The Big Fight

by Sugar Ray Leonard

  I was, to put it mildly, not organized. I reached into my pockets once and handed Charlie dozens of phone numbers and appointments hurriedly scribbled on torn napkins and matchbook covers. I had no clue as to what I agreed to, with whom, and when, often committing myself to be in two places at one time.

  Charlie never stopped working the phones. One deal he arranged took the two of us to Hollywood, where I signed pictures at an automobile show, “The World of Wheels.” For every autograph, I was paid a buck or two, Charlie stuffing the bills into his pockets and socks. When we got to our hotel room, he dumped the entire pile on the bed. I started to count. “We’re rich,” I told Charlie, the total several hundred dollars, at least. I jumped up and down and tossed the cash in the air. As thrilled as I was, Bruce Jenner, the decathlon winner from the Montreal Games, was raking in the real dough, pitching every product on the planet. I had no problem with Bruce doing so well. He earned it. But there was no doubt in my mind that if I were white, I would have done a lot better, paternity suit or no paternity suit.

  Once again, I kept my opinions to myself. Bringing up my race was never going to do me much good. If anything, it might make my situation worse. I was not as reserved, though, when it came to the matter of how my family responded to the suit. They found someone to blame instead of the county. Juanita, of course. She was perceived as a gold digger before there was any gold to go around. Never mind that I was the one who got her pregnant and didn’t have the money to support our child.

  I should have stood up for her and explained why the county filed the suit, but the other Leonards, as thickheaded as ever, wouldn’t have backed down anyway. I was fighting a losing battle, and it didn’t matter that my mom actually accompanied Juanita the first time she applied for welfare. The atmosphere grew so tense she stopped coming by the house. I couldn’t blame her.

  That was not the worst of it. The worst were the incredibly harsh comments the girls Juanita knew from high school made to her face, such as: “You tried to trap him with a baby, but it’s never going to work,” or, “I want him, you little shit, and I am going to fight you for him.” She’d be walking down the street and someone would point her out: “There goes the bitch that did it to Ray.” When a few girls threatened to beat her up, I was concerned for her safety. Yet, in her own feisty manner, Juanita was as tough as I was, never abandoning her faith in the bond we maintained with each other. She could withstand any insults as long as she believed we’d be together.

  The controversy also kept Juanita from going with me and my family to visit President Gerald Ford in the White House. I saw no need to put her in the spotlight. But I was glad I went. The pride my parents showed was something I’ll always cherish. Growing up in the Deep South, they never imagined they would one day be having a conversation with the president of the United States.

  Howard Cosell was there, too, and was most gracious.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ray,” Howard said, referring to the paternity suit. “It will blow over.” Howard was a true friend.

  As the days wore on, the story did not blow over. Nor did the emptiness in my soul since returning from Montreal. I wanted to believe that the void was directly related to the suit, and the negative reaction it generated among the fans of mine who felt betrayed.

  I knew better. The truth was that, without chasing the gold medal as a distraction, I was lost.

  I didn’t realize how lost until the night I almost made the worst mistake of my life. I get chills when I think about it.

  The first thing I did wrong was to call up a friend from D.C. who hung around with a much different crowd—the crowd I spent my high school years doing all I could to avoid. I knew they committed crimes. I just didn’t know which ones. I didn’t want to know.

  I could have called a lot of friends to be with, but for once I didn’t gave a damn about doing the right thing. I had done the right thing in representing my country, in bringing home the gold, and what good had it gotten me? I wasn’t a hero. I was a nigger. And if I was a nigger, I might as well hang out with the other niggers.

  I drove to an apartment in the northeast part of town where a friend of his lived. About ten people were already there listening to music and smoking weed. I knew a few of them.

  “What’s up, Sugar?” they said when I arrived. I could tell they were a little surprised to see me.

  After exchanging small talk for about a half hour, I noticed several guys heading toward the bathroom. They were gone for a while before I began to investigate.

  The door was closed. I knocked.

  “It’s me, man,” I said. “Let me in.”

  When the door opened, I saw them brushing against one another, handing a long needle down the line, from one to the next.

  They were doing heroin. I was naïve about drugs but I wasn’t that naïve.

  “Do me, man,” I pleaded. “Do me!”

  Almost immediately, one of the guys prepared to tie a piece of rope around my arm. The needle was slowly headed my way.

  Just then, my friend realized what was happening.

  “Ray, I am not going to let you fuck up your life,” he said. “It is too late for us. Our lives are already fucked up. You are somebody. You’re an Olympic champion.”

  Those words hung awkwardly in the crowded bathroom, but they were exactly the words I needed to hear. No, I was not going to fuck up my life. I took off as fast as I could, my arms spared the needle marks that would have done more damage than I could ever contemplate.

  As the weeks went by, however, and I was still not offered any exciting money-making opportunities, I started to believe that maybe I wasn’t somebody after all. Janks Morton warned me I’d feel this way. He spent a lot of time around former NFL players, seeing how their sense of worth crumbled after they could no longer make a tackle or catch a pass.

  “Ray, you need to take advantage of your name because you are hot right now,” Janks pointed out. “It won’t be this way forever. If you don’t do something about it soon, it will be too late.”

  I did not agree. People would come around eventually. After all, I had brought the gold to Palmer Park. I was chosen by the famous Howard Cosell as the successor to Muhammad Ali. I was . . . Sugar Ray Leonard!

  In early September, Janks, frustrated with my inability to grasp reality, asked me to accompany him to a busy D.C. intersection at lunch hour.

  “I bet you could stand here for hours and few people will recognize you,” Janks said.

  “That’s insane,” I shot back. “People will stop to ask for my autograph. I was on television!”

  I stood there forever, the minutes turning into hours, hundreds of people passing by as if I were invisible. In total, less than a dozen mentioned they had seen me on TV or congratulated me for capturing the gold. I kept changing where I stood to give them a better angle, almost blocking their path. It made no difference. I became more and more discouraged. I wasn’t as popular as I thought. I was Ray, not Sugar Ray, Leonard. Once I conceded the point, Janks and I headed back to Palmer Park.

  It was not the decline in my popularity, however, that made me begin to reconsider my future. It was the decline in the health of my parents. Both became ill around the same time and didn’t have the money to pay the medical bills that piled up every day. My father was already feeling bad in Montreal but didn’t say a word. That was how he was brought up, and he figured I had enough to worry about. When we returned to Maryland, he felt worse. It got to the point where he couldn’t digest any food or urinate, and was slurring his words. Pops insisted that it was just a cold. Yeah, some cold. He slipped into a coma and was rushed to the hospital. He suffered from spinal meningitis and tuberculosis, and lost forty pounds. There was talk that he might not make it.

  As usual, I buried my emotions. Until the day I couldn’t.

  The doctor was speaking to my father while he played with a dollar bill, as if he were a little boy. He was having another of his hallucinations. I looked into his eyes and
thought, here was my rock, the strongest man I had ever known, and he was totally out of it. I cried, and seeing the pain in my mom’s face only made me cry harder. Yes, they fought like hell. Yes, they almost broke up over and over again. But Cicero and Getha Leonard loved each other. They loved each other from the time they got past my grandparents’ rules and started dating in South Carolina, and now their future as a couple was in serious jeopardy. As for Momma, a short time before the Olympics, she had been briefly hospitalized for a heart ailment, forcing her to miss work.

  After every visit to the hospital, the same idea kept racing through my mind: Perhaps I should turn pro. Only in boxing could I earn the money to help pay my parents’ medical expenses. As a boy, I took it upon myself to put my skinny body between them when they fought while my older brothers and sisters did nothing. I believed it was a matter of life and death. As a man, I felt the stakes were the same.

  Was it a difficult decision? Absolutely. Instead of becoming the first in our family to earn a college degree, I’d be embarking on a vastly different sort of education, learning how to beat other people’s brains in.

  It was one thing to be an amateur fighter with the noble goal of representing your country in the Olympics. It would be quite another to harm other human beings, and risk ending their lives, for money.

  Before making a final decision, I was invited, along with the other gold medalists, by the well-known boxing promoter Don King, to Yankee Stadium to attend the heavyweight title fight in late September between my hero, Ali, and one of his rivals, Ken Norton.

  I couldn’t accept quickly enough. Not only would I see Ali fight in person for the first time, I would be introduced to the crowd as the Olympic light welterweight champion. After being ignored at the D.C. intersection a few weeks earlier, my ego could use the boost. I went with Charlie Brotman, who saw an excellent opportunity to get my name out again in the public eye, whether I turned pro or not.

  Ali was not the Ali from his early years as a pro, who dazzled opponents with his speed. He now relied on his will, typified by his struggle with Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975. He lost to Norton back in 1973, when his jaw was broken, before narrowly beating him in their rematch six months later. The fight at Yankee Stadium was sure to be another one that could go either way.

  In the end, Ali was very fortunate to exit the ring with his belt, and his faculties, still intact.

  But that’s not what I remember most about the evening. It’s what took place before the bell rang.

  Charlie and I were at ringside when Cosell motioned from a special box seat for us to come say hello. I was always honored to visit with Howard.

  After we hung out for a while, we got off on the wrong floor on the way back to our seats and wound up in the stadium’s basement. The door opened and a massive security guard gazed at us rather menacingly. For a second or two, I thought we might not see the fight after all. Thank goodness, the guard realized who I was, smiled, and politely asked if I might want to see “Muhammad.” Was he kidding? Of course I did, though I wondered: Why would Ali spend a second with me this close to the start of a championship fight? Didn’t he need to focus every ounce of attention on the task at hand?

  Apparently not. A few minutes later, Charlie and I were hanging with the champ in his locker room. It had been only eight months since Ali asked me at the Touchdown Club the question about having pussy in the days before a fight. It’s a good thing I didn’t remind him. It wasn’t the right time.

  “Are you turning pro?” Ali said.

  “I’m thinking about it. I haven’t made a final decision,” I said.

  Ali stared at me, his quiet eyes like giant black saucers.

  “Well, if you do turn pro,” he said, “just make sure that you don’t do what I did. Don’t let anyone own you. Remember, you are the one in the ring, and most of the money you earn should belong to you.”

  He added that if I did go pro, I should hire his trainer, Angelo Dundee.

  “He has the right complexion and the right connections,” Ali said.

  Ali’s handlers were getting a little anxious.

  “Hurry up, champ,” one said. “It’s time to go.”

  Nobody rushed Muhammad Ali.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said. “I’m talking to my friends.”

  “My friends?” Muhammad Ali was referring to me as one of his friends!

  I still was not ready to make a decision. Yet sitting in Yankee Stadium that night, I found myself mesmerized by the whole spectacle—the pressure, the applause, the electricity, all of it. I pictured myself in the ring, performing, winning—the welterweight version of Ali. Bailing out my parents was the initial motivation to turn pro, but I’d be lying if I said it was the only one.

  In New York, I went to meet Don King, who gave me a tour of his properties, including his luxurious penthouse apartment. Coming from Palmer Park, I felt like I was entering a new world I didn’t know existed.

  It didn’t take long for Don to make his pitch. Patience was never his forte.

  “Ray, I can make you a fortune,” he said, “and you’ll be the world champion.”

  Don rambled on as only he can. He offered me a deal that would, as he promised, make me wealthy. The numbers, and I don’t recall exactly what they were, would have set me up for a long time.

  There was only one problem. I kept hearing a voice in my head:

  “Don’t let anyone own you.”

  Which is precisely what would have happened if I had signed with Don. He would have had the right, for example, to renew the contract if at any point during its last year I was ranked in the top ten of my division. I rejected the offer, and that was the end of our “negotiations.” Over the years, I ran into Don on fight nights and we got along fairly well.

  In one typical rant, he said: “Ray, you are very rich but you are still a nigger and you always will be a nigger. The white man is gonna take everything from you.” I usually laughed during his tirades. Not this time.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You have more white attorneys working for you than anybody in this business.”

  King was speechless for the only time I can remember.

  Another millionaire to approach us was Abe Pollin, the owner of the Washington Bullets and Washington Capitals. The Pollin group offered a $25,000 loan at first and later increased it to a $250,000 signing bonus. However, Pollin would have eventually owned half of my future earnings. No deal.

  Meanwhile, as my parents’ medical bills continued to rise, it was no longer a matter of if I was going to turn professional. It became a matter of when and how. More specifically: How would I afford it?

  Maintaining distance from the boxing establishment meant that there was no capital to subsidize such an unpredictable venture. Winning the gold was no guarantee that I would succeed at the next level. The history of the sport is littered with promising amateur talents who never made it in the big leagues.

  I could think of only one person to manage my new life and career, one person who had any sense of how the world really worked. That was Mike Trainer.

  I didn’t know Mike too well at the time, but what I did know impressed me to no end. There was not a trace of BS in anything he said. If he could get something done, he’d tell me. If not, he’d tell me that, too. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was similar to me in one fundamental respect. He worked his way through law school, bagging groceries and delivering mail. He attended the University of Maryland, not Yale or Harvard. He earned his breaks, every one of them.

  Mike put together a shrewd business plan, which he referred to as “a community-oriented investment organization.” He installed me as the lone stockholder of a new corporation, Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc., asking twenty-three friends, who were businessmen in the Washington area, to lend the company a total of about $20,000. Mike also put in $1,000 of his own money. I was the president, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer. Our meetings did not
last long.

  The loans would be repaid in four years at 8 percent interest, and here was the part that made the arrangement most appealing: None of the investors would own a piece of me. They would not tell me whom to fight or when or for how much. When one potential investor inquired whether, in return, I might go with him on his sales route, he was immediately shot down by the others. The enterprise was designed to give me the best opportunity to make it as a professional boxer, not as a professional pitchman. These men weren’t going to get rich off me, and that was fine with them. They might not even get their money back. What if I could not compete at the highest level? What if I couldn’t sell tickets? We would find out soon enough.

  On October 12, 1976, I made it official. Boxing was my future after all.

  “I’m doing it for my parents,” I told the press. “They’re kind of down now and I’m capable of lifting them back up. I want to put them in a good financial position.”

  One last piece of the puzzle remained and it was a vital one: We needed someone with legitimate credentials in the fight game to navigate past the numerous pitfalls bound to emerge. Nobody on our team—Jake, Janks, Mike, Charlie, or I—understood how the industry, corrupt since the dawn of time, operated, and we couldn’t afford to learn on the job. One major slip-up, in or out of the ring, and we might never recover.

  After doing his research, Charlie narrowed the field of potential candidates to be my manager and trainer to three strong finalists: Eddie Futch, who guided Joe Frazier after the passing of Yank Durham; Gil Clancy, who oversaw the development of former welterweight and middleweight champ Emile Griffith and others; and Dundee, the indispensable presence in Ali’s corner since his second fight in 1960. Futch and Clancy would have been good choices, but Angelo could not be topped. As Ali said, he had the right complexion and the right connections. He knew the judges and the reporters, and there was no telling when those connections might make a huge difference.