Brown brokered an introduction to Ali, and Arum wound up the titular promoter for the heavyweight champion’s 1966 defense against George Chuvalo in Toronto. The first fight Arum promoted would also be the first one he had actually seen.
“When it came to boxing I was a complete neophyte,” recalled Arum. “A few days before the fight I was in the hotel coffee shop when Chuvalo’s managers, Irving and Abe Ungerman, sat down and joined me. One of them asked if I thought there was any way their guy could win the fight.”
“I didn’t want to let on that I knew nothing about boxing, so I said ‘The only way Chuvalo can beat Ali is to hit him in the balls, and to keep hitting him in the balls.’
“Well, the night of the fight Chuvalo must have hit Ali low a dozen times. Ali won, but afterward in the dressing room at Maple Leaf Gardens he was in absolute agony. I was afraid to confess my part in it, but as I was in there commiserating with him this balding guy with a microphone shoved his way into the dressing room. I turned around and pointed at him and said ‘You! Get the fuck out of here!’
“That,” said Arum, “was how I met Howard Cosell.”
Arum’s nascent promotional firm, Top Rank, would go on to stage most, though not all, of Ali’s fights in the 1970s. During Ali’s post-exile comeback, Arum also served as his personal attorney, even for fights he did not promote.
That he had assimilated the necessary nuances of the sport became evident when Newsday ’s Bob Waters caught Arum red-handed in what might charitably be described as a misstatement. When it was pointed out that he had said precisely the opposite just twenty-four hours earlier, Arum responded with what should have become his personal entry in Bartlett ’s:
“Yes, but yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth!”
King, after his release from prison in September 1971, had an even faster track to the top. In 1972 he promoted an Ali exhibition staged for the benefit of a Cleveland hospital (the show may well have benefited the hospital, but it benefited King considerably more) and in early 1974 he separately approached both Ali and heavyweight champion George Foreman with promises of then unheard-of $5 million purses.
King came away with contracts bearing the signatures of both boxers. What he did not have, of course, was $10 million, but that oversight was shortly corrected via a mechanism that would become a hallmark of Don King promotions: OPM−Other People’s Money.
King’s sometime partner Hank Schwartz prevailed upon British millionaire investor John Daly to provide some of the cash, and, hoping to boost tourism in his emerging nation, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire dipped into the national treasury for the rest. Thus was born the Rumble in the Jungle, and while his role had been more that of matchmaker than promoter, King would claim much of the credit. He emerged from Zaire as the veritable face of that epic fight.
When 1980 dawned Ali had retired for the third time, having regained the heavyweight title from Leon Spinks a year earlier, and the championship had two claimants. King promoted Larry Holmes, the WBC champion; Arum backed John Tate, who owned the WBA belt. Both promoters had been cagily attempting to lure Ali out of retirement, each hoping that The Greatest would confer legitimacy on his half of the championship by challenging his man, but that March Arum’s quest had been dealt a severe blow when Tate was knocked out, in the fifteenth round, by the even more obscure Mike Weaver. (This calamity occurred on the same televised card on the same night−March 31−that Leonard KO’d Davey Boy Green.)
Although they had joined forces in an earlier marriage of convenience to promote the 1975 Ali-Frazier III Thrilla in Manila, Arum and King roundly despised each other. In recent months, Arum had likened King to Idi Amin, and King had described Arum as “a snake” and “a Jewish Hitler.”
“Think,” said Dr. Ferdie Pacheco (Ali’s personal physician and later an NBC broadcaster) “of King as a sledgehammer and Arum as a stiletto.”
They would make strange bedfellows indeed, but the result of their meeting at Kennedy Airport was the establishment of a new promotional super-firm called BADK, Inc. BADK would promote exactly one card−Duran-Leonard I−before dissolving in acrimony shortly after the gate receipts were tallied.
Trainer would later explain that he had wanted both promoters involved all along−Arum for his unchallenged expertise in the vagaries of closed-circuit television, and King because he would almost certainly have devoted his energies to undermining the promotion had he been excluded. (As the Scottish scribe Hugh McIlvanney once noted, expecting King to play by the rules is “like asking a wolverine to use a napkin.” )
Once it became clear that Duran was seeking a $1.5 million guarantee, negotiations became frighteningly easy.
“We can do that,” said Trainer, who tried not to betray his surprise. After joining forces with Arum, King failed to improve Duran’s guarantee at all, but did double the promoters’ share he would split with his new partner, from $1 million to $2 million.
“It was almost embarrassing,” Trainer recalled the final tally, in which Duran collected a career-high purse of $1.65 million. Leonard, who in lieu of a purse had taken the site fee and an 80% upside of both the closed- circuit and foreign-rights television sales, wound up with nearly $10 million−by far the most any boxer at any weight had ever earned for a single fight. (The previous record had been the $6.5 million Ali got for his third fight against Ken Norton.)
The Quebec Olympic Installation Board, still smarting from the cost overruns of the Olympics four years earlier, ponied up a $3.5 million guarantee (all of which went to Leonard) against the live gate, banking on the allure of the biggest fight of the year, and Leonard’s residual popularity from the 1976 Games.
The intriguing matchup between the stylistic boxing virtuoso and a man widely regarded as a barely domesticated animal was scheduled for the night of June 20. Leonard was twenty-four years old, Duran twenty-nine, and their combined records were 98-1.
For a fight that would be billed as “Le Face-à-Face Historique,” the 78,000-seat Stade Olympique was scaled from $500 for ringside seats to $20 tickets in the upper-deck nosebleed sections. Tickets in those denominations moved briskly from the outset, but in the run-up to the fight, sales for the mid-range tickets, priced from $300 to $75, were disappointing.
The bout was formally announced in April at a press conference at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Leonard wore a business suit, while Duran was resplendent in jewels.
“Leonard was sitting on one side of the dais, Duran the other,” recalled King’s matchmaker Bobby Goodman of the Waldorf gathering. “I watched Leonard stare at Roberto as he ate. There was fruit on the table, and Duran just picked up the grapefruit with his hand and pushed it into his mouth, gnawing his way toward the center. Leonard seemed very taken aback.
“Then came the steak. As Ray was politely cutting his steak, Duran jammed a fork into his, picked up the entire steak, and started tearing at it with his teeth like a hungry lion. Leonard blinked a couple of times and looked away. He must have been thinking, ‘This guy is a friggin’ animal! ’ I’m sure it was the precise mindset Duran was seeking.”
When it came his time to speak, Leonard, presumably to show he was not going to be intimidated, promised, “I’m not just going to beat Roberto Duran, I’m going to kill him.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words.
“I don’t know why I said that, or where it came from,” reflected Leonard. “It was uncharacteristic of me. Duran had been pushing all the buttons. Whenever he got close he’d curse or shove me or act like he was going to hit me, just a total lack of respect, and I let myself get angry.”
“When Leonard told him in New York ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he made a grave mistake,” Duran’s octogenarian trainer, Ray Arcel, told Baltimore sportswriter Alan Goldstein. “If he had said that to Roberto on the street, Mr. Leonard would still be stretched out in an alley.”
Duran remained in New York for the initial phase of his training, sparring at Gleason’s Gym
with Teddy White and with a young New York pro named Kevin Rooney, who would later distinguish himself as Mike Tyson’s trainer. The Duran camp then relocated to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills.
“Grossinger’s was still in its heyday, and it was a tremendous place to train,” recalled Goodman. “The food was fabulous, and Duran was an instant hit with the guests and the visiting media. The ski lodge at Grossinger’s was closed for the spring, so that became his private training quarters.
“Duran was focused and serious, so much so that it became difficult getting sparring partners to stay in there with him. He was getting that sharp,” said Goodman. “Ray Arcel would come up weekly to check on his progress, but Freddie Brown was in charge of the camp.”
Brown, who had been in the fight game since the Depression years, was an old-school trainer. He is generally acknowledged to have been the inspiration for Burgess Meredith’s razor blade–wielding Mickey Goldmill character in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky films.
About once a week, Goodman would look out his window and see Brown, his bag packed, trudging off toward the reception area.
“This would happen whenever Duran wouldn’t get out of bed to run,” Goodman recalled. “Freddie would go to his room and pack his bag. Invariably, you’d then see Duran chasing him across the lawn in his underwear, shouting, ‘Freddie, don’t leave! I run!’
“After several weeks, the instances of Freddie walking out grew less frequent. Duran was getting into tremendous condition. I don’t think he’d ever trained this hard for a fight−before or since.”
Once he hit peak condition, said Goodman, “he almost toyed with his sparring partners. Cus D’Amato sent Kevin Rooney up to Grossinger’s, but Duran just played with the willing Rooney, who would keep coming but could hardly lay a glove on Duran, who could be a defensive magician when he wanted to. He would just put his gloves on his waist, plant himself right in front of a guy, and they would still have trouble landing anything clean.”
Rubén Blades, the Harvard-educated salsa singer and bandleader, often came up to Grossinger’s to hang out with Duran. Lou Goldstein, the resort’s longtime director of activities who years earlier had invented a game called “Simon Says” for the amusement of the guests, would sometimes be joined by Duran for his after-dinner program at the resort.
Leonard had opted to remain nearer to home. He based his training camp at a Sheraton in New Carrollton, Maryland, just off the Capital Beltway, and did his morning roadwork at nearby Greenbelt Park. He didn’t exactly splurge on sparring partners, using Don Morgan, a journeyman welterweight who had made a career of losing to bigger-name opponents, and a local amateur named Mike James. Roger Leonard, the champion’s somewhat less-talented older brother, and “Odell Leonard,” who identified himself as Ray’s “cousin,” also shared time in the New Carrollton ring.
“Odell wasn’t my cousin,” recalled Ray. “His name was Odell Davis, and he’d showed up at the gym in Palmer Park one day with a Mohawk haircut, saying ‘Where’s Sugar Ray Leonard? I’m gonna kill him!’ He started hanging around the gym and became sort of a fixture there. One day he asked about the people my family had known in North Carolina, and then he said ‘We must be some kind of cousins.’ I said ‘Whatever,’ but next thing you know he’s getting fights by calling himself ‘Odell Leonard.’”
At the champion’s request, the sparring partners all wore T-shirts with “DURAN” stenciled across the front.
“I have a tendency to ease up when I spar,” Leonard explained to Philadelphia Bulletin scribe Ray Didinger. “But I see that name and I want to tear the other guy’s head off.”
A few weeks before the fight, publicist Charlie Brotman arranged an open workout at the Sheraton. Sportswriters from up and down the East Coast were invited to come in, watch Leonard spar, and engage in a Q-and-A session afterward.
It was there that Didinger asked Leonard if he’d ever reflected on how things might have gone had he been able to stick to his original plan after the Olympics and never turned pro.
“I’d still be under pressure, but a different kind,” he told Didinger. “I’d be a senior at the University of Maryland, getting ready to take my final exams and wondering what I was going to do after graduation. I’d be plain old Ray Leonard again, and I wouldn’t have to worry about looking at Roberto Duran’s ugly face next week.
“And,” he added, “I’d be a whole lot poorer.”
Apparently unpersuaded that Duran’s knockout prowess had traveled with him to the 147-pound division, the oddsmakers posted Leonard as a 9-5 favorite. A preponderance of boxing experts shared that view.
In a June issue that featured the two boxers on its cover, Inside Sports polled a select panel of insiders. Muhammad Ali, Gil Clancy, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jimmy Jacobs, Red Smith, Bert Sugar, and Edwin Viruet (who had gone the distance with both Leonard and Duran) all picked Sugar Ray to win.
Harold Lederman liked Duran, albeit for the wrong reasons (“He’ll get Leonard late” ), while Cus D’Amato was, it would turn out, pretty much right on the money: “If Duran has the will to apply his skills with determination and courage, he will neutralize Leonard’s ability.”
The final tally favored Leonard by a 7-2 margin, with one abstention. The tenth member of the Inside Sports panel, Arthur Mercante, still hoping that he might be named the referee, declined to pick a winner.
“The casting is perfect,” said Angelo Dundee. “You have Sugar Ray, the kid next door, the guy in the white hat, against Duran, the killer, the guy with the gunfighter’s eyes. It’s the kind of fight where you can’t be neutral!”
While the fighters were still in training camp, King dispatched Bobby Goodman to Montreal for a site survey. In the customs line at the airport he was surprised to run into Arum.
“When are Teddy and I going to get together on the matches? ” asked Goodman. The Duran-Leonard fight was an Arum-King co-promotion, and he had expected his matchmaking counterpart, Top Rank’s Teddy Brenner, to share the duty of putting together the undercard.
“The card’s already been made,” Arum replied.
Goodman was somewhat taken aback, and when he voiced his objection, Arum replied, “That’s too bad. If Don has a problem, we’ll go to arbitration−and the guy handling that is Mike Trainer.”
Goodman interpreted Arum’s undercard coup as a declaration of war. Brenner, hoping for a win that would put John Tate back in line for another world title shot, had matched the former WBA champion against the Canadian heavyweight champion, Trevor Berbick.
“So we reached out for Berbick, set him up in camp, and got him some great sparring to get him ready for an upset over Arum’s contender,” recalled Goodman.
A month before the fight, Duran began experiencing severe back spasms, and a specialist was summoned to Grossinger’s. Members of the camp were sworn to secrecy, but the condition was bad enough that Luis Enriquez seriously contemplated asking for a postponement.
Though the eyes of the boxing world were fixated on Leonard and Duran, both Hagler and Hearns were closing in on title shots of their own.
In February 1980, three months after the draw with Vito Antuofermo, Hagler was matched with middleweight contender Loucif Hamani at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine. Hamani was a Paris-based Algerian with a 20-1 record, but he had never fought in the United States, nor had he ever faced an opponent of Hagler’s caliber. Hagler knocked him out in two.
Hagler got the opportunity to avenge his first career defeat when he fought Boogaloo Watts two months later. Once again the bout took place in Portland, and once again it didn’t get out of the second round.
In May he fought Marcos Geraldo in Las Vegas. The Mexican had given Leonard a world of trouble when they fought in Baton Rouge a year earlier, and Hagler had his problems as well, but he did enough to win seven of ten rounds on the scorecards of all three judges.
Hearns had also kept himself busy. In February he traveled to Las Vegas, where he knocked out “F
ighting Jim” Richards on the Larry Holmes-Lorenzo Zanon undercard. A month later he was back in Detroit to fight Angel Espada, a former WBA welterweight champion, in the main event of a card at Joe Louis Arena. Hearns stopped Espada in four. In that evening’s co-feature, Hilmer Kenty stopped WBA lightweight champion Ernesto España in nine to become Emanuel Steward’s first world champion.
On March 31−the same night Leonard knocked out Davey Boy Green at the Cap Center−Hearns KO’d Santiago Valdez at Caesars Palace. Employing a split feed from three separate venues, ABC had shown title bouts originating in Landover, Knoxville, and Las Vegas. Hearns-Santiago Valdez had been part of the Larry Holmes-Leroy Jones card at the latter venue, but was not included on the telecast.
In May, the Hit Man returned to Detroit to fight veteran Eddie Gazo at Cobo Hall. Gazo, a Nicaraguan, had just a few years earlier held the WBA junior middleweight championship. (“At the time, he might have been the worst champion in history,” claimed Katz.) Hearns knocked him out in the first round.
The Hit Man’s record was now 28-0. His next fight, scheduled for later that summer, would be against Pipino Cuevas for the WBA welterweight title.
Duran arrived in Montreal a few days before Leonard, and polished off his sparring at the Complex des Jardins. The assumption had been that Leonard would have retained his popularity among the locals who remembered him from the 1976 Games, but Duran, who wore a T-shirt saying “Bonjour, Montreal” at his workouts, quickly captured the hearts of the Quebecois.
The boxers worked out in the same ring at des Jardins. The gym had been converted from an old ice hockey rink. The novelist Leonard Gardner (Fat City), in Montreal to cover the fight for Inside Sports , watched both boxers prepare; one afternoon he saw Leonard knock Mike James down with a right hand.
Gardner was not the first to notice that Duran had never quite mastered another time-honored practice of boxers-in-training. The Panamanian, observed the novelist, skipped rope “like a drunk.” In a Cleveland gym I once saw a similar display of ineptitude: Duran kept getting himself tangled up in the jump rope. Since skipping rope is universally one of the very first exercises a nascent boxer learns, this also struck me as a pretty startling revelation. It was sort of like encountering a football player who couldn’t do jumping jacks.
Four Kings Page 9
