None of those things happened. Roberto Duran was the new lightweight champion of the world, but all people would remember was that a man Budd Schulberg described as “a Panamanian street dog” had stopped Ken Buchanan with a punch to the family jewels.
While his career didn’t end that night, Ken Buchanan was never the same fighter. The critical punch from Duran ruptured his right testicle, and he still experiences discomfort from the injury thirty-five years later.
“I still get a pain there,” Buchanan told Duran’s biographer Christian Giudice. “I’ll have it till the day I die. I told Roberto ‘I’ll never forget you. Every time I take a piss I’ll think of you.’”
When Derrik Holmes learned of plans to initiate a boxing program in 1970 at the Recreation Center in Palmer Park, Maryland, he was eager to give it a try, but was hesitant about showing up alone. He persuaded his best friend to accompany him.
Ray Leonard, then thirteen years old, was reluctant. His brother Roger had been boxing for a few years, and on the few occasions Ray had gone to the gym to watch, he’d found himself wincing whenever he saw his older sibling get punched in the face. But Holmes was determined, so Leonard agreed to tag along.
Holmes would box professionally, accumulating a 17-3-1 record that included an unsuccessful 1980 challenge for Wilfredo Gomez’ World Boxing Council junior featherweight title. It was not immediately apparent that his friend Leonard might be even more gifted.
“Of the four boys in my family,” Leonard would later recall, “I was probably the least likely to become a boxer. My three brothers were good at sports, and from the earliest time I can remember they all played football and basketball and had done well. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t even athletically inclined. I relied on my mother for everything. Once when I was very small I did go to the gym with Roger, and he talked me into putting on the gloves. I cried when I got punched in the nose. I didn’t like it a bit.”
Dave Jacobs and Pepe Correa each claim to have initiated the boxing program at Palmer Park. Ollie Dunlap, the director of the rec center who would become Sugar Ray’s closest friend and confidant, recalls that it was initially Roger Leonard’s idea, and that while Correa, who had taught boxing in the Army, was also involved, “the paperwork I did for the boxing program had Dave Jacobs’ name on it.”
Jacobs, an AAU featherweight champion in his youth, would later become the salaried head of the boxing program at Palmer Park, but in 1970 he was an unpaid volunteer, and still earned his living driving a delivery truck.
When Jacobs asked Leonard what he knew about boxing, the thirteen-year-old struck a pose reminiscent of John L. Sullivan’s fighting stance. It was all Jake could do to keep from laughing out loud.
Those who would later describe Leonard’s “choirboy” looks were actually spot-on in their assessment. Up until the day he put on the gloves at the rec center, he had been an accomplished member of the choir at St. John’s Baptist Church in Washington. Once he faced a choice between the two, the choir didn’t stand a chance.
“My mother always used to tell me ‘You sound like Sam Cooke’ or ‘You sound just like Ray Charles,’” Ray reminisced. “But I think she was just being kind. My sister Sandy was the real singer in the family.”
Ray Charles Leonard was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on May 17, 1956. That he grew up in a traditional nuclear family makes him unique among the Four Kings. He was the fifth of seven children born to Cicero and Getha Leonard, and at the age of four he moved with his family to Washington, D.C.
Cicero, the son of a sharecropper, had boxed in the Navy during the Second World War. He found work at a Washington produce market, and in time was promoted to night manager. Getha worked days as a nurse at a convalescent home, ensuring that one parent was always home to attend to their growing brood. By 1966 they were able to purchase a home in Palmer Park, Maryland, a lower middle-class, predominantly black enclave just across the District of Columbia line.
“Palmer Park wasn’t a ghetto, but it wasn’t what you envision when you think of suburbia, either,” recalled Ollie Dunlap, who had played on Michigan State’s 1966 national co-championship football team. After graduation he had signed with the Washington Redskins as an undrafted free agent and had a largely unproductive stint on the taxi squad. Although Dunlap later played for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, he continued to make the nation’s capital his off-season home, and after leaving football found work as the full-time director at the Palmer Park Rec Center.
“To my way of thinking, it was only a ‘sport’ if its name had the word ‘ball,’ in it,” said Dunlap. “Football, basketball, baseball . . . But when Roger came to me and proposed the boxing program, I said ‘Sure, why not? ’”
Correa, in any case, soon departed Palmer Park (“for personal reasons” ) to begin his own inner-city boxing club in Washington, and Jacobs took charge of the Palmer Park boxing program. He was shortly joined there, at Dunlap’s behest, by an insurance broker named Janks Morton.
Morton and Dunlap had been football teammates in Toronto (after being cut by the Browns and Redskins, respectively) and had become friends almost immediately. In addition, Ollie knew that Janks was a former boxer. Jacobs, Morton, and Dunlap weren’t dreaming about producing an Olympic champion. They were just looking for another way to keep kids off the streets.
The initial outlay for the boxing program was $45−the cost of two pairs of gloves. The Palmer Park Rec Center didn’t have a proper boxing ring, nor would there be one until 1976, by which time the program’s most illustrious graduate had already won an Olympic gold medal. The young boxers sparred in a makeshift “ring” marked off with tape on the basketball court, a condition that made the Palmer Park boys acutely aware of the importance of balance. In the absence of a ring mat to cushion one’s fall, a misstep or a knockdown could be doubly painful. Initially, boxers had to clear the gym whenever someone wanted to play basketball, but as Jacobs’ charges began to assert themselves in matches throughout the area, the rec center devoted the 1–5 p.m. time slot exclusively to boxing.
Over the next few years Palmer Park accumulated a prodigious collection of trophies, many of them won by Leonard, who, once he learned the basics, proved to be the most naturally gifted boxer Jacobs had ever seen.
In Jacobs’ recollection Leonard had weighed “a hundred pounds, soaking wet” the day he walked into the rec center with Derrik Holmes. A year later he had added twenty-five pounds, virtually all of it muscle, and when the fifteen-year-old soundly defeated Bobby McGruder, generally regarded to have been the Washington area’s best amateur featherweight, in 1971, Jacobs realized that he might have something truly special on his hands.
“Up until then I’d boxed in the Novice class,” recalled Leonard. “McGruder’s opponent that night fell out, and somebody said ‘Well, we’ve got this kid . . . ’
“I said ‘Sure, I’ll fight him,’ and I not only beat him, I beat the hell out of him,” said Leonard. “That was the end of Novice fights for me. I’d only been boxing competitively for a year, but I fought in the Open class after that.”
In less than two years Leonard had come to dominate in metropolitan Washington boxing. By 1972 it was time for him to move on to the national stage. That spring he won the Golden Gloves national lightweight title, a prodigious leap that allowed him to entertain hopes of making that year’s Olympic team.
“The first time I saw him was in 1972 at the Eastern Olympic Trials in Cincinnati,” recalled Emanuel Steward. “He was just a baby-faced little kid, and he fought a much older guy, Greg Whaley, in the semifinal. Whaley was a real strong fighter, who was favored to win the trials and go on to Munich−and he was from Cincinnati, fighting on his own home turf. Ray put on such a show that everyone was saying ‘Where did this little kid come from? ’ They gave the decision to the other guy, but Ray had beat him up so bad that Whaley couldn’t fight the next night.”
Greg Whaley didn’t go to the Olympics either. In
fact, he never boxed again.
“It turned out Ray had lied about his age, and even if he had won they couldn’t have let him go,” said Steward. “He was barely sixteen years old.”
Boxers were required to be seventeen to box in all international senior competitions, not just the Olympics, but this didn’t stop Leonard from representing his country in two pre-Olympic meets against a team from the U.S.S.R. in Las Vegas that summer.
When Rolly Schwartz asked Leonard how old he was, the boy smiled sweetly and said “Seventeen, sir.” Schwartz, the chairman of AAU Boxing, only had to take one look at Ray to know he wasn’t, but he allowed him to fight anyway.
“Rolly Schwartz knew I was underage, but he also knew I could hold my own with pretty much anyone,” said Leonard.
“The truth of the matter,” said Schwartz, “is that he was already the best amateur lightweight in the United States.”
At the first meet, Leonard knocked out his Soviet opponent with the first punch he threw, a left hook to the face. In the next, against Valery Lov, he was knocked down in the first when the Russian caught him with his guard down.
From the canvas, Leonard looked up and saw Joe Louis and Redd Foxx, seated together, laughing at him. Furious and embarrassed, he climbed to his feet and stopped Lov in the third round.
The following year, both major boxing championships took place in Massachusetts−the Golden Gloves at the Lowell Auditorium in March, the AAUs in Boston two months later.
“I’d become very involved with amateur boxing by ’73, and in fact my heavyweight Johnny Hudson won the Gloves championship in Lowell,” said Steward. “I’d seen Leonard box the previous year, but Lowell was the first time I actually met him. Dave Jacobs came to me and asked for some help. He was afraid Ray was going to be overweight for his final match.”
Nearly seventeen, Leonard was still growing, and was struggling to make weight for what would be his last bout at 132 pounds. Steward and Jacobs used tape to seal the bathroom door in the motel, and, turning the hot water on full blast, converted it into a makeshift steam room. That and half an hour’s worth of exercise helped Leonard shed the requisite two pounds with minutes to spare, but, recalled Leonard, “it felt like it took forever.”
Ironically, he was matched in the final against Hilmer Kenty, a boy from Columbus, Ohio, who would later move to Detroit and become Steward’s first professional world champion.
“Ray won a close decision over Kenty, and Hagler lost to Dale Grant in the middleweight final,” said Steward, whose brightest prospect, fourteen-year-old Thomas Hearns, was still back home in Detroit. “I developed a relationship with those guys, and even though Marvin and Ray later fought Tommy, I’ve always had a close relationship with them. It was like we all kind of grew up together.”
None of Steward’s boxers qualified for the AAU championships two months later, but he attended as a spectator. Leonard had moved up to light-welterweight, where he was outpointed by Randy Shields in the championship match, while Hagler won at 165.
After the disappointment of the 1972 Olympics, when Seales was the only U.S. fighter to return home with a gold medal, Rolly Schwartz had been given a brief to revamp amateur boxing in the hope of restoring American dominance to the sport. Schwartz arranged a heavy schedule of international competitions over the two years leading up to the 1976 Olympics−but took care never to show the rest of the world a full-strength American squad.
Leonard won both the Gloves and the AAU titles in 1974, and was named to the U.S. team that boxed in Eastern Europe that summer. On that trip, Leonard incurred what would go into the books as the final two losses of his 150-bout amateur career.
In Moscow he dominated Anatoli Kamnev, only to have the judges award the verdict to the Russian champion. When the decision was announced, the pre- Glasnost crowd erupted in a chorus of whistles and jeers.
Kamnev appeared to share their sentiment. He walked across the ring and presented Ray with the trophy he had just won.
In Warsaw a few days later, Leonard floored Kazimier Szczerba three times in the final round, the last for good, but after Szczerba had been counted out, the Polish referee ruled that the knockout punch had been delivered after the bell had sounded and disqualified the American.
Szczerba had to be propped up in the ring to receive his medal.
“Ray Leonard was fantastic,” said Emanuel Steward. “He was more exciting than anyone I’d ever seen. Early in 1976 he came to Detroit and trained at the Kronk Gym for several days. The kids called him ‘Superbad’ and pretty much adopted him. During the Olympics the Kronk looked like a Ray Leonard shrine. There were pictures of Ray all over our gym.”
Leonard repeated as AAU champion in ’75, and then went to Mexico City, where he won the light-welterweight gold medal at the Pan-American Games. By then the secret was out. Asked by ABC boss Roone Arledge which American athletes bore watching at the upcoming Montreal Games, Howard Cosell predicted that “Sugar Ray Leonard will be the Olga Korbut of the 1976 Olympics.” (The “Munich Munchkin,” Korbut was a tiny gymnast from the Soviet Union who had captured the hearts of television viewers all over the world with her performance at the 1972 Games.)
He was an enormously talented boxer, but Leonard’s other attributes made him even more appealing to the network. He was telegenic and well-spoken with a ready smile that exuded charisma.
“All the attention was new to me, but I honestly didn’t mind it,” said Leonard. “When I was sixteen someone interviewing me had asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? ’ I think he expected me to say ‘a champion,’ or something like that, but I said ‘I want to be special. ’ And in Montreal that’s exactly how I felt−special.”
ABC televised all six of Leonard’s Olympic matches, in which he defeated a Swede (Ulf Carlsson), a Russian (Valery Limasov), a Briton (Clinton McKenzie), an East German (Ulrich Beyer), and a Pole (his old friend Kazimier Szczerba) on his way to the final, where he would face the formidable Cuban Andres Aldama.
ABC’s showcasing of Leonard added to the pressure. Sports editors watching on TV back home were on the horn to their Olympic correspondents, demanding that they join the Leonard bandwagon. As the week wore on, each time he ventured out of the Olympic Village Leonard was trailed by an ever-growing pack of reporters, each searching for some tidbit of information television viewers didn’t already know. By the time he squared off with Aldama, most of America was aware that Leonard would be boxing with a photo of his high school sweetheart Juanita Wilkinson tucked into his boot for inspiration.
“People seem to think that was about image, but it wasn’t,” said Leonard. “It was just about scoring brownie points with my girlfriend. I did it for Juanita, that’s all.”
If anyone had bothered to ask, Leonard might also have revealed that
Juanita was the mother of “Little Ray,” Leonard’s two-year-old son.
U.S. boxing coach Pat Nappi told Baltimore columnist Bob Maisel that “Sugar Ray Leonard is the best amateur I’ve ever seen−and that includes Muhammad Ali.” Aldama had stopped all four of his preliminary opponents leading up to the final, but Leonard handed him a pair of standing eight-counts in the last round, handily winning the fight (5-0 on points) and the gold medal. All of his wins had come via decision.
He was joined on the victory stand by four other Americans−flyweight Leo Randolph, lightweight Howard Davis, and brothers Michael (middle-weight) and Leon (light-heavyweight) Spinks. It is generally acknowledged to have been the greatest team triumph in Olympic boxing history. (The Americans won nine golds in Los Angeles eight years later, but the Soviet and Cuban boxers boycotted those Games, considerably diminishing the accomplishment.)
Although Leonard had surely been the face of the 1976 Olympics, and had captured the hearts of his countrymen, the panel of boxing officials who selected the Games’ “Outstanding Boxer” hadn’t been watching ABC. Howard Davis won that trophy.
In an interview with Cosell immediately after the gold
medal match, Leonard said that the Aldama fight had been his last.
“I’m finished,” he insisted. “I’ve fought my last fight. My journey has ended. My dream is fulfilled.”
The kid with the captivating smile and the all-American looks hoped to capitalize on his Olympic triumph with promised commercial endorsements. Leonard, who had already accepted a Congressional Scholarship, said he would hang up his gloves and enroll as a full-time student at the University of Maryland, where he planned to major in communications. After that, he hoped to go to law school, perhaps at Harvard.
The next time Americans saw his face, it would presumably be staring at them from a Wheaties box.
He rode back to Maryland with his family, the gold medal hanging from the rear-view mirror of the crowded van Cicero Leonard and Dave Jacobs had driven to Montreal. On the Beltway they were intercepted and then accompanied by a police cruiser, sirens blaring.
Joined by local politicians and dignitaries for an impromptu motorcade, the Leonards were whisked away to a civic reception in downtown Washington, where before a crowd of well-wishers Sugar Ray repeated his intention to retire.
“This medal is all I ever wanted,” he said. “I will never be a professional fighter, I promise you that. It’s time I started a new life.”
Two days later, the Washington Star, in a front-page story, broke the news that Juanita Wilkinson had filed an application to receive $156 a month in welfare payments, and that Prince George’s County had in turn filed a lawsuit on her behalf against the Olympic hero.
The paternity suit came without warning. Leonard had never denied paternity of his son. Somewhat embarrassed officials explained that they had merely been following a pro forma procedure mandated by a recently enacted law intended to winnow out welfare cheats, but the damage to his public image was both immediate and devastating.
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