—Ray Didinger
Hearns–Leonard I, 1981
“I made a couple of mistakes, and you can’t afford to make mistakes against a fighter of Ray’s caliber.”
—Thomas Hearns
Duran–Hagler, 1983
“Fighting all those years for peanuts finally paid off. I finally got the big one.”
—Marvelous Marvin Hagler
Duran–Hearns, 1984
“I tried to get under those long arms, and he knocked me crazy with that right hand.”
—Roberto Duran
Hagler–Hearns, 1985
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much intensity in a fight.”
—Richard Steele
Hagler–Leonard, 1987
“He’s a miracle man.”
—Gil Clancy
Hearns–Leonard II, 1989
“I think we both showed what we’re made of.”
—Sugar Ray Leonard
Hearns–Leonard II, 1989
“That is what makes a great champion!”
—Emanuel Steward
The Hit Man at his place of business—the Kronk Gym
“Give Tommy Hearns Ray’s balance and he probably beats them all.”
—Angelo Dundee
Leonard [Duran–Leonard III], 1989
“They were better prepared than we were. It was 38 degrees outside. Leonard had a blanket in the corner and Duran didn’t.”
—Mike Acri
The Four Kings: Hagler, Hearns and Leonard (top); Duran (below)
“If Jose Sulaiman tried to strip Hagler to prevent a Hagler-Leonard match, it would be a joke,” said Arum. “It would be the end of the WBC. No one would take them seriously.”
It seemed plain enough that Sibson himself was uneager to be an impediment to the proposed megafight.
“[Hagler] couldn’t turn that down,” said the Englishman. “As long as they got me a good payday on the undercard, I’d wait in line.”
Seemingly the only man whose opinion was not solicited in San Remo that night was Obelmejias. At 3:00 a.m., after we had filed our stories, Jim Fenton of the Brockton Enterprise and I walked out of the arena and into the deserted town square to come upon the beaten Venezuelan.
He was a forlorn figure. His face was puffy, and, still clad in his fight robe, trunks and socks, he wore shower clogs on his feet. His driver had apparently abandoned him, leaving the car locked and its formerly distinguished passenger stranded. He quietly found a seat on a stoop before a deserted storefront. His wife eventually approached and tenderly stroked his head. Obelmejias began to sob.
A few miles away, at the Hotel Mediteranee, Hagler’s victory party was in full swing. They waited until we got back, and then Arum directed the piano player to strike up the chords to “God Bless America.”
The boxing press, much of it en route to Miami for the Pryor-Arguello fight the following weekend, flocked to Baltimore in anticipation of Leonard’s announcement. Howard Cosell was brought in to serve as master of ceremonies. Angelo Dundee was also summoned, as were Muhammad Ali and, of course, Hagler and the Petronellis. Every network in the country sent a film crew, and the event was promoted like a boxing match. Ringside guests ranged from boxing luminaries to Wayne Newton, Orioles star Brooks Robinson, and Donald P. Hutchinson, one of Spiro Agnew’s successors as Baltimore County Executive.
Emanuel Steward was also on hand, as were the two reigning light-heavyweight champions, Matthew Saad Muhammad (the former Matthew Franklin) and Eddie Mustafa Muhammad ( né Eddie Gregory).
“Whatever you decide, I’m behind you,” Matthew told Leonard.
When Eddie Mustafa followed Saad to the dais he echoed the sentiments of “my brother” in counseling Leonard.
The following morning’s Baltimore Sun reported that “Matthew Saad Muhammad and his brother Eddie” had supported Leonard’s decision.
Dick Young of the New York Post boycotted the proceedings, which he described as “a Barnum & Bailey side-show.” “If Sugar Ray Leonard says anything other than that he is through fighting, then the next test he should take is a psychiatric one,” wrote the crusty columnist. “If he fights again, he is insane, and I just can’t bring myself to believe that he is.”
The suspense was prolonged by the reading of congratulatory telegrams from Donna Summer, Richard Pryor and Gerald Ford.
When it came time for his address, Leonard assured the crowd that his eye had fully healed. He thanked Dr. Ron Michels, the Johns Hopkins surgeon who had allowed him to see again. He thanked his parents and his wife and his son, his trainer and his lawyer.
He then waxed poetic as he described a fight against Hagler as the matchup each man had wanted for his entire career, one that would not only make each of them rich beyond his wildest dreams, but also establish once and for all the matter of supremacy in the sport of boxing. The smile on Hagler’s face seemed to broaden with each sentence, particularly when Leonard pointed his way and said, “He’s the only man who could make it possible.”
Then Sugar Ray dropped the bombshell.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s not going to happen.”
Leonard went on to explain that after consultation with his family, friends, and business associates, he had decided to retire.
Hagler was crestfallen, the Petronellis furious.
“I’m surprised,” said Pat.
“I’m shocked,” said Goody.
“I’m disappointed,” said Marvin.
“Leonard had sent us a special invitation, and then he kept calling to make sure we’d be there,” said Goody. “We were sure it was to announce he was going to fight Marvin. Why else would he have wanted us to be there? ”
Instead, they had flown to Baltimore to be used as stage props in another Sugar Ray Leonard moment.
On his way out of the arena, Hagler’s attorney Steve Wainwright turned to me and made a prescient observation.
“Nothing,” said the Barrister, “is forever.”
Plans were almost immediately undertaken to revive the Hagler-Sibson mandatory, which took place in Worcester the following February. The out-gunned Englishman was stopped in six.
Now, six months after having been snubbed in Baltimore, Hagler found himself relishing the chance to share the ring with Leonard, even if it would only be in a puerile television skit with an eighty-year-old comedian as the referee.
A few days before the scheduled appearance, Leonard was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, and the boxing skit seemed imperiled. Arum suggested that the producers go ahead with the segment, with Duran replacing Leonard as Hagler’s “opponent.” (The third man in the ring, Hope, had in his youth boxed professionally under the name “Packy West.” )
Two nights earlier, Angie Carlino and I had been in Atlantic City to cover a fight between Sean Mannion and In-Chul Baek. Mannion was a Boston-based 154-pounder from Ireland, Baek a Korean, and the winner would ostensibly become the WBA’s mandatory challenger for the Moore-Duran winner.
Mannion won, and the following morning we drove to Baltimore, where I had been assigned to cover that Saturday’s Preakness Stakes. (Deputed Testamony won.) Carlino took a train from Baltimore to Washington, where he hooked up with Hagler.
NBC had dispatched a private plane to fly Hagler and his wife, along with Goody and Pat Petronelli, to Washington. Duran, who had been training in New Jersey, arrived by train.
“Before he left camp somebody else had packed Duran’s equipment bag, and when he started to take his stuff out he had two right boxing boots,” Carlino remembered. “He held them out and stared at them, not saying a word.
“I wore the same size shoe as Duran, and I happened to have a new pair of sneakers I’d never even worn,” said Carlino. “I offered them to Duran, but he said no. Back then he had an endorsement contract with Viceroy. It said Viceroy on his trunks and on his shoes, and I guess he figured if he didn’t wear them he might not get paid. Somehow, he managed to stuff his left foo
t into the right boot, and he wore it that way throughout the skit. It must have been painful.”
Hagler and Duran shared a dressing room for the Hope show. As they rehearsed for the skit, Luis Spada noted to Arum, “I don’t believe it. They’re almost the same size.”
Indeed, at 5' 8 1/ 2 ", Duran was only an inch shorter than Hagler and now weighed just a few pounds less. It occurred to both men that a matchup between the middleweight and the longtime lightweight champion might not be such a far-fetched notion after all.
Hagler was a week away from his fight against Scypion, Duran three from his encounter with Moore. By all accounts the two got on well.
“Duran was always Duran,” said Carlino. “They joked around together a lot. Once they were getting ready to fight each other things got a little snarly between them, but that weekend they were fine.”
Hagler and Duran were warmly embraced by the rest of the star-studded cast. “Everybody you could think of was there,” said Carlino. “George Burns, George C. Scott, Brooke Shields, Sheena Easton, Cheryl Tiegs. Reagan, the president, was there. They all wanted to meet Marvin.”
The Duran-Hagler-Hope skit, more slapstick than boxing, went well. Afterward, Duran took another train back to New Jersey, while Hagler and his party flew back to the Cape. Or tried to.
“We hit bad weather and couldn’t land in Hyannis,” recounted Carlino. “The plane didn’t have instruments, so we couldn’t land in Boston or Providence, either. Finally they turned around and flew back to Washington.”
Their rooms in a downtown hotel were gone, but the party managed to rent three at a hotel near National Airport. The Petronellis took one, Bertha Hagler another.
“Pat and Goody wouldn’t let Marvin sleep in the room with his wife a week before the fight,” said Carlino, “so Marvin had to bunk with me.”
Hagler got back to Provincetown on Sunday, and, six nights later, knocked out Scypion in four in Providence. The most significant aspect of an otherwise unremarkable evening was the fact that it was the first title fight in history to be recognized by three sanctioning bodies.
Following Mancini’s fatal beating of Deuk-Koo Kim, the WBC had adopted a twelve-round limit for its title matches. Hagler, who held both the WBC and WBA titles, still insisted on fighting fifteen rounds, the time-honored championship limit. As part of a long-standing arrangement, the two organizations alternated the oversight role in Hagler’s defenses, and although the WBA still had a fifteen-round limit, it sided with its rival organization in this instance. Both threatened to strip Hagler if the bout were scheduled for the traditional distance.
Since disposing of Antuofermo in their 1981 rematch, Hagler had defended the middleweight title four more times. That October he had stopped Mustafa Hamsho in an eleven-round bloodbath in Chicago. In March 1982 he knocked out Emanuel Steward’s middleweight Cave Man Lee in the first round, and that fall in Italy he had stopped Obelmejias, the WBA’s top-rated challenger, in five. In February ’83 in Worcester he demolished Sibson, the WBC’s No. 1, in six. Although none of them had lasted that long, all four bouts had been scheduled for fifteen rounds.
In a failed palace coup at a WBA convention the previous winter, New Jersey’s Bob Lee had lost out in his bid for the presidency of that organization, but he remained head of the United States Boxing Association. A few days before Hagler-Scypion, Lee announced the formation of a new world sanctioning body, and offered to oversee the fifteen-round middleweight fight as its first championship bout. (At the time Lee’s hastily formed group was called the “USBA-International,” but within days it would change its name to the International Boxing Federation.) The WBC and WBA reluctantly came on board and collected their sanctioning fees. Steve Wainwright distributed buttons describing the Hagler-Scypion fight as “Boxing’s First Triple Crown.”
Having successfully defended his championship for the seventh time, Hagler turned up in New York a few weeks later to watch his sparring partner from the Bob Hope special continue his comeback against Davey Moore.
Moore had won the WBA version of the 154-pound championship in February 1982 when he knocked out Tadashi Mihara in Tokyo. The other half of the title by now belonged to Tommy Hearns.
Three months after his loss to Leonard in The Showdown, Hearns had initiated his campaign as junior middleweight by outpointing veteran Ernie Singletary in the Bahamas, a bout that took place in a run-down baseball field outside Nassau on the undercard of what would be Ali’s final fight, a ten-round loss to Trevor Berbick.
For The Greatest, it had been a bizarre and bittersweet farewell. Since the amateurish promoters had neglected to provide a supply of extra boxing gloves for the card, cornermen were ordered not to cut off their fighters’ gloves, and the same two pairs were passed along from one bout to the next, meaning that Ali probably wore the same sweaty gloves in losing to Berbick that Hearns had used in beating Singletary several hours earlier. And since no one had remembered to bring a bell, the Bahamians borrowed a fair approximation from a neighboring farm. The conclusion of Ali’s storied career was signaled by the tinkling of a cowbell.
In 1982 the Hit Man had knocked out the Mexican veteran Marcos Geraldo in the first round of a February bout in Las Vegas. There were two attempts to make a fight with Hagler, but legal problems and injuries had intervened. Hearns fought next in Detroit that July, where he KO’d an un-beaten middleweight named Jeff McCracken in eight.
Those fights set the stage for a December challenge to Wilfred Benitez in New Orleans. Sharing the bill with another title fight on the Don King-promoted card−Wilfredo Gomez stopped Lupe Pintor in the fourteenth round of a spectacular WBC junior-featherweight bout−Hearns scored a majority decision in becoming just the second man to defeat Benitez.
But he paid dearly for the win: In the eighth round he had rocked Benitez with a right hand. The punch landed with such force that it shattered several small bones in his wrist and popped them through the linear muscles at the back of his hand. Tommy fought the last seven rounds using only his left, but still won easily on two of the three scorecards. Dick Young (146-137) and Tony Castellano (144-139) favored Hearns by wide margins. The third judge, Lou Filippo, had it unaccountably level at 142-142.
The outcome confirmed yet again what many who had been following his career already knew: that beyond his “Hit Man” power, Thomas Hearns was a terrific boxer. He had not only beaten the acrobatic Benitez at his own game, but had done it with one hand.
After recovering from his appendectomy, Leonard once again found himself in Hagler’s neighborhood when he was invited to address an assemblage of Harvard students. It was Ray’s first visit to the Cambridge campus, where in those long-ago post-Olympic dreams he had hoped to go to law school.
“I’d done a lot of public speaking by then and I was comfortable before a microphone,” recalled Ray. “But I was downright nervous about that one. I kept asking myself ‘These kids are about to graduate from Harvard . What am I going to tell them? ’”
Despite his apprehension, Leonard was a hit.
“You’re blessed, and I’m blessed,” Leonard told the students that day. “We’ve each been given God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up.”
Davey Moore had already made three defenses of the WBA title, winning all by knockout. He was a 4-1 favorite against Duran. In a newspaper survey of two dozen boxing writers in town to cover the fight, only four picked Cholo to win. (I was one of them.)
That the champion might be in for a long night was first suggested when he struggled on the scale. Duran made weight with ease; Moore required an extra hour to lose two pounds.
Although Moore was a Bronx-born champion, the loyalties of the Garden crowd were divided, as a massive Hispanic contingent turned out to support Manos de Piedra on his return to the scene of some of his greatest triumphs−on his thirty-second birthday. Over 20,000−the largest Garden crowd since Ali-Frazier II−packed the Mecca of Boxing to watch Duran administer what turned out to be a br
utal, one-sided ass-kicking.
Enacting a repertoire of his tricks of the trade, the old master humiliated Moore, bullying him around the ring, spinning him like a top and hitting him with everything from punches to elbows to a thumb (in the opening round) that caught Moore squarely in the right eye, which almost immediately closed.
In the eighth round, after Duran flattened the champion with a straight right, Moore’s corner threw in the towel. (It was such a rout that referee Ernesto Magana was widely criticized for not having stopped it earlier.)
Marvelous Marvin Hagler, at ringside, was among the first into the ring to congratulate Duran.
Hagler was also the center of attention at the post-fight press conference, where he shared the dais with Arum. The middleweight champion was answering a question about his impression of the Duran-Moore fight when a clamor arose in the back of the interview room. A jubilant conga line, headed by Roberto Duran, snaked through the room and headed out the door for what promised to be another all-night party.
Duran paused just long enough to shout, “Thank you, Teddy!” at Brenner. He also acknowledged Hagler with a wave of his hand, as if to say, “And you, I’ll see later!”
As magical as the evening had been, it would be nearly as memorable for a disgraceful episode on the undercard as for Roberto Duran’s redemptive triumph.
The supporting acts included a ten-rounder between middleweights Billy Collins, Jr., and Luis Resto. Collins, from Tennessee, was undefeated at 14-0 but largely untested, while Resto, a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, was 20-8-2. Collins had had several fights on ESPN; I’d seen Resto a few years earlier, when he’d come to Cleveland to spar with Duran before his fight against Nino Gonzales. Collins was favored, but I figured he was going to have a tough time beating Resto that night. I couldn’t have guessed how tough.
Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing Page 19