  Benitez had fast hands and (as Hagler stablemate Tony Petronelli had learned back in 1976) sneaky knockout power, but his real forte lay in the fact that he may have been the slickest defensive fighter ever to lace on a pair of gloves. Possessed of an otherworldly combination of split-second reflexes and an uncanny sense of anticipation, he seemed to avoid punches before the opponent even decided to throw them, a gift which had earned him the sobriquet “El Radar.”

  “To me, Benitez’ greatest attribute was his agility,” recalled Katz. “I never saw a guy better at bending backwards from his waist to avoid punches.”

  Wilfredo had been schooled by his father, the noted Puerto Rican trainer Gregorio Benitez. Before the Palomino bout, Gregorio had sold his son’s contract to Jacobs, the erudite New York fight-film collector−reportedly for $150,000 in cash, 10% of Wilfredo’s future earnings, and a pair of tickets to each of his fights. Teddy Brenner, then the president of Madison Square Garden Boxing, had been the go-between in brokering the arrangement, and when his involvement came to light, Garden owner Sonny Werblin was not pleased. It cost Brenner his job.

  Although Benitez was undefeated in thirty-nine pro fights, the oddsmakers had installed Leonard as a 4-1 favorite, and in the run-up to their anticipated encounter The Ring magazine featured a story headlined “Why Benitez Will Lose His Title.” Its purported author was Gregorio Benitez.

  Gregorio would explain that he was trying to motivate his son, whose distaste for training was nearly as legendary as his defensive skills.

  Watch highlights of Leonard-Benitez nearly three decades later and you might think it was a one-sided fight. You’ll see Benitez going down twice, Benitez bloodied from the middle rounds on, and Benitez being rescued, apparently from a terrible beating, in the fifteenth round.

  In fact, for much of the evening it was Sugar Ray’s most difficult fight to date. As advertised, El Radar often seemed to make himself invisible, causing Leonard’s punches to whistle harmlessly past his head. Although Leonard seemed to dominate the early going, the usual flash-and-dash the public had come to expect was curiously absent. Leonard would later reveal that the night before he had received a telephone call from Muhammad Ali, who, after wishing him luck, had cautioned against showboating in the title fight, on the grounds that it might alienate the judges.

  “Benitez gave me my introduction to psychological warfare,” said Leonard. “Watch a tape sometime of the stare-down before that fight. I’m literally chomping at the bit, about to bite clean through my mouthpiece, and he’s just standing there calmly staring at me. I learned from Benitez, and later from Duran, the importance of being relaxed at the start of a fight.”

  In the third, Leonard embarrassed Benitez when he knocked him down with a jab.

  “When I knock most guys down, it’s pretty much over,” said Leonard. “I tried to knock him out, but I couldn’t. I don’t know how many punches I missed. Benitez was the most elusive and talented boxer I’d ever faced.”

  Shortly thereafter Benitez adapted his tactics and began to emulate the challenger, counterpunching so adroitly that Leonard would later say, “It was like fighting myself in the mirror.”

  Not everyone at ringside was impressed. Said veteran boxing writer Barney Nagler in the Daily Racing Form, “Leonard took Sugar Ray Robinson’s nickname. Maybe he ought to give it back.”

  From the corner, Dundee urged Leonard, “Go to the body.”

  The sixth round produced a collision of heads. Benitez got the worst of it, coming away with a gash high on his forehead that bled for much of the night.

  In the seventh, Benitez incurred a stinger to his wrist while landing a jab, and fought the rest of
the round with his benumbed left arm seeming to dangle from its socket. But when he came out for the eighth, he flashed a smile at Leonard and stuck his tongue out before going on the attack.

  Benitez appeared to be battling his way back into the fight, but in the eleventh Leonard drove Benitez into the ropes and unleashed a left hook that sent his mouthpiece flying. Although it may have impressed the judges, the resultant respite was probably more beneficial to Benitez than to Leonard. Referee Carlos Padilla called time before sending Wilfredo back to the corner to have the mouthpiece rinsed, allowing Benitez to catch a breather by the time hostilities resumed.

  If nothing else, the Antuofermo-Hagler fight an hour earlier had provided a cautionary tale for the challenger, and Leonard fought the fifteenth like a man determined to erase any doubt in the minds of the judges.

  “I’ve always believed in closing the show,” said Leonard, “but I think somewhere in the back of my mind was what had happened in Hagler’s fight, too. I’d been watching that one on TV in my dressing room and when they announced the decision I was thinking ‘Damn. No way Marvin didn’t win that fight.’”

  Leonard hurt Benitez with a straight right in that final round, and then moved in to land a spectacular flurry of punches topped off by three successive hooks that buckled the champion’s knees.

  Benitez instinctively lowered his head and groped his way toward Leonard, hoping to tie him up, but as he did he walked right into a punch Leonard hadn’t thrown all night−a left uppercut, which sent him sprawling to the deck.

  Only seconds remained in the fight. Benitez managed to get to his feet, and backed unsteadily toward the ropes as Leonard closed in. Sugar Ray landed two or three more punches before Padilla abruptly raced in between the boxers and signaled that the fight was over.

  Leonard raced across the ring, vaulted himself into position atop the second strand of ring ropes, and thrust his gloved fists into the air.

  Many among the crowd of 4,500 at the Caesars Sports Pavilion howled in protest over the referee’s seemingly precipitate intercession. The 1-4 odds on Leonard had been prohibitive enough that there wasn’t a great deal of action either way on the outcome, but there had been heavier betting on the “Go/No Go” proposition. The sports books had offered 6-5 odds on whether the fight would last the full fifteen rounds, and at least one prominent Las Vegas gambler, Billy Baxter, had wagered $50,000 that Benitez-Leonard would not go the distance.

  There were only six seconds left in the fight when Padilla intervened. Not only does the timekeeper pound the canvas to signal the referee when ten seconds are left in a round, but in Nevada the corner-posts are equipped with red lights that are illuminated at the ten-second mark. It seemed inconceivable that Padilla didn’t know that the fight was virtually over, and that another punch could not have been thrown before time expired had he merely stepped in and broken the fighters.

  The question on a lot of people’s minds was then, and remains to this day: Was Carlos Padilla rescuing Benitez, or was he rescuing Billy Baxter?

  “According to a possibly apocryphal story I’ve often heard,” said Katz, “Padilla was chased out into the desert that night by distraught gamblers. I saw Padilla stop a similar fight where the only action was go/no go, with seconds remaining and the fighters far apart.”

  “I didn’t know anything about any betting line,” said Leonard with a chuckle, “but I was certainly glad when he stopped it. I was exhausted. I’m not sure I could have lasted another six seconds.”

  The outcome, it turns out, was not in dispute either way. After fourteen rounds− before the final knockdown−Leonard had led by margins of 137-130, 137-133, and 136-134 on the judges’ cards. Less than three years removed from his Olympic triumph, and after just his twenty-sixth professional fight, Sugar Ray Leonard could call himself the welterweight champion of the world.

  Chapter 2

  Le Face-à-Face Historique

  Duran–Leonard I

  Stade Olympique, Montreal, June 20, 1980

  After Leonard won his first world title by stopping Benitez for the WBC welterweight title in November of 1979, there loomed an obvious candidate for a big-money fight, and his name was not Roberto Duran.

  In early 1980, the Mexican welterweight Jose Isidro “Pipino” Cuevas was boxing’s longest-reigning world champion, having won the WBA title in 1976 and defended it on ten occasions.

  A showdown between the two 147-pound claimants seemed not only natural but inevitable, and the groundwork for the fight was laid after Leonard’s first WBC title defense, a fourth-round, one-punch knockout of England’s Davey Boy Green in March of 1980.

  A deal for a Leonard-Cuevas fight to unify the welterweight title had actually been reached, with the approval of both sanctioning bodies, but the proposed matchup rapidly began to unravel amid charges of backroom politicking involving some unlikely bedfellows.

  Although Leonard was the standard-bearer of the World Boxing Council, the organization was headquartered in Mexico, and WBC president Jose Sulaiman implored his countryman Cuevas to step aside and pave the way for a Duran challenge to Leonard. (A cynic might have noted Sulaiman’s cozy relationship with Don King at work in these machinations: Leonard-Cuevas would have been a big fight on which King would not have made a single peso.)

  The World Boxing Association, whose title Cuevas held, was based in Duran’s home country, and the military government there turned the thumbscrews on a pair of Panamanian nationals, WBA president Rodrigo Sanchez and Elias Cordova, the chairman of the organization’s championship committee.

  Col. Ruben Paredes, who headed up the National Guard of Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos, paid a visit to the WBA offices and strongly intimated that it would be in Sanchez’ best interests to pull the plug on Leonard-Cuevas. Paredes represented the muscle for Torrijos, whom he would later, albeit briefly, succeed. Torrijos’ principal padrone was Carlos Eleta, Duran’s influential backer, but the Duran camp denied having exerted undue influence.

  “We never pressured anyone,” insisted Luis Enriquez, a Duran advisor who served as Panama’s honorary consul in New York. On behalf of his people’s government, said Enriquez, “We merely asked the WBA to do what was right for the sport of boxing and the people of Panama.”

  To which the curmudgeonly New York scribe Dick Young replied, “On behalf of the New York Daily News, I would like to say one word: Bullshit! ”

  Leonard’s attorney Mike Trainer recalled that “some very influential people” wanted to see a Duran-Leonard fight come off before Cuevas got his crack at unifying the title, but for public consumption it was announced that Cuevas was withdrawing from the proposed Leonard fight due to an injury incurred in his April bout against Harold Volbrecht.

  Even with the WBC now endorsing a Duran-Leonard match, there remained several obstacles to overcome, among them that there was no contract, no site, no purse structure, and no promoter.

  Both Leonard and Duran were technically promotional free agents, but Arum, as the promoter of the aborted Leonard-Cuevas fight, could claim some currency with Leonard. King had Eleta’s ear and tried to negotiate on Duran’s behalf, leaving Trainer convinced that the flamboyant promoter was more concerned about Don King’s interests than about Roberto Duran’s. Trainer and Arum then decided to try an end run around the selfdescribed World’s Greatest Promoter, flying to Panama to take their case directly to Carlos Eleta.

  But they had underestimated King’s intelligence network. (Very little happened in the world of boxing that King didn’t know about; he had better spies than the CIA.) As they waited to board their flight in the first-class lounge at Kennedy Airport, King, who just “happened” to be stopping by, joined them.

  A bizarre conversation ensued, in which the rival promoters refused to even acknowledge one another’s presence, conducting their discourse through Trainer, who was seated uncomfortably between them. At last, the lawyer had had enough.

  “Look, this is ridiculous,” he told them. �
��There’s plenty enough in this for everybody. Either you two guys work this out or I’m going to Panama by myself.”

  Then, as now, the sport’s preeminent promoters−Arum and King−could not have come from more diverse backgrounds.

  A native New Yorker, Arum was in his youth a Talmudic scholar who had been educated at NYU and at Harvard Law School. In 1961, on the recommendation of his Harvard classmate Richard Goodwin, a top advisor in the Kennedy Administration, he became an assistant U.S. Attorney under Robert F. Kennedy.

  King had grown up a street tough in Cleveland, and along about the time Arum was prosecuting federal tax cheats, King had risen to become the overlord of the Cleveland numbers racket.

  The position sometimes required that he act as his own enforcer. In the 1950s he had shot and killed a man in what was ruled a justifiable homicide. In 1967, while attempting to collect a delinquent account from a gambling associate named Sam Garrett, King so savagely stomped Garrett in a street confrontation, that, as he later described it, “much to my regret, the gentleman subsequently expired.”

  Convicted of manslaughter, King used his three-year, eleven-month stretch at the Marion Correctional Institution to educate himself, devouring the works of Shakespeare, Aquinas, Voltaire, and, apparently, P.T. Barnum. King also emerged having mastered a new language of his own creation, a dazzling locution that combined Ebonics with polysyllabic malapropisms.

  Both men had risen to prominence in the sport on the coattails of Muhammad Ali. In 1962 Arum had been dispatched to investigate suspected tax fraud in connection with that year’s Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson rematch, whose ancillary rights were controlled by the notorious conservative lawyer (and Bobby Kennedy archenemy) Roy Cohn. On the night of the bout, Arum had agents waiting to pounce on the box-office receipts at every closed-circuit venue in the country.