The Big Fight

by Sugar Ray Leonard

  Except that the spots, known more commonly as floaters, did not go away, and of greater concern was that my eyelid began to feel like a curtain that was slowly closing, my visibility becoming less clear. I didn’t feel any pain in the eye, and there was no swelling, but something was obviously wrong. After I explained the situation to Julius (Juice) Gatling, one of my boys, he urged me to have the eye examined immediately. Juice was uniquely attuned to any eye difficulties, given that he had lost one of his in a car accident several years earlier. In being candid, though, he caught flack from several members of my team who were more interested in their paychecks than my well-being. Shocking, isn’t it?

  I visited a doctor who gave me a few eyedrops and suggested I have it checked out again after the fight. The sense of relief I felt cannot be overstated. I trained with renewed vigor when I returned to the hotel. For the first time, I was eager to face Stafford.

  The excitement did not last. I saw more spots. The eyedrops were not the solution. A week before the fight, on a Friday morning, I went to see another doctor, a specialist. The news was grim.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have a detached retina,” he said.

  “A detached retina? How serious is that?” I said.

  “Very serious,” he said.

  “Should I go on with the fight?” I asked. He said he wouldn’t if it were him. I respected his view but decided to seek a second opinion.

  The original idea was to go on Monday to the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but waiting an entire weekend for more details would drive me crazy. Instead, we made plans for me, Janks, and my father to fly from Buffalo to Washington on Saturday morning. Before we could leave, I had to pretend that everything was normal. It was one of the hardest acting jobs I ever had to do.

  When I returned to the hotel gym, there were tons of people waiting for me, including the mayor and several local TV crews. They expected the usual show—shadowboxing, jumping rope, hitting the bags, etc. I gave it to them. What else could I do? While I was performing, I felt horrible. These nice people were getting pumped up about the kind of event that rarely comes to Buffalo, telling me over and over how much the city adored me. I was almost certain there would be no fight and I couldn’t clue them in.

  During the flight, I stared out the window for the longest time. Suddenly, shockingly, my father and I talked. We never talked. We exchanged meaningless sentences. But now we were engaging in an actual conversation about issues that mattered—his fears and my fears, and how he would pray for my recovery. He cried. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him cry.

  Around five P.M., after hooking up with Juanita and Mike Trainer at the airport in D.C., we found ourselves in the office of Dr. Ronald Michels, who had operated on heavyweight Earnie Shavers for a similar ailment. I was scared and I wasn’t the only one.

  Dr. Michels asked me to read the eye chart. It was as if I were back in elementary school. I recited each letter correctly except for one on the bottom row.

  I looked around the room. Everyone was smiling. How bad could my eye be if I could see that far away?

  The next part of the examination was to dilate the pupil. I lay down on a table as Dr. Michels shone a light and did an inspection of my retina. After he finished, he paused. I could tell by the expression on his face that what he was about to tell me would not be what I wanted to hear. “There is definitely a partial detachment,” he said. “And you don’t have much time. If you don’t take care of this in the next week or so, you could go blind in that eye.”

  There, he said it, the B word, the word that had been in the back of my mind from the moment I noticed the very first floater. Now it was out there, no longer just a fear, and there was nowhere to hide. It was as if he had said “You have a tumor.” Yet I maintained my composure. I always did, at least in public. That was not the case with Juanita. She began to sob. We excused ourselves and went into another office. She cried louder and louder. There was nothing I could say to wipe away her tears.

  Not everyone in our group, however, was as mindful of my welfare. After the doctor said I’d need an operation, Janks Morton had the nerve to ask: “Can he fight and come back later for the surgery?” We all looked at Janks as if he were out of his mind. I did not ask him then, or ever, how he could have been so insensitive, though I never forgot what he said.

  Dr. Michels told me I could come back in a few days to have the surgery, which I was inclined to do. I was a fighter and I needed time to get in the zone. I was then reminded of how much of a fighter Juanita Wilkinson was, and always had been. The tears gone, she was stronger than anyone on my team.

  “No,” she insisted. “We will stay here tonight and have the surgery tomorrow.” I was in no position to argue. Tomorrow it was.

  It was during these exchanges, and they were frequent, when Juanita’s love and concern for my well-being made me cherish her more than words can describe. And when I reflect on the pain I caused her by chasing after women who could never match her kindness, the guilt becomes almost more than I can withstand. Juanita didn’t leave my sight the whole night, sleeping on a cot next to me.

  I got almost no sleep. The nurses barged into the room four or five times to check my temperature and administer blood tests. They weren’t the only visitors. The story that I was at Johns Hopkins had been all over the news. As a result, until close to midnight, strangers kept popping in, wishing me well. I appreciated their concern, though I would have preferred a little privacy. It wasn’t until the morning that I received the proper security.

  The biggest reason for my lack of sleep was the fear that I could not bury with my usual resolve. Of all the parts that made me a champion, I relied on my eyes the most, and now they were the ones that were letting me down. I had thought I was invincible. I wasn’t, and it wasn’t my future as a boxer I was most worried about. It was my ability to see, period, out of my left eye. What if something went wrong on the operating table? What if the detachment was greater than they thought? This wasn’t a fight. I couldn’t talk to Angelo and go over any adjustments in the corner. If anybody was “blowing it,” it would not be me. Yes, I’d still have one good eye left, but that’s no way to go through life. I’d never be the same again.

  I took time that evening to compose in my head the statement I would make to the press once I came to after the operation. Here, thankfully, was one aspect of this awful ordeal I could control. For a change, however, the precise words did not come. Each time I attempted to put a positive spin on the situation—the operation was a success, my eye will be 100 percent, etc.—I had to stop and start over. My first impulse, as usual, was to think about my image and make people feel good, but there was no guarantee the surgery would go well. After three or four attempts, I gave up and dozed off. I was given anesthesia in the morning and the next thing I remember, I was in the recovery room with a black patch over my eye.

  The operation lasted about two hours and did go well, thank God, although it would be weeks, if not months, before the doctors would know if I’d make a complete recovery. I was fortunate that the tear occurred at the bottom of the eye and that just under 50 percent of the retina had separated.

  I couldn’t wait that long. Once everyone left my room upstairs except for Juanita, I did what I was specifically told not to do. I ripped the patch off. I didn’t see much, only a glimmer of light, but I saw enough. I was not blind in my left eye. That night, I slept like a baby. Over the next several days, I received thousands of letters and calls, including one from President Reagan. I do not remember what the president said, but he was very friendly. I spent about a week in the hospital, Juanita taking care of everything. She fed me. She bathed me. She walked me to the bathroom. When I woke up in the middle of the night in pain, she gave me my pills. She was an angel.

  On May 16, wearing the patch, I left the hospital and returned to my house in the D.C. suburb of Mitchellville to begin pondering my next move. Nothing was certain any
more.

  It was one thing to think about retirement, which I did routinely—after Benitez, the first Duran fight, and Finch. I was the one in control, assessing how much more punishment my body was willing to take, and nobody except my wife was privy to those thoughts. It was quite another to have events control me, to be forced, perhaps, at the ridiculously young age of twenty-six to leave the only career I had ever known. And to do what, exactly? Commercials? Commentary? I wasn’t sure. I decided to give myself six months to figure things out.

  Many fans and members of the boxing community didn’t need six months to render their verdict: I should quit immediately. In their view, I risked permanent damage to my eye and had absolutely nothing left to prove.

  If I did return to the ring, it would reveal, as the noted Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich put it, “a foolish pluck that would also invite the suspicion he wants more money than his monthly printouts show him to own, in the millions.” Although I respected this opinion, I wasn’t going to make a rash decision with countless ramifications, and not just for me and my loved ones. The end of my boxing career would mean the end of lucrative paydays for the rest of Team Leonard.

  On May 27, I met with reporters for the first time since the operation. Wearing a pair of glasses I borrowed from Roger, I was not my normal confident self. I told them about ripping the eye patch off in my room, and addressed speculation that the injury took place during the Hearns fight. I traced it instead to the workout when I was struck by Odell Hadley’s elbow. Only much later did it occur to me that the damage I sustained in the Geraldo fight in May 1979 was the more likely cause. Either way, it made no difference. What mattered was whether my eye would heal.

  The conference was soon over, the beast fed for another day. The reporters would devote their precious column inches to other men now, fighters they were sure would be back in action.

  Boxing didn’t stop when Joe Louis retired or Muhammad Ali retired, and it wasn’t about to stop with Sugar Ray Leonard on the sidelines.

  A writer asked me if I would miss the sport during the next six months.

  “Time will tell,” I said.

  I didn’t miss it at first. I enjoyed being back home with Juanita and Ray Jr., now eight. We watched television, went bowling, did a lot of things normal families do. I was also grateful to be spared Mount Motherfuck and the other rigors of training. It felt no different from the breaks I regularly took after every fight. Three months went by between Bonds and Kalule, five between Hearns and Finch. Long gone were the days of fighting once a month. Plus, with the endorsement opportunities and the chance to do more boxing analysis on television, there would be plenty to keep me busy.

  Yet as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, I was overcome with more and more anxiety. Whenever I had felt those emotions before, and it was fairly often, I headed to the gym. There was nothing like pounding the bags, or some poor soul’s face, to flush the anger out of my system. Without the gym, I needed a new haven.

  It didn’t take me long to find one.

  I don’t recall where I was or who I was with when I did cocaine for the first time that summer. I was wary, I must admit, knowing how much drugs messed up Roger, as well as my sister Sharon. Yet I wasn’t weak like they were. If I could handle Benitez, Duran, and Hearns, I could certainly handle a little white powder. Besides, during my trips to California, the people I did coke with did not work on the streets, as did the drug dealers back in Palmer Park. They lived in mansions with swimming pools. They were some of the most high-profile stars in music and movies, people of stature. If they thought cocaine was cool, who was I to argue? Wherever I went, cocaine was on the table, as if it were part of the furniture. I was surprised when it wasn’t there.

  The high I got from cocaine was incredible. I tried pot a few times as a teenager, but it made me paranoid, and I was too serious about boxing to mess around for long. Coke made me feel like I did in the ring, in complete control. I became funny, engaging, articulate. Coke made the anxieties go away. I was Sugar Ray again.

  Except that they kept coming back, over and over. Which meant I needed more coke. Lots more.

  Fortunately, due to my celebrity status, I didn’t have to buy my own. The high rollers I hung with were thrilled to share with the champ, coke being another symbol of their vast wealth and power. As time went on, though, and my appetite grew, I couldn’t wait for the next party in Bel Air or the next visit to a swanky club in West Hollywood. I paid for the stuff myself, doling out one thousand dollars here, two thousand dollars there, which seemed a bargain for the buzz cocaine gave me. Only, those dollars began adding up in a hurry. One friend I used as a supplier estimates that I spent a quarter of a million dollars per year on coke, and I bet he’s not far off. The stuff he bought was high quality, though he admitted to me last year, as I had suspected, that he cut some of it for what he termed “a handler’s fee.” There was nothing I could have done. I was not about to ask a stranger working the streets to take his place.

  I kept my habit a secret, but always worried that people would find out. Each time I visited Dr. Michels for a checkup, I wondered: If you do cocaine, can your pupils still dilate? If he did observe a difference, he never said anything. Nor did anybody else. Yet they had to know.

  One time, a member of my team tried to convince me to stop taking drugs by appealing to another vice of mine, and smartly picked a time when he knew I couldn’t walk away. We were thirty-five thousand feet in the air, flying to somewhere I don’t remember.

  “Ray, did you happen to know that cocaine kills your sex drive?” the person said.

  I appreciated the effort. I knew, however, that there was no validity to that statement, not for me. Cocaine, if anything, increased my interest in sex.

  What about Mike Trainer? If he was my protector, it’s natural to ask: Why didn’t he protect me from my most dangerous enemy . . . myself? It’s because that’s never what our relationship was about. He kept track of my business affairs but did not interfere in my personal matters, unless I sought his advice, which was rare. Even if Mike had spoken up forcefully, I was not in the frame of mind to listen. The spell drugs and alcohol cast over me was overwhelming and, like most victims of substance abuse, I was the last to recognize it.

  “You need to see somebody,” Juanita told me one morning after another night I couldn’t remember. “You’re an alcoholic, Ray.”

  No way, I told her. The impression I had of alcoholics came from the movies—dirty, down-and-out bums thrown out of bars, not famous prizefighters worth millions. Not Sugar Ray Leonard. She was right, of course, but to admit to being an alcoholic was something I could not do. Not in 1982. I did instead what any alcoholic would do when he or she gets angry. I drank some more.

  The public, thank goodness, had no clue as to who I had become. They still saw me as the kid who took the gold in Montreal, and the three of us as the all-American family they wanted us to be. It’s strange to believe that so many fans would be fooled, but it was a role my wife and I knew how to play. We were experts. When a TV crew or magazine reporter came to the house for a puff piece, we posed for cute pictures and said all the right things. The moment they left, we returned to being as dysfunctional as ever.

  I assumed nothing could take me down, and that included the authorities, although there were some awfully close calls over the years.

  After one nasty fight with Juanita, I took off in my Jeep and was driving on Route 1 just outside D.C. when a pickup truck hit me as I was trying to make a left turn. The car was totaled, the wheel bent up, and I briefly lost consciousness. I was fortunate to escape with only a bruised sternum and cuts on my face and wrist. While I was being treated in the hospital, a friend who assisted with my security found out where the vehicle was impounded, and supposedly conducted a thorough search before the cops could to make certain there was no coke on the seat or in the glove compartment. There wasn’t. He later claimed that he proceeded to pay the orderlies in the hos
pital a couple of hundred bucks apiece to hand him the sample of blood taken from me after the crash, which surely contained traces of alcohol. To show how messed up I was, when he explained what he had done, it did not occur to me how close I had come to getting into serious trouble.

  The other harrowing moment that stands out came as I was about to board the Queen Elizabeth II for a cruise to England in the late summer of 1982. I had agreed to appear in a documentary film to be shot on the ship. The way I was acting, leaving the country was the best move I could make.

  When I was about ten or fifteen yards from being searched by customs at the gate, I suddenly remembered the cocaine in my pocket and started to panic. How would I talk my way out of this one? Thinking fast, I slipped the cocaine to Ollie Dunlap, my administrative assistant. I figured it would be easier to get Ollie out of jail than me. I didn’t tell him what was in the aluminum foil, though by the expression on his face I could tell that he had a pretty good idea. He broke into a cold sweat and kept his hand clenched until we passed through customs. Once I was safely in my cabin, I got the cocaine back and never carried it in public again. I apologized to Ollie. I could have ruined his life. It was bad enough that I was ruining my own.

  The cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II was memorable for another reason besides almost going to jail.

  The crew filming the documentary asked me to spar a few rounds with a fellow named Steve Sinclair, who had a job on the ship’s crew. Why not? After all, what could some lowly sailor do to me? I’d throw a few innocent body shots, slip a few from him, and the crew would have the footage they required. Yet before I knew it, with several hundred tourists assembled in the ship’s ballroom, Sinclair, an ex-fighter who weighed about 190, landed a hard blow, to my injured eye, no less, which I didn’t exactly appreciate during an “exhibition.” Ollie told me later that my eyes got that intense, almost deranged look he knew only too well. I promptly tagged Steve with a belt to the body. There was nothing innocent about it. Down he went. He wasn’t badly hurt, thank goodness, and collected himself to finish the show. Needless to say, he didn’t throw any more hard blows.