The Big Fight

by Sugar Ray Leonard

  As November 30 approached, the atmosphere, however, was different from how it normally was in the days leading to a championship fight. There was a real battle going on in Iran, as fifty-three innocent Americans were being held hostage by followers of the country’s new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. The hostages were on everybody’s minds.

  Closer to home, just two days before I took on Benitez, a fighter named Willie Classen passed away from injuries sustained in a November 23 bout against Wilford Scypion at the Garden.

  Given the awful beating Classen was taking, many felt the referee should have stopped the fight long before Classen was knocked out in the tenth round. Although I wasn’t familiar with Classen, whenever a member of our small fraternity is killed in action, I feel a deep sense of loss, as do many of my colleagues. We are aware of the great danger every time we step inside the ropes, but that doesn’t lessen our shock and grief. Yet I could not afford to mourn the unfortunate death of Willie Classen. Not then. Not during the few hours that remained before I would enter the arena to risk my own hide. If I did, and I lost my focus, I could end up just like him.

  By then I was already in the last stage of the change in personality I underwent before every critical match. As fight night neared, I became high-strung, rude, snapping at people for no apparent reason. Not having sex for months didn’t exactly lighten the mood. To their credit, the boys gave me a lot of leeway and didn’t take it personally. I was aware of my behavior, but it was more important to preserve the level of aggression I would rely on in the ring. Unless I brought out the savage in me at the right moment, I’d be doomed, and once I adopted that mind-set, I could be as mean as any brawler, especially when I was in trouble, as I was against Marcos Geraldo and would be against Tommy Hearns. I hated to lose more than anything.

  Of course, in the weeks prior to any fight, it was difficult, and unwise, to maintain the edge every second. If I did, I would burn out just as I did in the gym while I prepared for Johnny Gant. Only, any loss of motivation against Benitez would be much more dangerous. I would not be able to take a week off and escape to rustic Vermont to clear my head. Gant, with all due respect, was no Benitez.

  I would need to find a distraction. The answer was television. Situation comedies and action-adventure films often took my attention, if only for an hour or two, away from Wilfred Benitez. As the years went by, I turned into a VHS junkie, buying practically every tape in the store. I would slide a tape into the machine, and if it didn’t instantly produce a new world, much like the comic book heroes of my youth, I’d put in another until I found the appropriate diversion. After a short respite, I returned to the task at hand, visualizing how I’d break down the other man’s spirit and defenses and win the fight.

  On the day before the Benitez bout, I went for a three-mile run at six A.M. Jake and Angelo were not crazy about the idea, but running calmed me down. As I kept telling everyone, the fight was for “all the marbles.”

  Win, and I would be the new champion. Lose, and I would be what my critics had said all along—overrated, made-for-TV, style with no substance.

  The latest question from the doubters was how I might fare if the fight lasted the full fifteen rounds. I had yet to go past ten, while Benitez went fifteen in five fights, including the previous two. No matter. I was in tremendous shape and knew when to conserve energy and pace myself. Moving up from a scheduled six to eight to ten to twelve rounds was not a hard transition to make earlier in my career. Why should fifteen, if it went that long, be any tougher? I sparred five-minute rounds in camp instead of three to build stamina. That was the only adjustment.

  I was installed as a 3–1 favorite, almost unprecedented for a challenger, although I never paid much attention to the odds. The odds don’t mean a damn thing when the bell rings.

  Yet, as prepared as I was, one authority in the boxing business outside my circle believed I needed some last-minute advice. I was in my room around nine P.M., going through my normal visualization about what I anticipated for the fight, when the phone rang. It was Muhammad Ali.

  I couldn’t believe it. Ali was calling me.

  After I got over the shock, I listened intently. It was partly due to the suggestions Ali made in his dressing room at Yankee Stadium in 1976 that I didn’t sign with an established promoter. I was sure he’d come up with another gem. I wasn’t disappointed.

  “Don’t do any showboating,” he warned. “The judges won’t like it.”

  I had to chuckle. Ali’s warnings were akin to Richard Nixon giving a lecture on how to run a clean White House. Nobody clowned around like Muhammad Ali, who threw away more rounds than many fighters won. But he made a good point. The last thing the Vegas judges wanted to watch was another lounge act; there were plenty on the Strip already. They wanted to see punches that connected. They wanted to see a fighter serious about his craft. Considering the likelihood of an extremely competitive fight, I knew one or two points could make the difference.

  I thanked Ali and went to sleep—well, I tried to. I never got much rest the night before a fight, and this being my first title fight, I got less than usual.

  Around midnight, I jumped out of bed and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. For ten minutes I did some shadowboxing. The exercise was geared more to checking out my mental state: Was I willing to put everything on the line? The answer was a resounding yes. I slipped back under the covers.

  About a half hour later, I got up again and went through the same drill, the punches harder, the dancing faster, the eyes wider.

  I got up three or four more times until, around four A.M., I finally went to sleep.

  Benitez and I walked toward the center of the ring to receive the traditional prefight instructions from referee Carlos Padilla. Any assumption on my part that Benitez would be overwhelmed by the moment was immediately put aside.

  He stared me down as we used to stare at each other in the hood, where most street fights wouldn’t begin for maybe thirty or forty minutes while each man, his fists defiantly raised, attempted to scare off the other. Forcing someone to give up in our unwritten code generated more respect among the group than beating the living daylights out of him. Benitez was trying to establish a tone so that I would be more wary of him once the bell rang. Prizefighters since John L. Sullivan in the late 1800s had played these mind games all the time. In this case, there was reason to believe it might work. As we stood only inches apart, I was the one who appeared tentative.

  I needed to recover, and fast. When I retreated to the corner, I told myself, here was the championship fight I had yearned for since committing my heart and soul to this life three years earlier. I thought for the longest time that I would never want anything as much as I wanted the gold medal. Yet as the ring started to clear at Caesars, so did my mind, giving way to the will that defined me as a fighter, and a man.

  In these final moments, I never felt more alive and more authentic. It was as if I entered a room where no one else was permitted to go, where there was no confusion and no fear, where I felt happy and at peace despite taking part in a sport that required merciless brutality. In a strange way that made sense to me, I found boxing’s warlike nature serene, almost beautiful, and it was why I made my comebacks years later against my better judgment and the counsel of others. I never did it for the money; because of Mike Trainer’s shrewd investments, I was set for life. I didn’t do it for the fame, either; there’d be an endless supply of that as well. I returned to the ring to experience the pure, almost indescribable sensation I could not attain anywhere else. I miss it terribly.

  The bell rang. I was determined to show Benitez who was in control from the outset. His cocky stare was soon replaced by a look of genuine concern. He was in for the fight of his life. I landed the left jab and right hand, which created an opening for the hook. I won the first two rounds easily.

  In the third, I nailed Benitez with a left, which promptly sent him to the canvas. Perhaps I gave the champ too much credit. Perha
ps this evening, similar to many others in my undefeated career, was destined to be a short one. Whenever I put another man down, I finished him off.

  Not this man. Benitez rose and took a standing eight-count. He was not seriously injured, and when he came out for round four, I felt like I was chasing a ghost. He slipped one punch after another. I was known as the dancer with the slick moves, but facing him was like looking in a mirror, and I did not appreciate what I was seeing. I never missed so many punches, and that takes a heavy toll, as an exhausted George Foreman discovered against Ali in Zaire. You spend more energy hitting air than hitting flesh, and it begins to wear on your confidence. Why am I not landing punches? What is wrong with me?

  It became apparent that this was going to be a long night. Which meant that both of us, with our experience, instinctively sensed the need to pace ourselves. At various intervals, we took about twenty seconds off to step back and, standing almost flat-footed, allow time to go by without initiating any rough exchanges on the inside. Similar respites take place in every fight that doesn’t end in the early going, and you can see it in the eyes of each man, who, with legs burning and lungs on the verge of exploding, relays a signal to the other without saying a word. The restless spectators, frustrated by the lack of sustained action, might not approve, but they can’t relate to the pressures and demands we face every moment in the tiny space called a ring. Nobody, not even Joe Frazier, has been able to maintain a frantic pace for three full minutes round after round.

  In the sixth round, our foreheads accidentally cracked together, although I was fortunate to fare better in the exchange. Blood poured down his face, while there was only a small welt on my forehead. The danger was that the blood would flow into his eyes and impair his vision, which had stopped countless fights in the past. The sport is filled with exceptional boxers who did not reach their potential because they cut too easily. Yet I did not try too aggressively to take advantage of the bleeding. I knew he could still counter and score points if I was sloppy. Benitez also injured his left thumb, and no fighter at this level is skillful enough to prevail with only one good hand. But he carried on, and actually got stronger, landing a number of solid shots over the next few rounds. My respect for him grew with every blow.

  Part of the reason for my uneven performance was my fault, a stubbornness in continuing to depend on the right hand even after Angelo urged me to use the more effective jab. I suppose my ego, often a fighter’s worst enemy, did not quite believe he could be in front of me one second, ready to be hit with a hard right, and gone the very next. This being my first title appearance, I sought the glory of a dazzling knockout. There was nothing glamorous about winning on points.

  The main reason was Benitez. I wasn’t the only boxer who could dig deep inside himself. In the ninth, after he landed a few well-timed licks, I retaliated with my most lethal combinations of the evening, sending him into the ropes. Still, he refused to go down. The critics were wrong about him, just as they were wrong about me. He was a warrior. I rocked him with a strong left hook and two overhand rights in round eleven, knocking out his mouthpiece, but not him. His father must have been proud. The fatigue was setting in, though, as I was in uncharted territory, past the tenth round, for the first time. My arms were spent. My head was pounding. My lungs were gasping for air. Maybe I couldn’t go the distance.

  It was not during the actual fighting that I felt the worst of it. I was too busy searching for an opening or attempting to avoid his combinations. It was during the breaks between rounds. That’s how it always was. Resting in the corner for the one minute that never seemed to last long enough, I’d catch a glimpse of the man in the opposite corner and sometimes ask myself: Why should I put my body through another three minutes of torture?

  It didn’t matter one bit whether I was in control of the fight. My body wouldn’t know the difference. No wonder some fighters surrender on their stools. They assess their predicament and decide that giving up is better than absorbing the pain guaranteed to come again if they answer the bell.

  “Don’t go to sleep on me now,” Angelo warned after round eleven.

  I didn’t. I got back into the zone. To me, giving up was far worse than any amount of pain. My body would heal a lot faster than my pride.

  Benitez remained sharp in rounds twelve and thirteen and took the fourteenth, perhaps his finest of the night, to give him hope of retaining the title with a strong fifteenth. He was as sure of himself as he was in the prefight stare, grinning when we met in the middle of the ring for the touching of the gloves to kick off the last three minutes.

  I could not believe he was still on his feet, and while I was convinced I was leading on points, I couldn’t be convinced enough. Judges were known to render stranger verdicts, as they already had on the undercard by awarding middleweight champion Vito Antuofermo, a 4–1 underdog, a draw against Marvin Hagler. There’s no question Hagler was robbed. It’s no mystery he never again trusted judges in Las Vegas. I would have felt the same way.

  “This fight is very, very close,” Angelo told me in the corner. “You got to fight like an animal.”

  Which was exactly what I tried to do, as did Benitez, the two of us giving the fans the best stretch of fierce toe-to-toe action in the entire fight.

  I landed a hard left and soon followed with a right to the jaw. Later in the round came three left hooks, and with less than a minute to go, Benitez was too worn out to slip away once more. He was mine. At last.

  A stinging left put him on the canvas. He rose quickly, as he did in the third, and grinned, but he was hurt. He was hurt bad. After Benitez took the mandatory eight-count, I went in for the kill. That is what fighters are taught to do from their first day in the gym, and I was no exception.

  I never got the chance. Padilla ended it for me with only six seconds left, and it was the right call. Benitez was helpless.

  The next thing I remember, I was standing on the second strand of ropes, my arms raised triumphantly in the air. I wasn’t filled with the odd range of emotions I felt when I was on the podium in Montreal. I was ecstatic. The win, making me the new WBC welterweight champion, represented a beginning, not an end. The future was limitless.

  After celebrating with Jake, Janks, Angelo, and my brothers, I was met near the center of the ring by Benitez. We hugged.

  Some might wonder how two men who for forty-five minutes tried to destroy each other could embrace so soon after their battle was over, but it was precisely because we faced each other in combat that we needed to share this moment. Only the two of us—not our handlers or our loved ones—could relate to the sacrifices we made, physically, mentally, and spiritually. For months, the opponent was the enemy, the major obstacle standing in the path of greater earnings and greater fame. Yet, as most of us who fight for a living come to recognize, some sooner than others, the opponent is also a partner on the same journey.

  Moments later, I climbed outside the ropes to do an interview with Howard Cosell. I paid my respects to the Classen family and praised Benitez. I then spoke about my performance.

  “Don’t be cocky,” Howard teased, punching me lightly on the chin. There was no danger of that happening. Not after the punishment I took from Benitez, to date, the worst of my career.

  For a fighter not recognized for his power, he fooled me. My face was swollen around the cheekbones and there were large welts under both eyes. I was nauseous, dehydrated, and my right hand was throbbing, as if someone had injected a needle into my knuckles. I spoke to the reporters afterward, with Benitez at my side, but instead of attending a celebration, I went to the hospital for X-rays of my hand, which proved negative. By around eleven P.M., I was back in my suite at Caesars, soothing the aches and pains in a tub of hot water. I lay there for an hour, at least, and could have stayed longer. I was in no mood to see a soul.

  Soaking in the bath, stealing an occasional glance at the ugly face in the mirror, I asked myself the same questions most fighters do once every battle is ov
er, win or lose: Was it really worth it? Were the rewards, as lucrative as they might be, worth getting beaten up, not to mention the hits one must endure day after day in the gym? And what about the chances of permanent brain damage? Fighters generally bury those fears, but I had met enough who took too many blows to the head and by their late thirties or early forties were never the same again. Would that be my pitiful fate as well? Would I have to depend on another person for the most menial tasks?

  The questions were more relevant than ever. With the $1 million from the Benitez fight, after doling out a substantial portion to the government and my handlers, there was still plenty in the bank for me to walk away for good and live comfortably for the rest of my life. It was tempting.

  “Ray, you are the world champion now. You have nothing left to prove,” Mike Trainer said at the hospital. “This is a brutal way to make a living. Isn’t it wonderful to know that you do not have to ever fight again if you don’t want to?” Mike meant every word. He could never bear to see me get hit. He stayed in the dressing room until each fight was over.

  But who was I kidding? I wasn’t going to walk away.

  Not after climbing to the top of my profession at the age of twenty-three. Not with more lucrative paydays in the years ahead. Not with there being no welterweight alive who could take me down.

  And not as long as everyone in my circle kept urging me to continue—and why wouldn’t they? Even if they harbored serious doubts about the condition I was in, mentally or physically, which I know they did, especially in the weeks leading up to the Hagler bout in 1987, what would possibly compel them to speak their minds? A fear for my safety? Please. They cared about me, but they cared more for their own welfare, and no one else could provide for them and their families as I could.

  Every fighter is aware, or should be, of how damaging it is to be surrounded by a group of yes-men who won’t pose the questions that have to be asked. The danger, of course, is that the boxer, oblivious, will take on the next assignment and the one after that, and who will ever know which blows were the ones that made him an invalid for the rest of his life? For Muhammad Ali, was it Joe Frazier who gave him Parkinson’s? Earnie Shavers? Leon Spinks? Larry Holmes? Ken Norton? Who? If I said, at the age of fifty-four, that I was thinking about coming out of retirement to fight Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr., some of the boys would say, “Go for it.” I’m half serious.