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

by George Kimball

  “How bad is the Marina? ” a scribe grumbled. “When I checked in, the bellhop asked me if I knew where he could find any girls.”

  Although few realized it at the time, The Showdown was briefly imperiled three weeks before the fight. At his training camp in Phoenix, one of Leonard’s sparring partners, a then-unbeaten young California middle-weight named Odell Hadley, caught Sugar Ray with an errant elbow beneath the left eye. Although he wasn’t cut, the shiner was bad enough that it was initially feared that a postponement might be necessary. After a few days, the swelling subsided. Members of the training camp were sworn to secrecy, and Leonard resumed his preparations.

  An even more serious training injury occurred in the other camp, but it wasn’t to Hearns. In a sparring session less than ten days before the fight, the Hit Man served notice that he was getting his game face on when he broke Marlon Starling’s jaw.

  Starling, who would later become a two-time welterweight champion, was to have headlined the live card accompanying the closed-circuit tele-cast at the Hartford Civic Center. Instead of replacing his bout, local promoters advertised that they would show video clips of the sparring session in which Hearns injured Starling.

  Each competitor, in fact, prepped for The Showdown against a sparring partner named Odell. Hearns was also sparring with Odell Leonard, who promoters around the country had been pitching as a “cousin” of the Olympic champion. That Odell, who would fight Marvin Hagler’s brother Robbie Sims on the Boston Garden live show September 16, made no attempt to correct the alleged family ties, but once he went over the hill and joined the enemy, the Leonard camp quickly outed him.

  “His name is Odell Davis and he’s from North Carolina,” said Janks Morton. “He changed his name after the 1976 Olympics.”

  “He’s not my cousin,” said Roger Leonard. “If he was my cousin, do you think he’d be helping the guy who’s going to fight my brother? ”

  • • •

  In the first six months of 1981, Marvin Hagler had made the first two defenses of his middleweight title on his home turf, facing Fulgencio Obelmejias in January before meeting Antuofermo in a June rematch.

  Obelmejias was 30-0 and rated the No. 1 challenger by the WBA. His first twenty-seven fights had for the most part taken place in his homeland and Mexico, while his last three, all against nondescript opposition, had taken place in Italy.

  That Hagler would approach his championship reign with the same dedication he had during the years when he was a hungry outsider was evident the first time we visited him in Provincetown before the Obelmejias fight. All but shuttered for the season, the sprawling Provincetown Inn was a ghostly mansion in January. Hagler rose each morning to run across the secluded dunes at the tip of Cape Cod, emerged from his room once a day for sparring, and spent the rest of his time in seclusion, staring out at the bleak winter landscape.

  As a boy in Newark, Hagler had kept pigeons in a rooftop coop. In Provincetown he had developed an affinity for the ubiquitous seagulls, some of whom he had even given names. In training, Hagler wore shirts and caps emblazoned with an ominous-sounding, if bizarrely ungrammatical, slogan: Destruction and Destroy.

  Sometimes Goody and Pat would drop by for a chat, and he would occasionally roust one of his sparring partners for a walk on the dunes, but it isn’t a stretch to say that Hagler spent twenty hours of each day alone, much of that thinking about his next opponent−in this case, Obelmejias.

  Considering his dearth of high-level experience, Obelmejias performed creditably enough. He didn’t win a single round, and was down twice before Octavio Meyran stopped it twenty seconds into the eighth.

  Obelmejias had been a mandatory challenger. In his next defense, Hagler was determined to erase what he considered the lone remaining blight on his record.

  He had avenged the Philadelphia decisions with Watts and Monroe by knocking out both men. He had removed any lingering doubt over the Seales draw with a first-round knockout in their third meeting. Now it was time to prove to the world that the Antuofermo draw had been a miscarriage of justice.

  Antuofermo’s proclivity for being cut was legendary. He had recently undergone a new form of surgery, which promised to alleviate the condition. Doctors had gone beneath the tender skin above his eyebrows to shave down the bone, a procedure it was believed would better allow him to withstand punches without bursting open.

  “I guess,” a cornerman would say later, “the operation didn’t take.”

  Vito didn’t have a chance in this one. Hagler was all over him from the opening bell onward, and Antuofermo’s face began to sprout leaks in the first round. A deep cut above his left eye had turned his face into a mask of gore, but Vito the Mosquito pressed bravely onward. Hagler dropped him in the third, and when Vito emerged from his stool to answer the bell for the fifth, he was followed into the ring by a towel from his corner.

  Marvelous Marvin’s reign as middleweight champion was off to a flying start, but he would never play the old Causeway Street arena again. The second Antuofermo fight turned out to be Hagler’s last in the Boston Garden.

  The Showdown with Hearns would confirm what those closest to him already knew about Ray Charles Leonard: that beneath the million-dollar smile and the pretty-boy veneer lurked a boxer with the heart of a serial killer.

  “People who think he’s a nice guy don’t know how nice he is,” said Dundee. “And people who think he’s a tough fighter don’t know how tough a fighter he is. He’s a nicer guy and a tougher fighter than people realize.”

  Emanuel Steward enthusiastically concurred with that assessment.

  “One of Ray’s greatest attributes was that he was such a strong finisher. He could always close the show,” said Steward. “Even in the first Duran fight he was the guy coming on over the last few rounds. When people looked at that baby face and small-boned structure they didn’t realize how strong and physical he was, but Sugar Ray Leonard could be a total animal in the ring.”

  Beyond his respect for Leonard’s abilities, Steward had another concern in the days leading up to The Showdown.

  “I was afraid Tommy was overtraining,” recalled Emanuel. “I tried to rein him in, but for the first time since he was ten years old he wasn’t listening to me.

  “He had this crowd of people around him, and they were telling him, ‘Ray and Ollie run their camp. Angelo just comes in at the end, and they tell him what to do.’ So he was running in the morning, running again at night. When I told him I thought he was doing too much, he said, ‘I’m the one doing the fighting.’

  “A few days before the fight there was a big crowd at Tommy’s workout. We were supposed to be through sparring, but Shelly Saltman, who was doing P.R. for us for that fight, grabbed the microphone and announced that Tommy was going to box.

  “I said, ‘ What? ’ I thought I hadn’t heard right, but Tommy had told Shelly to announce it. ‘Yes, I’m going to box,’ he told me. He went seven rounds with Cave Man Lee and Dujuan Johnson [two future Kronk title challengers] that day.”

  Another potential distraction occurred a few days before the fight. At daybreak one morning a tangential Hearns hanger-on who described himself as a “bodyguard” was cleaning a pistol near the outdoor swimming pool when the weapon accidentally discharged. Although no one was injured, Caesars security officials quietly moved to disarm the Hearns posse, at least until the fight was over.

  The Showdown would affirm boxing’s first undisputed welterweight champion since Jose Napoles, but although Leonard held the WBC title and Hearns the WBA belt, neither championship was even mentioned in the contract. Both organizations belatedly agreed to sanction the bout, but when their representatives arrived in Vegas, instead of getting the red-carpet treatment the tinpot boxing dictators from Mexico and Venezuela discovered that they were expected to stand in the same credential line as everybody else.

  When they complained about waiting to have their photos taken, it was presumably to say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ b
adges!”

  “Why do they bother taking these guys’ pictures? ” wondered Bert Sugar. “They could get them right off the post office wall.”

  In September 1981 Leonard actually owned two world titles. The previous June he and Hearns had laid the groundwork for The Showdown by sharing a bill at the Astrodome in Houston, where Hearns defended his WBA welterweight championship, stopping Pablo Baez in four, while Leonard TKO’d Ayub Kalule in nine to win the WBA junior middleweight title.

  The rationale for this joint appearance had been simple. Although the clamor for a Hearns-Leonard bout had commenced shortly after Duran said “No mas” in New Orleans, Trainer said at the time that while “boxing people know all about him, the American public doesn’t even know who Thomas Hearns is. ”

  It was hoped that sharing the limelight with Sugar Ray at the Astrodome would help correct that deficiency.

  The most memorable pre-fight moment in Houston came after Arum’s publicist Irving Rudd trotted out what was supposed to be an authentic African witch doctor, ostensibly to boost the chances of the Ugandan-born Kalule by casting a spell on Leonard.

  It was a cheap publicity stunt that appealed to the basest stereotypes, and at least one African American on hand was prepared to denounce it as such. Outside the hotel Rock Newman−later the manager and promoter of Riddick Bowe, but then a Washington-area sports radio personality−staged an impromptu press conference to decry the “witch doctor” gimmick and all that it implied.

  Newman was wearing white trousers and a white dashiki, and as he stood there berating the “witch doctor” and railing against the racial overtones implicit in the gag, he was suddenly set upon by a flock of angry crows, which without warning swooped in from the sky and attacked Rock with such ferocity that he was forced to flee in terror.

  Score one for the witch doctor.

  (Native Texans later explained that everyone in Houston knew better than to wear white in the summer, because the color was known to antagonize the local crows.)

  Leonard, in any case, was allowed to hang on to both belts through the summer. Granted dispensation by the sanctioning bodies, he had until ten days after the Hearns fight to decide which one he would keep.

  Sharing the spotlight with Hearns in Houston had brought about Leonard’s first day-to-day interaction with the Hit Man. Leonard’s impression?

  “They ought to lobotomize Hearns, just to see if there’s a brain in there,” he said, unkindly.

  The remark was widely circulated, and would be frequently revived in the run-up to the September fight. Like Muhammad Ali’s equally mean-spirited description of Joe Frazier as “ignorant” and “a gorilla” ten years earlier, it would serve as bulletin-board material for the opposing camp.

  Although the outcome of the No Mas fight seemed to have proved Dundee and Trainer right and Jacobs wrong, the breach was now irreparable. Having completely severed his ties with the Leonard camp, Jake volunteered his services to the enemy. In 1981, Ray’s old amateur coach materialized in Las Vegas as a member of Hearns’ entourage.

  Although Steward welcomed his input, it is questionable how much advance intelligence Jacobs actually contributed. He walked around Caesars in a Kronk Boxing Team jacket and held court for the press, but on fight night Jacobs was not in Hearns’ corner.

  “I’d known Dave Jacobs for several years,” said Steward. “We’d been friends since the ’73 Gloves. He was part of our camp for the Leonard fight, but he didn’t ever give us advice about how Tommy should fight Leonard.

  “He didn’t have to. I knew Ray Leonard as well as anyone,” said Steward. “I’d seen him most of his amateur career, I’d coached him on several international amateur teams, and he’d come to the Kronk to prepare for the 1976 Eastern Regionals before the Olympics. There wasn’t anything [Jacobs] could have told me about Ray that I didn’t already know.”

  Even though he was technically a member of the Hearns entourage in Vegas, Leonard’s old mentor clearly had mixed feelings. Two days before The Showdown he told the Chicago Sun-Times’ John Schulian, “If they called this fight off, I’d be the happiest man in the world.”

  The Nevada State Athletic Commission had assigned the triumvirate of Duane Ford, Chuck Minker and Lou Tabat to be the judges. Sixty-three-year-old Davey Pearl, a fund-raiser for UNLV, was named the referee.

  At the pre-fight rules meeting, Dundee asked Pearl to be vigilant in monitoring certain Hearns tactics he’d picked up watching films of the Hit Man’s earlier fights.

  “Watch how many punches Hearns misses and then hits the guy with his backhand,” said Leonard’s trainer. “Or how many times he’ll miss with a jab, then hold the guy with his left hand behind the head and throw a right. I warned the commission about these things at the rules meeting.

  “They’ll be watching for it,” said Dundee, “but so will my guy. When Hearns does that, he’s off balance, and Ray will catch him with left hands.”

  The Showdown loomed a classic boxer-puncher matchup, then, and both participants appeared to subscribe to that view.

  “My right hand could make this the easiest fight I’ve ever had,” said Hearns. “It’s very possible this fight can end very, very quickly. No more than three rounds.”

  “Hearns makes mistakes,” countered Leonard. “He tries to knock out everybody with one punch. I use my mind. Maybe Tommy would too−if he had one.”

  “Emanuel Steward is no dummy,” said another interested observer, Marvelous Marvin Hagler. “I expect Hearns will try to take Leonard out early, and I’m sure he’ll be the aggressor. Of course when that bell rings you never know what might happen. Hearns might not fight the way he’s supposed to. But I think he will.”

  Hagler would not be an eyewitness to The Showdown. The middleweight champion was again sequestered at his training camp in Provincetown, preparing to make his third title defense, against Mustafa Hamsho in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, a few weeks later.

  Neither Leonard nor Hearns had ever fought as a 160-pounder, but even in 1981 it was apparent that both loomed as potential Hagler opponents.

  Marvelous Marvin was doing double-duty the week of the Hearns-Leonard showdown, “covering” the fight as a guest columnist for the Boston Herald American . Before leaving for Vegas I’d sat down with Marvin in Provincetown for his analysis, and in the days leading up to the bout we spoke each day by telephone.

  “The first Duran fight was his toughest test so far, but his fight against Hearns will be even tougher,” Hagler had predicted. “To neutralize Hearns’ reach advantage, Leonard is going to have to stay either inside him or outside him. My guess is that he’ll stay outside and box and make Tommy come to him. Leonard is a very good counterpuncher.

  “The way Hearns carries his left hand so low looks dangerous, but it really isn’t,” added Marvelous Marvin. “Not if he keeps the proper distance. There’s a safe distance and an unsafe distance, and Hearns is awfully quick. If Leonard tries to come inside that left, well, there’s a saying in boxing that if he’s close enough to hit you, he’s close enough for you to hit him. That’s especially true with those long arms Tommy has.”

  It had not gone unnoticed that Hearns had a proclivity for running out of gas in longer fights. In addition to the issue of Hearns’ punching power versus Leonard’s boxing abilities, the matter of the Hit Man’s stamina was also called into question.

  “Only two of Hearns’ fights have ever gone the distance, and his longest fight ever was when he went twelve rounds in beating Randy Shields,” noted Hagler. “But Randy Shields is the sort of fighter who could make a firing squad look bad.”

  But when Hearns was asked about the possibility of the fight lasting into the later rounds, he seemed confident.

  “I might be tired, but Ray better not underestimate me,” he warned. “Tired, I’m still able to break ribs and break jaws.”

  At a breakfast with the press a few days before the fight, Hearns was asked about the mind games Leonard seemed to be playing.<
br />
  “If he’s trying to psych me out,” said Hearns, “he’s not doing a very good job of it.”

  The widespread assumption was that the judges would bend over backward for Leonard and that Hearns almost had to score a knockout to win. One of the wire services, in fact, polled out-of-town boxing writers on the matter, and of seventy prognosticators queried, only one picked Hearns by decision.

  Even Emanuel Steward seemed to share the view that the judges would be disposed toward Leonard.

  “If the fight goes fifteen rounds and it goes to a decision it will be, uh, interesting, ” said Hearns’ manager/trainer.

  The bettors apparently subscribed to the opinion−wagering that the fight would end by knockout was an odds-on, 2-5 proposition.

  Leonard had been posted as a narrow favorite when the fight first went up on the board, and remained so until two nights before the fight, when so much Motown money came rolling in that Hearns became a 7-5 favorite.

  Having made their cases for the conventional wisdom, Hagler and both trainers allowed themselves some wiggle room by conceding that the fight just might not unfold the way everyone expected.

  “Leonard knows he can’t run all night,” said Hagler. “He’ll have to give them a show, but I figure he’ll try not to mix it up early, hoping that Hearns will get tired and sloppy in the later going.

  “But you never know,” mused Marvin. “Leonard might try to punch with Hearns. He’s showed a tendency to do that in some of his more recent fights, especially the last one, against Kalule. If he does that, I think it will be a mistake.”

  “People forget that Tommy wasn’t always a puncher,” Steward said. “In his whole amateur career he hardly ever knocked anybody out. He was a boxer then, and he’s a boxer now.”

  “My guy is gonna back him up,” vowed Dundee, although few expected that to happen.

  “One of them will be a loser and the other one is doomed,” said Hagler, “because the winner gets me. ”