Four Kings

by George Kimball

  “The difference between our arrangement and Ali’s was that Ray still owned one hundred percent of himself,” said Trainer. “From a business standpoint it wasn’t the shrewdest investment these guys ever made, but they were mainly in it for the fun−it was kind of like having your own team to root for in the NCAA tournament. By the time we bought them out, each of them made $80 for their thousand-dollar stakes. Fortunately, none of them were really doing it for the money. They just wanted to help Ray get started.”

  Instead of going the traditional route, Team Leonard hired Daniel E. Doyle, Jr., to be its promoter of record. A successful college basketball coach (at Trinity) who had dabbled in many aspects of the sporting world, Doyle took out a promoter’s license in several states. Trainer−or more accurately, Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc.−paid him a flat fee.

  On February 5, 1977, when Leonard took on Luis Vega at the Baltimore Civic Center, CBS paid him $40,000 for his maiden voyage. Vega was a journeyman from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had begun his career impressively enough, with seven wins and two draws in his first nine fights, but would lose twenty-seven of his last twenty-nine, and there wasn’t much tread on the tire by the time he met Leonard. Leonard won all six rounds on all three cards for a unanimous decision.

  In May he faced 10-1 Willie “Fireball” Rodriguez and once again pitched a shutout, winning all six rounds on the judges’ cards. Although there were no knockdowns, Rodriguez received a standing eight-count from referee Terry Moore in the third.

  In his third pro outing, with Hagler performing on the undercard, Leonard stopped Vinnie DeBarros in Hartford, Connecticut. The bout represented the first installment on a $350,000, six-fight contract Trainer had negotiated with ABC.

  By his fifth fight, Leonard was playing Las Vegas, though not as the headliner. His opponent at Caesars Palace was an undistinguished Mexican welterweight named Augustin Estrada, and Leonard knocked him out in five. In the main event, Ken Norton outpointed Jimmy Young in what was billed as a World Boxing Council heavyweight eliminator. (When, a few weeks later, Leonard’s Montreal teammate Leon Spinks−who had upset Muhammad Ali to win the heavyweight championship in his eighth pro fight−signed for a return bout with Ali, in contravention of WBC rules, the organization stripped Spinks and declared Norton its champion. Norton thus became the only heavyweight champion in history to lose all three title fights in which he participated.)

  The road map Dundee had plotted out for Leonard was far from random. As A.J. Liebling eloquently noted in The Sweet Science, “In any art the prodigy presents a problem. Given too easy a problem, he gets slack, but asked too hard a question early, he becomes discouraged. Finding a middle course is particularly difficult in the prize ring . . . The fighter must be confirmed in the belief that he can lick anybody in the world and at the same time be restrained from testing this belief on a subject too advanced for his attainments.”

  “Sometimes Angelo Dundee doesn’t get the credit he deserves for what he did with Ray,” said Emanuel Steward. “I’ve heard guys in our business say ‘Shit, anybody could have trained Muhammad Ali and Ray Leonard,’ and in a sense they’re right. It’s sort of like coaching a Michael Jordan. He’s bound to make you look good, no matter who you are.”

  Or, as the legendary George Gainsford once put it, “I’m the greatest trainer who ever lived. I trained Sugar Ray Robinson.”

  “Ali and Leonard were truly gifted boxers who were going to be great fighters no matter who trained them, but to me the finest work Angelo did was in the managerial role,” said Steward. “Angelo picked the right opponents that allowed Ray to develop into a complete fighter. He put him in with tall guys, short guys, old guys, young guys, left-handed guys and right-handed guys, guys who could punch and guys who could box. They gave him free rein to do it, and there was a reason for each and every one of them. He made the right matches, just as he’d done with Ali early in his career.”

  From the outset Leonard’s career trajectory differed from the norm for nascent pros. Boxers usually began with four-rounders, eventually graduating to six- and eight-round fights, but Leonard started with six-rounders, and was scheduled for eight by his fourth pro fight.

  And while promising young boxers traditionally got their feet wet in the pro game by taking on unskilled novices and used-up bums, Leonard, in his entire career, faced only two opponents with losing records: Vega, his first victim, and Estrada, who played the foil in his Las Vegas debut.

  ABC was so pleased with the ratings of Leonard’s fights that it upped the ante. Under the terms of a new deal with the network, he would be guaranteed a million dollars a year for five weekend-afternoon bouts. By July of 1978 he was 12-0 when he was matched against Dickie Ecklund at Boston’s Hynes Auditorium. Ecklund was 11-3 at the time, and his career would shortly go off the deep end as he succumbed to the temptations of drugs. (Years later he would make a successful return to boxing as the trainer of his younger brother, junior welterweight Micky Ward.)

  A 1974 federal court edict ordering the desegregation of the public school system had produced what Bostonians referred to as “the busing crisis.” Four years later the racial tension was still very much in evidence.

  “That fight was the first time I’d been exposed to racial taunts,” said Leonard. “Not from Ecklund or any of his fans, but there was a concentrated element there, and I could hear them shouting nigger this and nigger that.”

  The Ecklund fight was also noteworthy because it featured the first recorded knockdown of Sugar Ray’s career.

  As knockdowns go, it wasn’t much. Most agree that Ecklund stepped on Leonard’s foot as he delivered what didn’t appear to be a particularly lethal punch, but referee Tommy Rawson gave him a count and it went into the books as an official trip to the canvas. It would be six more years, in another fight in Massachusetts, before Leonard would go down again.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” said Leonard. “Dickie Ecklund was tough. Just think what he might have done if he’d been sober.”

  Dundee had invoked an old trick of the trade to cure another longstanding Leonard malady. As an amateur, Ray’s hands had painfully swollen after nearly every fight. Both for sparring and in actual fights, Dundee addressed this by placing a Kotex pad beneath the tape when he wrapped Leonard’s hands, and the homespun remedy produced immediate improvement.

  In his next outing after the Ecklund fight, Leonard almost fought Tommy Hearns.

  Since it didn’t happen, we can only ponder what might have happened had Leonard and Hearns met not in their primes and not amid the glitter of Las Vegas, but three years earlier, in a grimy New England mob town.

  In August of 1978, Dundee was out of the country, on a cruise with his wife, Helen, and unreachable by telephone when ABC called to offer Leonard a televised fight against Hearns.

  The bout would take place at the Providence Civic Center in September. The $100,000 purse, which would come from the $1 million extension Leonard had signed with the network, sounded right, and Leonard’s people provisionally accepted the offer. The contract would be formally signed at a press conference in Providence the following week.

  By then Hearns had been fighting professionally for just ten months. His record was 11-0, but he had fought just once outside Michigan and never on national television, while Leonard had improved by leaps and bounds since that sparring session a year earlier. Trainer, Doyle, and ABC could be forgiven if they were unimpressed with Hearns’ credentials, but Dundee knew better.

  At 11:30 the night before the scheduled press conference, Doyle was at the summer basketball camp he ran at the Westminster School in Connecticut when he got an urgent call from Dundee, who had just returned from the cruise and gotten the message.

  Angelo’s first words were, “Are you nuts?

  “We can’t take this fight,” ordered Dundee. “We’re not fighting Hearns.”

  “Why? ” asked Doyle.

  “Ray isn’t ready for Hearns,” Dundee told him. “Not now,
but in a year or two he will be. And by the time he is, this fight is going to be worth much, much more than we’re talking about now.”

  “Based on the terms of his managerial contract with Ray, Angelo had the right to veto the opponent,” recalled Doyle, now the executive director of the Institute for International Sport in Kingston, Rhode Island. “At first, some others in the Leonard camp weren’t happy about the decision.”

  Instead of Hearns, Leonard fought Floyd Mayweather on the Providence show. Like Dickie Ecklund’s, Mayweather’s career would shortly be derailed by drugs. Like Ecklund, he would also go off to prison, only to emerge as a top-notch trainer of, among others, his enormously talented son, Floyd, Jr., and Oscar De La Hoya.

  Mayweather was the first Top Ten contender Leonard faced. Ray knocked him down twice in the eighth round before the fight was stopped in the tenth.

  When the bout against Leonard evaporated, Hearns took a fight with his first ranked opponent, and on September 7, two nights before Leonard fought Mayweather, the Hit Man knocked out Bruce Finch in three rounds in Detroit.

  “Then in October of that year a group of us went to see Hearns fight Pedro Rojas in Detroit,” recalled Doyle. “Those of us who had been opposed to Angelo’s position realized that we’d been wrong. A Hearns-Leonard fight, when it happened, was going to be worth a lot of money.”

  Leonard would have been paid $100,000 for fighting Hearns in 1978, exactly what he received for beating Floyd Mayweather. Hearns’ end would have come to $12,500.

  In 163 amateur bouts, Thomas Hearns had knocked out only eight of his opponents. As a professional, he dispatched the first seventeen men he fought.

  At 6-foot-1 he was improbably tall for a welterweight, but by now he was built like a linebacker from the waist up. Ron Moore, a Detroit auto parts manufacturer who served as the promoter for many of those early cards involving the Kronk boxing team, likened him to another Detroit creation.

  “You could take the best designers at Fisher Body, and they couldn’t build a better body for a boxer than Tommy Hearns’,” said Moore.

  “Forget ‘Sugar Ray’ Leonard,” matchmaker-turned-promoter Teddy Brenner told Katz at the time, “the young boxer who most resembles the original Sugar Ray (Robinson) is this young kid Hearns−he’s tall and slender with knockout power in either hand.”

  With Hearns knocking out opponents left and right, Steward bestowed upon him the nickname that would become his nom de guerre.

  “Tommy’s like a Hit Man,” the manager observed. “He does his business and then gets out of town.”

  Steward knew Hearns was good, but he was still not quite sure how good.

  “You’ve got to remember, this was a whole new ball game for me, too,” recalled Steward. “A bunch of my kids had turned pro together, but it was a new experience for me.”

  The epiphany came in January of 1979, when Hearns, in his fifteenth pro bout, was matched against Canadian veteran Clyde Gray in Detroit.

  “Gray was ranked number two in the world, and everybody said he was too much for Tommy at this stage of his career,” recalled Steward. “They were probably right. He was a very seasoned fighter. Tommy had all knockouts up until then, and that night was the first time he didn’t knock his opponent out right away. From the fifth round on he was running out of gas.”

  It was, in fact, the first time Hearns had ever fought a fifth round. All of his amateur bouts had been scheduled for three rounds, and only one of his professional fights had lasted into the fourth.

  “By the ninth round Gray was really coming on, and Tommy was looking tired. Before the tenth, I told him to just go out there and try to box, hoping we could win the decision. He just looked at me, and then he went out there and knocked Clyde Gray out in the tenth,” said Steward. “To me, that was star quality. That night is when I knew I might have something sensational on my hands.”

  Like Robinson against Gene Fullmer, Hearns had knocked Gray out while moving backward.

  Up until now Hearns had been considered a local phenomenon, little known outside Michigan. It was time to start trying to get him noticed around the rest of the country.

  Alfonso Hayman, Hearns’ eighteenth foe, became the first to go the distance when they met at the Spectrum in Philadelphia that April.

  (Hearns emerged from the bout with two sore hands. Steward blamed the “cheap gloves” provided by Peltz, and vowed never to fight for him again.)

  In May, Hearns topped a card at the Dunes in Las Vegas, where he stopped another respected veteran, Harold Weston. At one point, Weston appeared to have Hearns in trouble, but an accidental thumb produced a detached retina that ended Weston’s career.

  In June Hearns returned to Detroit to fight Bruce Curry in a main event at the Olympia. Curry was 20-4. Two of the losses had been in Madison Square Garden fights against Wilfredo Benitez, who had gone on to win the WBC welterweight title. In one of those, Curry had knocked Benitez down three times but lost a split decision.

  “Tommy got a bad cut early, and I was afraid they were going to stop it,” said Steward. “But he went to war. It was like Ray Robinson against Randy Turpin. Tommy was unbelievable. He knocked Curry out in the third.”

  Born in Indiana in 1899, Ray Arcel had been raised in Spanish Harlem and educated at Stillman’s Gym. During the Roaring Twenties he enjoyed a highly successful partnership with Whitey Bimstein, and over the course of the Great Depression he had tutored the likes of Barney Ross, Jack “Kid” Berg, and Sixto Escobar, and handled the great Benny Leonard, who had been forced to make a comeback after losing much of his money in the stock market crash.

  Arcel had worked the corner of James J. Braddock on the night the Cinderella Man turned back into a pumpkin against Joe Louis, and of Ezzard Charles when he lost to Rocky Marciano. In between he had handled so many members of Louis’ infamous Bum of the Month Club that Jimmy Cannon dubbed him “The Undertaker.”

  The iconoclastic Arcel often found himself in conflict with the powers-that-be. In the early 1950s he went into partnership with Sam Silverman, the Boston promoter who two decades later would launch Marvin Hagler’s career, packaging a “Saturday Night Fights” series for ABC.

  The enterprise put him at odds not only with the mobbed-up International Boxing Club, but with the so-called Managers’ Guild, a New York-based organization which also operated at the behest of boxing godfather James A. Norris. In 1953 Arcel was standing outside the Hotel Madison, adjacent to the old Boston Garden, in conversation with fellow manager Willie Ketchum when a man sneaked up behind him, pulled a lead pipe out of a paper bag, and smacked him on the head.

  Arcel spent nineteen days in the hospital, much of it in a coma. When he revived, he decided to get out of boxing for good.

  For many years thereafter, Sam Silverman never left his office without first slipping a flunky a few bucks to go out and start his car.

  It has been said that it took Roberto Duran to bring Arcel back to boxing after an eighteen-year hiatus, but that isn’t entirely accurate.

  Twenty years earlier, Arcel had handled a Panamanian pug named Federico Plummer for Carlos Eleta. In 1971, Eleta was grooming Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer for a title fight against junior welterweight champion Nicolino Locche of Argentina, and pleaded with Arcel to come to Panama to train his prospect. Arcel, who brought along his trusted assistant Freddie Brown, agreed to put the finishing touches on Frazer. Eleta had also suggested that Arcel might be interested in working with his other youngster, Duran, but Arcel demurred, preferring to concentrate on Frazer.

  But Arcel and Brown were seated at ringside the night Duran destroyed Benny Huertas in his American debut, and they liked what they saw. A month later they were in Panama with Frazer when Duran fought the Japanese veteran Hiroshi Kobayashi. Although Duran would recall his opponent only as “some Chinese guy,” Kobayashi had in fact held the World Boxing Association junior lightweight title from 1968 until 1971, and had been dethroned by Alfredo Marcano less than three months
before he fought Duran.

  When Duran knocked him out in seven, Arcel became a believer.

  Once Arcel and Brown assumed control of Duran’s training, there were the expected moments of friction with Plomo Quinones, who felt his authority was being usurped, but for the most part the three appear to have coexisted without major incident. Brown handled the day-to-day conditioning, but at Arcel’s insistence did not attempt to tinker with Duran’s style.

  “Don’t change a thing,” Arcel had ordered his deputy.

  Duran had two more fights−a decision over the wily Cuban veteran Angel Robinson Garcia and a first-round stoppage of Francisco Munoz−before he fought Ken Buchanan for his title at the Garden.

  After winning the lightweight championship, Duran interrupted his celebrating just long enough to score two first-round knockouts in Panama before returning to New York for a non-title fight against Esteban DeJesus, a 32-1 Puerto Rican trained by Gregorio Benitez, Wilfredo’s father, at the Garden.

  By all accounts he was undertrained and unprepared, and incurred what would be the only loss of his first seventy-two fights. Duran went down from a left hook in the first round, but that was merely a harbinger of things to come that night. DeJesus won on all three scorecards: Judges Bill Recht and Harold Lederman had it 6-2-2 and 6-3-1, respectively, while Arthur Mercante, the referee, scored it 5-4-1 for DeJesus.

  Duran would later blame the lingering effects of a car crash in which he had been involved a few weeks before the fight, but his handlers knew better. When he, Eleta, and Arcel repaired to a Manhattan restaurant later that evening, a disconsolate Duran was in tears.

  “You didn’t lose that fight in the ring, you lost it in training,” Eleta admonished him.