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

by George Kimball

  The Leonard camp would later complain that Padilla (with, perhaps, Sulaiman’s pre-fight admonition ringing in his ear) had abetted Duran’s roughhousing by allowing him to escape unpunished when he held and hit, or used his elbows and forearms to maneuver Leonard around the ring. From the corner, Dundee pleaded for the referee to be more assertive in breaking up the frequent clinches.

  As he recalled these early stanzas two decades later, Manos de Piedra told his biographer, Christian Giudice, that Leonard (or, perhaps, Dundee) had committed a tactical blunder by smearing his body with Vaseline. The theory had been that the ample coating of grease would cause Duran’s punches to slide off, but by the fourth round the substance had been transmitted to Duran’s gloves. When Leonard tried to tie him up, which was often, Duran was able to yank his hands free and resume his attack.

  Although he was ostensibly the quicker man, Leonard already had rope burns on his back from the numerous occasions Duran had driven him to edge of the ring. Ray was no longer even trying to dance. In her ringside seat, Juanita Leonard had begun to sob.

  Leonard finally sprang into action in the fifth, unleashing dazzling combinations of punches that impressed the judges, if not his opponent. “I couldn’t tell you why,” Leonard said of the abrupt change in approach beginning with the fifth. “I think my fighting instincts just took over.”

  Duran disdainfully sneered in response, but when it was over it was clear that Sugar Ray had claimed his first round.

  The sixth saw Leonard once again become the aggressor, using his jab to set up combinations. Now Ray was forcing Duran to tie him up.

  “By then I felt I was in control of the fight,” Leonard recalled to his Boswell, Al Goldstein, “but the one thing that concerned me was Duran’s head. He was using it as a weapon. Every time I moved inside, he tried to butt me.”

  By the seventh the fight had turned into an all-out street war, and by the time the round ended, both men looked so tired that it was hard to imagine this fight lasting eight more. I thought Duran had probably won the round, but all three judges scored it even.

  As the two engaged in a toe-to-toe brawl in the eighth, stadium ushers rushed to Juanita’s ringside seat. Overcome by the intensity of what she was watching, Ray’s wife had fainted.

  Dave Jacobs, working the champion’s corner with Dundee and Janks Morton, looked as if he was about to pass out himself.

  “Box!” He kept pleading.

  “Be the boss!” Arcel ordered Duran.

  The ninth round produced another vintage Duran move. He charged into Leonard, butted him squarely in the forehead, and then, as Ray clinched, raked his head across his eyes. Leonard, once he extricated himself, wiped himself with his glove to check for blood.

  Once again, all three judges scored an even round.

  “Leonard showed tremendous courage,” an admiring Arcel would say later. “Duran landed some body shots that would have shook Hitler’s army, but Leonard kept fighting back.”

  The tenth was on the way to being another close round until Leonard clocked Duran with his best punch of the night, an overhand right that came out of nowhere and rocked the Panamanian in his tracks.

  The eleventh was another nonstop, three-minute brawl. Leonard, who opened with a right-hand lead followed by a staccato flurry to the body, probably did enough to win it, but Duran fired back in kind and was battling at its end, setting the stage for the twelfth, in which Duran would win his last round of the night.

  The thirteenth proved to be Leonard’s most dominant stanza of the evening as he dug into Duran with a left to the body followed by two rights to the head. Later in the round the second half of a left-right combination snapped Duran’s head backward.

  Leonard continued to jar Duran with combinations in the penultimate round, but the challenger countered by putting his head down and charging forward to tackle Ray in an effort to smother the onslaught.

  From the corner, Dundee shouted, “Why don’t you break ’em, Padilla? ”

  Leonard closed the show with a dazzling final round that impressed all save Duran, who, playing to the crowd, mocked his opponent. Apparently confident of victory, Duran did a little Leonardesque dance and pointed to his chin, daring Leonard to hit him one more time.

  When the final bell sounded, Leonard reached out and tried to tap Duran with his glove, but Cholo appeared to ignore the gesture. Both boxers were quickly engulfed in a mass of humanity as cornermen, posses, and officials poured into the ring.

  When Duran reached his corner I saw him suddenly wheel and, pointing to his own genitals, unleash an incomprehensible torrent in Spanish.

  “What did Roberto say? ” I asked my pal Jose Torres, the former light-heavyweight champion.

  “He called him, you know, a pussy,” said Torres. “A cunt.”

  Leonard Gardner seemed to think that Duran was addressing his remarks to Wilfredo Benitez, while my own impression was that he had been looking right at Sugar Ray when he did it. As it turned out we were both wrong. Cholo’s invective was directed toward Roger Leonard.

  “Right after the bell rang, Roger came charging out of the corner, running straight at Duran,” said Ray. Duran responded pretty much the way he had to Pedro Mendoza’s wife and dropped Roger in his tracks with a single punch.

  “Duran just nailed him,” said Ray. “There was so much confusion in the ring that not a lot of people even saw it happen.”

  Benitez was, however, a conspicuous presence at ringside. He had been invited by Howard Cosell to sit in on the telecast, but, said Leonard Gardner, “had abandoned his post to yell insults at Duran.”

  “A security guard picked him up and was about to throw him over the ropes into the press section when I convinced him that Wilfredo was a valuable commodity,” wrote Gardner in recapturing the moment.

  An eerie silence pervaded the stadium while the verdict was awaited. Sugar Ray Leonard had closed the show, but now the unthinkable had begun to cross his mind−the possibility that he might have lost.

  “They’d both been blocking and slipping and rolling and countering,” Gardner remembered thinking. “To me it had seemed quite an even fight.”

  In the initial reading of the scorecards the French judge, Raymond Baldeyrou, had it 146-144 for Duran. The Italian judge, Angelo Poletti, scored the fight even at 147-147.

  For a brief instant it appeared that a fight this close might come down to a split draw, but then came the British judge’s card: Harry Gibbs scored it 145 Duran, 144 Leonard, rendering it a majority decision.

  Though clearly disappointed, Sugar Ray didn’t quibble about the verdict. In his dressing room he conceded that Duran had won most of the early rounds in what he termed “the hardest fight of my career,” but pointed out that once he did get untracked, “I stood my ground.”

  “You never fight to a guy’s strength, you try to offset it,” sighed Dundee as he attempted to explain to SI’ s Bill Nack how the best-laid plan had gone awry. “It was strictly Duran stuff−elbows, knees, head-to-the-face. The guy who had more practice at that won the fight.”

  An hour later Bob Lee, then a WBC supervisor, entered the press-room to sheepishly announce that there had been a mistake in the tabulation of the scorecards, and that Poletti had actually scored it 148-147 for Duran.

  While it made the decision unanimous, the one-point correction didn’t alter the outcome, but it made it all the more outrageous in that it confirmed that Poletti, who had flown from Italy to Canada on the promoters’ dime because of his alleged boxing expertise, had scored ten rounds of a fifteen-round fight even. It was a cop-out so infuriating that even his fellow judges condemned him.

  “Calling ten rounds of a fight even is a diabolical disgrace,” said Gibbs, although in truth none of the judges that night was particularly decisive. Between them they scored eighteen of a possible forty-five rounds even.

  “It was a great fight, and it was a shame that either fighter had to lose that night,” Bobby Goodman recalled twenty-
seven years later. “The way Red Smith put it was very fitting: ‘Tonight, the man became a legend, and the boy became a man.’”

  But in the end, Leonard had lost for essentially the same reason Marvin Hagler would lose to him seven years later. Sugar Ray had allowed his adversary to dictate the terms under which the battle was waged. He had fought Duran’s fight.

  Why had Leonard allowed himself to be drawn into a battle for which he was ill-suited?

  “It’s hard to think when you’re getting your brains knocked out,” supposed Freddie Brown. “This ain’t football, you know. And Duran is like Marciano. He never gives you the ball.”

  Like Hagler (who called his alter ego “the Monster” ) and Hearns (who, despite his own reservations, sometimes described “the Hit Man” as a separate persona), Leonard nurtured a disembodied boxing self he referred to in the third person: “the Street Fighter.”

  “The Street Fighter was always lurking there somewhere inside me. I knew I could hang with anyone, any size, when it came down to inside fighting,” reflected Leonard. “Normally the Street Fighter doesn’t come out, because he’s controlled, but in this fight I just lost it and he took over.”

  Having repaired to his dressing quarters, Duran brandished his gaudy new WBC championship belt. Then he looked across the room to Brown and said, tears glistening in his eyes, “Freddie, you deserve this,” and handed it to the gnarled old trainer.

  When the first wave of press arrived, the new champion was asked what had made the difference in the fight. Duran responded by pounding on the left side of his chest to indicate corazon.

  Was he suggesting that Leonard had lacked heart?

  “No,” Duran replied through an interpreter. “If Leonard did not have a heart, he would not be alive tonight.”

  “To my mind,” said Michael Katz, “what happened in Montreal that night was one of the greatest displays of athletic heroism I’ve ever witnessed. Roberto Duran beat a man who was bigger, stronger, younger, faster−and just plain better−with willpower. It was an incredible performance.”

  After the fight, Leonard said he was contemplating retirement.

  “I was serious, or serious about considering it, anyway,” Leonard confirmed many years later. “It had nothing to do with the decision. I didn’t like the fact that I’d lost, but I wasn’t demoralized, the way the rest of the guys were. Janks, Dave, even Angelo were devastated. Mike [Trainer] was so crushed that I don’t think he even came into the dressing room.”

  Elsewhere in the stadium, Trainer told Bill Nack “As far as I’m concerned, [Ray] can pack it in.”

  By winning a world title, Leonard had “accomplished what he set out to do,” said Trainer. “I don’t enjoy this. I don’t enjoy seeing him get hit.”

  “I was mentally and physically exhausted,” Sugar Ray recalled. “I’d never taken such a physical beating. The doctor had to come up to my hotel room later that night and drain blood from my ears.

  “It was one of the most physically demanding challenges of my life, but the thing people had always wondered about was whether I could take a shot. I’d never had to before.”

  Although he went 1-1 for the evening, Roger was the only Leonard to win a fight that night. Before getting KO’d by Duran, he had outpointed Clyde Gray, the thirty-three-year-old former Canadian welterweight champion who had in the space of eight months the previous year been knocked out by Tommy Hearns, Pete Ranzany and Chris Clarke.

  Despite having been embarrassed in the post-fight skirmish with Duran, Roger excitedly proclaimed that he would avenge the family honor.

  “I want Duran next,” he told anyone who would listen.

  “Roger,” Dave Jacobs said wearily, “shut up.”

  Chapter 3

  Stone vs. Sugar

  Duran–Leonard II

  Louisiana Superdome, November 25, 1980

  In almost any field of endeavor a sequel can either reaffirm or refute its predecessor. Duran’s legion of supporters expected him to repeat his virtuosic Montreal performance in the rematch, while Leonard’s hoped he would demonstrate that his own had been an aberration. It’s safe to say that no one could have anticipated what actually did unfold when the two met again five months later. If Duran had prevailed by indomitable force of will in his first fight with Leonard, his will was utterly broken in the return bout, and while the second Duran-Leonard fight, unlike several of those between the Four Kings, would stake no claim to a position among the great fights of all time, in its own way it became the most celebrated of them all. What took place that night in New Orleans transcended boxing, and indeed, the world of sport. Even people who had never watched a fight and didn’t speak a word of Spanish now knew at least two of them, and exactly what they meant. The words were “No Mas.”

  Amid the postmortems following the fight in Montreal, Don King conceded that Leonard’s representatives had done a superior job of negotiating. Now, King reminded the press the following morning (neither boxer was present), Duran was in a position to dictate the terms of a rematch.

  “We assume they’re going to be fair,” said King, who held the promotional rights to Duran-Leonard II. “It’s like a mirror. Mr. Trainer was quite adamant in his negotiations for the first fight, and did a splendid job for Sugar Ray Leonard. I’m sure that Mr. Eleta and I can do the same for Roberto Duran.”

  Initially it was by no means clear that there would be a rematch. As Duran embarked on a profligate celebratory tour that would take him and his partying posse from Montreal to Panama and then back to New York, a disappointed and confused Leonard headed off to Hawaii to ponder his own future.

  There were days of solitary walks on the beach, evenings in which he seemed to stare for hours at the ocean. But all the while his mind was churning as he replayed the events of Montreal in his mind.

  “I ran on the beach every day, and every day I’d run into people who’d say ‘You know what? If you’d fought your fight you’d have won,’” said Leonard. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized they were right.”

  Even though he had willingly walked into Duran’s trap, he began to realize, it had still been a very close fight. If he could come that close to beating Manos de Piedra fighting Duran’s fight, what would happen if he fought his own?

  Juanita Leonard told Duran’s biographer Giudice: “For a week Ray never said anything, Then one day he said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, sweetheart. I can’t quit fighting.’ I just looked at him and said, ‘It took you a while, didn’t it? ’ He was twenty-five years old. There’s no way he was going to quit.”

  “That conversation is accurate,” said Leonard, “but by the time I told Juanita I’d already phoned Mike Trainer and told him I wanted the rematch. I didn’t need to clear it with my wife first.”

  When Leonard told Trainer he wanted to fight Duran again he also told him to try to make the fight right away.

  “That was calculated on my part,” admitted Leonard. “I knew Duran was overweight and partying big time. I’ve done some partying myself, but I know when to cut it out. I said to Mike ‘Let’s do it now, as soon as possible.’ In retrospect, it was pretty clever of me.”

  • • •

  Four days after defeating Leonard, Duran was greeted by 700,000 of his countrymen at a rally in Panama. He wore about his waist the green WBC belt he had “given” to Freddie Brown a few nights earlier.

  On several occasions Duran pointed down to the belt as he spoke, reminding the throng, This does not really belong to me, it belongs to you, my people, and, more colloquially, This thing is hanging there for you guys.

  Only later, Duran related to Giudice, did he realize that a sizable portion of his audience assumed from the animated gestures that he was referring not to the championship belt, but to his “verga” −his prick.

  From Panama, Duran returned to New York, where he and his friends continued a celebration that lasted the entire summer. By September the welterweight champion weighed nearly 200 pounds
.

  In the meantime, King and Eleta had managed to strike a bargain with Trainer that was favorable to their client in every respect save one. Duran would indeed earn the champion’s share, an $8 million guarantee that exceeded his wildest expectations.

  The catch was that the rematch would take place in November.

  Eleta was subsequently criticized for taking the autumn date even though he knew how badly out of shape Duran was. The manager later explained that he agreed to the timetable not because Leonard had demanded it, but because if he hadn’t, he feared Duran might never stop partying.

  “In our country, Duran is like a god,” Eleta later explained to Dave Anderson. “Everybody is after him to do this or do that, and he is very difficult to control. After he won the title from Leonard in Montreal and returned home to Panama, everyone invited him to parties and his home was turned into a hotel. Training in Panama became impossible. He was 183 pounds before we got him out of the country.”

  Duran-Leonard II was once again officially announced at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria. At its conclusion, Katz approached Duran and thanked him for the score he’d made in Montreal.

  “Thees time, bet dobble,” a smiling Duran replied, in English.

  “I did,” said the Wolf Man.

  At that same press conference, Duran foreshadowed the events of what would prove the critical moment of his life, providing a glimpse into his psyche as he voiced his disdain for Leonard.

  “I don’t like to see clowns in the ring,” said Duran. “I like to see boxers. To fight and beat me, you have to come into the ring and fight me. He goes into the ring and tries to imitate Ali, but an imitator is a loser.”

  “It was a little tougher getting Duran into camp,” recalled Bobby Goodman. “He had celebrated his win over Leonard with, shall we say, gusto and enthusiasm.