The Big Fight

by Sugar Ray Leonard

  Hagler connected with a series of solid shots in the sixth, but could not put him away. The longer the fight went on, the more concerned I became. Finally, in round eleven, Hagler sent Mugabi to the deck. He didn’t get up and that was smart of him. I was the happiest man in the arena, next to Hagler.

  When I returned to the hotel, I phoned Mike Trainer. It was about two A.M. on the East Coast. He didn’t sound thrilled to hear from me.

  “Mike, I’m ready to take on Hagler,” I said.

  “Ray, have you been drinking?” Mike said.

  “Yes,” I conceded, “but that’s not the point. I can beat him.”

  Mike figured I was out of my mind and once the alcohol wore off I’d drop the idea, just as I did the other times. He figured wrong. I called him back the next day, sober but determined. Mike knew that sound in my voice. He knew this was different.

  I thought about the risks I would be taking, to my health and my legacy, and how returning to the ring would affect my wife and kids. The boxer is hardly the only person who must sacrifice. So must his loved ones, and my family had sacrificed plenty. Yet the more thinking I did, the more I was convinced that I was doing the right thing. I never should have retired the second time, after defeating Kevin Howard. I did it because I was frustrated with my performance in Worcester, when in actuality it was quite respectable after being away from the ring for twenty-seven months. If I had just waited a few days, maybe a few hours, I would have come to my senses and told Mike to make my next match. Once I made the announcement, I couldn’t take it back.

  I thought about a conversation I had with Hagler only two months before at the formal opening of Jameson’s, a restaurant in Bethesda that Mike was a part-owner of. Hagler, who came with his wife, Bertha, and I got to know each other that evening, both of us getting drunk, sharing stories about our families and our fights.

  For all our differences, and there were many, Hagler and I discovered that we had a lot in common, neither needing a thing from the other, which was rare in my life, and his, too, probably. Under different circumstances, if there had not been a natural tension between the two of us, each vying to be the man in our sport, he and I could have been good friends. There are truths about us, about how we tick, that only another fighter can ever begin to understand. I could relate to the lack of motivation he was expressing, having felt the same ambivalence when I trained for Finch and Stafford. People have speculated that I lured Hagler into being vulnerable on purpose, to soften him up, because I had already decided to come out of retirement. That wasn’t the case, although once I did choose to return, I remembered what a relaxed Hagler had told me and looked for ways to use this information to my advantage. Who could blame me?

  The question then became: How do I tell the world I am returning to the ring? A press conference? No. I was above that. I was still the champ, in my mind, and bringing the media together would have brought my stock down, making me appear desperate. Instead, I had to almost make it seem as if Hagler were the one pursuing me. If the public was opposed to my return—and, yes, what people thought of me still mattered too much for my own good—or if Hagler did not bite, I would be able to move on without sacrificing my pride.

  My chance came on May 1 when James Brown, a sportscaster for one of the D.C. TV stations, asked me during a casual lunch in town and posed the same question I’d been asked a million times in the two years since the Kevin Howard bout: Would I ever consider fighting again? In the past, I’d deliver a quick and definitive no, and the interviewer would proceed to other issues. Not this time. I told J.B., as Brown was affectionately called, I wasn’t interested in a comeback, but I’d be open to one fight, and one fight only, against Hagler. I meant exactly what I said. I was also savvy enough to know I’d stand a better chance of gaining the public’s approval if they believed it was for one night. They had invested too much in the notion that I was different from the other fighters, in knowing my limitations. I was no different, as they would find out over and over.

  The next morning, the phone did not stop ringing. The reporters wanted to determine how serious I was, and so did Pat Petronelli, Hagler’s manager, who, from what I can recall, told Mike he was confident that his man would accept the challenge, although Hagler was away on a cruise in the Caribbean and couldn’t be reached. Mike wasn’t pleased that I did the interview, convinced that I weakened our bargaining position. He had already put out feelers to the Hagler camp before I went public. I didn’t care. I wanted the word out to move the process forward as rapidly as possible. My job was done. Now it was up to Hagler.

  A lot of people thought I was crazy for challenging him, including members of my own family.

  “Who is your tune-up?” Roger asked.

  “Hagler,” I said.

  “No, who is your tune-up?” he persisted.

  “Hagler,” I repeated.

  The reason for not arranging a tune-up was not only to make the public feel better about my decision. I also thought I would have trouble getting motivated for a lesser opponent, just as I couldn’t get fired up for Kevin Howard. As for the fact that Ali, after being in exile for three and a half years, had two tune-ups (Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena) before his first bout with Frazier, the comparison was not valid. Ali was interested in a career. I was interested in a night.

  No one in my inner circle tried to talk me out of taking on Hagler, and why would they? After assuming that the days of large paychecks were gone forever, here, out of nowhere, was a chance for one more. So what if I got whipped? The money would be in the bank either way. It required someone on the outside who didn’t stand to profit to question my sanity.

  Someone like Howard Cosell. I was walking in the Hamptons one afternoon when I heard his distinctive voice.

  “Suuugggar Ray, what are you doing in my neighborhood?” Howard asked.

  Howard invited me to his house for lunch and I was happy to accept. The gratitude I felt toward him went back more than a decade. I never lost sight of how important a role he played in my becoming Sugar Ray.

  By this stage of his life, Howard, in his late sixties, was finished with boxing, at least at the professional level. The last straw was the mismatch in November 1982 between the champ, Larry Holmes, and Randall “Tex” Cobb. Howard was angry that the referee, Steve Crosson, had allowed the bout to continue. In 1985, he came out with his controversial book I Never Played the Game, in which, among other things, he blasted his former colleagues on Monday Night Football.

  We exchanged some small talk before he got serious.

  “Son,” he said, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I respected Howard for being blunt. It was one of the most endearing things about him. But I could be blunt, too.

  “Howard,” I said, “I believe I can win this fight. They told you not to write your book, but you still wrote it and you still believe in every single word of it. Right?”

  He paused. I never saw Howard Cosell pause for that long.

  “I guess you got me, son,” he said.

  While I waited for Hagler to make his decision, I didn’t waste any time. If I was to be at my best, and it would take my best to outduel a man whose last loss was in March 1976, before I competed in the Olympics, I’d have to train harder and smarter. In the four years since beating Finch I had fought just once, for a total of twenty-six minutes and thirty-two seconds.

  A few weeks later, Hagler weighed in. During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Hagler said he was going to “sit back and lick [his] chops. And just wait.” I couldn’t believe it. Who did he think he was?

  The wait for Hagler to decide went on . . . and on . . . and on. I found out how others, including Hagler, must have felt when I took forever to make my intentions known after the eye surgery.

  What was taking him so long? The advantages of fighting me could not be any clearer:

  In addition to the money, which figured to be in the $10 million range, Hagler would get his opportunit
y to shut up the one person responsible for the boxing world not affording him the respect he felt he deserved. He couldn’t stand the fact that I kept stealing the show, with high-profile triumphs against Duran and Hearns, while he was virtually ignored when he won title bouts over Alan Minter, Fulgencio Obelmejias, and Vito Antuofermo. In his mind, I even seized too much of the spotlight at my farewell announcement in Baltimore. All anybody could talk about the next day was how smart I was to retire.

  It was not till my second retirement, in 1984, and his victory over Hearns a year later, that Hagler became the man, and now here I was trying to steal the show once more. No wonder he milked the situation for as long as he could. I would have done the same thing. Having everyone breathlessly await your every word is intoxicating, and the moment you make a decision, the attention shifts to someone else.

  Day after day the speculation went on: Will he accept my challenge? Will he take on Hearns again instead? Or will he retire?

  I told the reporters I would not wait forever. I was bluffing but had to say something. I began to think he might take the rematch with Tommy, which had been discussed by the two camps prior to my offer, and force me to wait for him as he had waited for me.

  At last, on July 2, Hagler held a press conference. The news did not appear encouraging.

  “I’m very seriously thinking about retirement from the boxing game,” Hagler said. “And what I feel is that I’m going to need a little bit more time to determine what my future will be.”

  A little more time, Marvin? I felt like saying. You’ve had two full months! Of course, given my track record, I was hardly one to talk.

  He went on to indicate that money was not everything and that his family, which included his wife and their five children, was his primary consideration. I could definitely relate, recalling how many times Juanita was hoping I would quit and the disappointment she went through every time I decided to keep fighting. He suggested that I take on “the Mugabis or the Hearnses or the [Donald] Currys” before challenging him.

  What I took away most from his press conference, however, was what Hagler did not say. He did not say he was retiring, not yet anyway. I still felt confident that he’d accept the challenge. Try turning down $10 million. It’s not easy. Believe me, I know. I also knew instinctively what others close to me did not know, that Hagler would never forgive himself if he let the opportunity pass. No matter how justifiable his reasons for quitting might have been, he’d be accused until the day he died of ducking me, and for a fighter there is no worse shame, and that includes losing.

  Still, the weeks went by with no further word from the Mysterious One. Maybe Bertha Hagler would succeed where Juanita Leonard never could.

  Finally, on August 18, three and a half months after I did the interview with J. B. Hagler, through a spokesman at Top Rank, the Las Vegas–based fight promotion firm, made his decision known: He was in.

  I was overjoyed, although there was still the matter of the finances to work out, and with Bob Arum, the head of Top Rank and promoter of every Hagler title defense, doing the bidding, the negotiations were bound to be contentious. It was no secret that Mike Trainer and Bob Arum did not always see eye to eye. Hagler’s decision also made me anxious. I realized there would be no going back. It was one thing to talk trash in the newspapers. I was a fighter and that’s what fighters did. That’s how we got by in the streets. But if you talk trash in the streets and get your ass kicked, no one finds out and you often get a chance to redeem yourself. Now the whole world would find out and I’d have to live with the outcome forever, and I still wasn’t sure if I could pull it off.

  There was only one way to find out, and it wasn’t my body that needed the most work. It was my mind. My mind let me down in the preparation for Kevin Howard, and that was why I was knocked down for the first time in my career. My mind needed to be where it had been for the second Duran fight and the Hearns battle, where the only thing that mattered in my life was winning. Once I got there, if I got there, nothing could stop me.

  As I kept working, so did Mike Trainer and Bob Arum. Their task was just as daunting.

  Dividing the pot of gold to each party’s satisfaction and ironing out the other issues were not going to happen overnight. It was not until late October, after two months of spirited negotiations, that the two sides reached an agreement. Hagler, the champion, was guaranteed $11.75 million while I was to take home at least $11 million. Another key element of the deal was convincing Hagler to accept twelve rounds instead of the standard fifteen for a championship fight. Hagler wanted fifteen. The extra three rounds were crucial when he rallied to secure the decision over Duran in 1983. Yet Mike shrewdly made Hagler’s people believe it was a deal breaker when it never was. I was willing to go fifteen rounds if necessary, though given my time away from the ring, the less energy I spent, physically and mentally, the better.

  The fight was set for April 6 at Caesars. I couldn’t have been more satisfied. Caesars was where I won my first title, against Benitez, and where I would now win my last.

  April was a long way off and I was grateful. When I issued the challenge to Hagler, I was hoping to get the fight in before the end of the year. Understanding the level of commitment it would require, I didn’t know how long I would be able to maintain it. But as the months dragged on, I began to see the advantages of any delays. In addition to the extra work I could get in, which I needed, the later the fight was staged, the more it would render insignificant that I had been away from the ring for so long. By April, I would be fighting for the first time in thirty-five months, while more than a year would have passed since Hagler’s last bout vs. Mugabi. To me, there would be little difference in the degree of rust. The layoff also meant I had absorbed far fewer blows than Hagler in recent years, and there are only so many hits a fighter can take in his career.

  On November 3, Hagler and I met in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for the press conference formally announcing the fight. The Waldorf was where Duran first got inside my head before the disaster in Montreal. Six years later, a heck of a lot brighter, I had my opportunity to do the same to Hagler.

  During my opening remarks, I thanked the champ for giving me a shot and walked from the podium to his seat at the right side of the head table to shake his hand. He didn’t turn around. I walked back to the podium and delivered my next line with perfect comedic timing.

  “Apparently, he has his fight face on,” I said.

  A few people chuckled but Hagler stared straight ahead as if I weren’t there. That was fine with me. He’d see me soon enough.

  From that day forward, everything I said to the reporters over the following five months was designed to work on Hagler’s psyche. I felt it was his weakest part. I was measuring him the same way I measured fighters in the ring, looking for an opening and pouncing on it. I benefited enormously from the work I had done to prepare for the fights of his I covered on HBO. I also knew, from our talks at his house in Brockton and the restaurant in Bethesda, what motivated him and what scared him. For the press conference in Manhattan, for instance, I wore a jacket that had shoulder pads to create the illusion of being as cut and muscular as possible to show Hagler he wouldn’t be able to overpower me. I’d come in at 158 or 159 pounds and look every ounce of it.

  With the deal official, I finished assembling Team Leonard, which included, as usual, Angelo, Janks, Ollie, Juice, Joe, my brothers, and about a dozen others. Also among us for the first time since 1980 was my ex-trainer, Dave Jacobs.

  Jake and I hadn’t had spoken for years. I’d never completely forgiven him for joining the Hearns camp. Nonetheless, sincerely believing the Hagler fight, win or lose, would be my last, I was determined to bring the entire cast together for one final, magical encore. I thought back to what it used to be like in the early days before the squabbling over money, and before my troubles with drugs and alcohol. I yearned for it to be that way one last time. Was I naïve? Maybe. To conquer Hagler, though,
I needed more than a strategy to mess with his psyche. I needed to dig deeply, to be brave enough to look into my own soul and rediscover the joy of what inspired me to run five miles at five o’clock every morning and take a pounding from sparring partners who were out to make a name for themselves. I needed to be a fighter again. The best way was to have the people around who made me one in the first place.

  Jake, assigned to manage the sparring partners, fit right in. I knew he would. After being on the outs for six years, he welcomed the chance for another ride. The rest of Team Leonard, no matter what their own misgivings might have been, were also serious from day one. Except Leonard himself.

  A few months earlier, before the agreement was signed, I went to Miami for about a week to cover a fight for HBO. While I was there, I decided to get in a couple of workout sessions during my spare time. I also squeezed in something else on this trip—a woman. But when I appeared sluggish in the gym, Ollie let me have it. There was a time for fooling around with women. This wasn’t it.

  “Hagler will beat the shit out of you,” he said. “You’ve got to get your body in shape.”

  I don’t recall what I said but I was pissed. For three days, I wouldn’t let Ollie ride in the limo with us to the gym, and I told Mike I wanted him off the team. Mike ignored me, and Ollie and I were soon speaking to each other again.

  Mike, too, had moments when he questioned my commitment. At one stage, he had urged me to fight sparring partners without my headgear, and to let them use ten-ounce gloves. His point was that I needed to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of an actual fight. Mike believed Sugar Ray Leonard could beat Hagler but Ray Leonard couldn’t.

  Ollie and Mike were not alone. Even Juanita chimed in. I arrived at our home in Potomac from a workout one afternoon with contusions and bumps everywhere. The sparring partners had been roughing me up again.