When Frank the Animal opened his eyes several minutes later, the ringside physician asked him if he knew where he was.
“The Sands? ” guessed Fletcher.
“Juan is the stronger man,” said Roldan’s manager/trainer Tito Lectore, who in the 1970s had handled both Carlos Monzon and Hugo Corro. “He could beat Hagler now.”
“If this hasn’t convinced them, then I don’t know what else I can do,” said Roldan through an interpreter. “They can’t escape me anymore. I finally got my shot.”
Four months later Roldan would indeed fight Hagler, at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and while he would be stopped in ten, he would be credited with the only knockdown Hagler incurred in a sixty-seven-fight pro career.
The 14,600-seat outdoor arena was packed. Ringside tickets had been priced at $600, those in the bleachers farthest from the ring $100, but the scalpers outside were getting two and three times that, and were still doing a brisk business until the opening bell for the main event.
The ringside seats were occupied by the usual mixed bag of big-time gamblers, celebrities (Paul Anka, Susan Anton, David Brenner, John and Bo Derek, Redd Foxx and Red Buttons among them) and boxing luminaries, including heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, former light-heavyweight champs Bob Foster and Joey Maxim, erstwhile welterweight champions Tony DeMarco and Ray Leonard and a couple of old middleweight champs, Gene Fullmer and Jake LaMotta. The latter was accompanied by his ex-wife, Vicki.
The manner in which the fight would unfold had been unwittingly fore-shadowed days earlier, when Hagler told me that he wasn’t going to allow Duran to turn it into a brawl. In retrospect, he probably should have done just that himself. Marvelous Marvin was a career-long middleweight, and while Duran had been a fearsome puncher as a lightweight, there was no indication that at 160 he possessed the sort of one-shot firepower that would warrant caution.
Hagler and Duran appeared to sleepwalk through the first several rounds as the champion, expecting Duran to take the fight to him, awaited his opportunity to counterpunch. Problem was, Duran was doing the same thing. The crowd was growing restive, and Goody Petronelli worried that Marvin might also be boring the judges.
In the early going Hagler was landing the odd jab, a punch he customarily threw with unusual authority, but Duran proved a wily target, sliding from side to side, slipping most of Hagler’s attack and smothering the ones that got through.
“This ain’t going too well,” Goody Petronelli finally told Hagler, advising him to pressure Duran.
“I was a little tight at first,” Hagler conceded later. “It took me a few rounds before I could really start putting my combinations together.”
“We never anticipated that he’d fight that kind of fight,” said Petronelli. “We figured that Duran would be Duran, lean his head against Marvin’s chest and try to move him around. Instead, he laid back and tried to counter, and sometimes when you get two counterpunchers, it makes for a stinking fight. Finally, I had to send him in.”
In the sixth, the inner beast Hagler described as “the Monster” made its first appearance.
Switching back and forth between southpaw and orthodox, Hagler rocked Duran on several occasions. A rapid-fire triple jab snapped Duran’s head back, and a left-right combination drove him to the ropes.
Duran would later say that Hagler’s switch in gears wasn’t the only thing that had changed after five rounds. Late in the fifth, Cholo had landed a right that caught Hagler on the top of the head. “I felt pain in my hand,” said Duran.
Duran’s damaged paw would be one factor as the night wore on. Another would come late in the seventh, when Duran landed a right and−shades of the Davey Moore fight−the thumb of his glove caught Hagler in the left eye. The wound would swell throughout the night.
The crowd, oblivious to either infirmity, came to life in the eighth, and the stadium alternately rocked to chants of “Doo-ran! Doo-ran!” from the Latinos and “Mah-vin! Mah-vin!” from the New Englanders.
Once Hagler took the fight inside he seemed to be beating Duran at his own game, and the champion appeared to have seized control in the middle rounds, but in the tenth, the bout took yet another turn. Now Duran was in the center of the ring, Hagler circling warily around him.
“I wanted to show him some boxing, and maybe catch him coming in the way he’d sometimes been catching me,” Hagler would later explain. But in almost the same breath he admitted that the rapidly swelling eye had also become a cause for concern.
Had Hagler been willing to stay inside a bit longer, logic suggests that he might well have overpowered Duran, but prudence may have dictated the modification in strategy. The rows of scar tissue Hagler wore like combat ribbons around his eyebrows could provide an inviting target, even for a boxer more observant of the Marquis of Queensberry rules than Roberto Duran.
Duran being Duran, there were several borderline low blows as the fight wore on, none of them lethal, and while Christodoulou cautioned the challenger on several occasions, the referee maintained control without turning himself into a schoolmaster.
By the twelfth round Duran had become cognizant of Hagler’s injury, and attacked with a fury, zeroing in on the purplish target. Panamanian flags seemed to have sprung up all over the arena as his supporters urged Manos de Piedra to go for the kill.
“But after the ninth my hands were tired,” Duran recalled afterward. “I was a little too tired to finish him in the twelfth.”
The sixth, when Hagler looked to be on the verge of taking Duran out, and the twelfth, when Duran appeared to have Hagler on the run, had been the only points in which either man was in trouble, but in the thirteenth Hagler’s and Duran’s heads collided, and the champion came away with blood pouring from two new cuts.
In the Hagler corner the bout had taken on a new sense of urgency. Petronelli realized that the fight might be close. He could hardly have imagined just how close.
After thirteen rounds, both Yoshida and Oveson had Duran ahead by a point, while Jutras had it even. Had Duran been able to win just one of the final two rounds he would have become the middleweight champion of the world.
In the fourteenth the hematoma below Hagler’s eye burst, and the blood came spurting out, but, heeding Petronelli’s advice, Hagler fought the final six minutes in a controlled fury. Casting off the cloak of caution that had characterized his performance until then, he closed the show by battering Duran around the ring.
“I had to give up my plans for a knockout, but I felt like if I’d had one more round I could have put this man away,” Hagler would say afterward.
Had Hagler gone on the attack earlier, most ringsiders concluded, he might have made what proved to be his most difficult title defense an easy one.
When the final bell rang, Duran wheeled, glared in Hagler’s direction, and spat as if to say, “You didn’t hurt me.” But the Panamanian didn’t seem surprised by the decision−close, but unanimously in Hagler’s favor.
When the final scorecards were tallied, Jutras had Hagler up 144-142, Ovesen 144-143 and Yoshida 146-145. The Japanese official had scored more rounds even (six in all) than he awarded to either man.
Scoring at ringside, I had Hagler up 146-140, a margin more in line with most non-WBA judges who watched the fight that night.
Hagler didn’t need to look in a mirror to know he’d been in a fight. It had been the first time he’d had to go the distance in defense of his title, and the cut below his eye reminded him that the old lion named Duran still had some teeth.
“I didn’t expect to come out of this one looking pretty anyway,” Hagler said. He held his championship belts above his head and added, “The only thing that counts is that I’m taking these back home.”
Although the fifteen-round distance had probably saved him on this night, the WBC would shortly move to vacate its title, citing Hagler’s refusal to abide by its twelve-round limit and the presence of a referee from an outlaw nation. Only after Wainwright filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ha
gler was the WBC portion of his undisputed title restored.
“The better man won,” conceded Duran through an interpreter that night. “But I wasn’t disappointed. Hagler didn’t do anything special. He’s just a strong fighter.”
Still, Duran had landed more punches, and inflicted more damage, than Hagler had absorbed in his seven previous defenses put together.
“He caught me a few times with that lead right,” said Hagler. “But it didn’t really bother me. About the twelfth, I was concerned when the eye swelled up, but my guys took good care of it. After that, I knew he was going to have to hit me with the ring post to knock me out.”
At the post-fight press conference Hagler wore sunglasses to mask the damage wrought during the fight and reiterated his belief (borne out by the films) that the injury had come not from a punch, but from Duran’s thumb.
Roberto Duran was learning to speak English.
“He win. I lose. He complaining,” he said with a laugh.
Someone asked Hagler that night whether Duran was the most cunning boxer he’d ever faced. Marvin pondered for a moment before replying:
“I’d call him experienced. He’s a crafty fighter, all right, but he was a legend, and I beat him. Give me some credit for beating him.”
Although Duran lost the fight, it was Hagler’s reputation that took a beating that night. By allowing the fight to turn into a cautious chess match he had diluted the image of the fearsome destroyer he had so carefully cultivated.
Budd Schulberg suggested that Hagler might want to go back to court to have his name legally changed again, this time to “ Semi -Marvelous.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Hagler carried him, like in the old days,” Schulberg told Katz that night.
While that view might have been overly suspicious, Arum was clearly a beneficiary of the outcome. Emerging essentially unscathed from the Hagler fight preserved Duran’s value for another megafight, against Thomas Hearns, just eight months later.
Sports Illustrated’ s Bill Nack complained that night that Hagler “didn’t just fight cautiously, he fought timidly. A blown-up lightweight was still there at the end.”
By the time his story appeared several days later Nack had tempered his criticism: “Hagler proved himself the best middleweight on the block, while Duran showed that he is a fighter for the ages and should again be the object of celebration.”
The criticism would be more than offset by Hagler’s career-high payday of nearly $10 million.
“Fighting all those years for peanuts finally paid off,” said Hagler. “I finally got the big one.”
Duran was also well-compensated, earning over $5 million. When a few of us ran into Cholo the next morning he revealed that he was headed to the hospital to have his right hand X-rayed.
“I put in salts and water all night, and again today,” he said, wincing as he shook his paw. “Is no good.
“But,” he added with a grin, “is good for holding money.”
Chapter 6
Malice at the Palace
Duran–Hearns
Caesars Palace, June 15, 1984
The right hand Hearns had broken on Wilfred Benitez’ head remained in a cast until April 1983 and occasioned an eight-month hiatus from boxing, at least part of which was spent at sea.
Hearns owned a fifty-six-foot boat. Each spring he paid a bareboat captain to deliver the Natasha (named for his baby daughter) to Detroit from its wintertime slip at the Fort Lauderdale Marina. In the spring of ’83, with time to spare, Tommy decided to make the trip himself, and spent the better part of a month on a leisurely cruise up the Atlantic coast to the St. Lawrence Seaway and onward to the Great Lakes.
Hearns didn’t fight again until that July, when he decisioned Scottish veteran Murray Sutherland in Atlantic City. He didn’t make his first defense of the WBC junior middleweight title until February ’84, when he outpointed Luigi Minchillo of Italy in Detroit.
Hearns had won six straight since his loss to Leonard, but he had been forced to go the distance three straight times. He had barely used the right against Sutherland, and, said Steward, “he was even afraid to throw it in sparring.”
The “Hit Man” appellation seemed suddenly inappropriate, and Hearns began billing himself instead as the “Motor City Cobra.” Between fights, he became a virtual recluse.
Frederick Lewerenz was Hearns’ physician in Detroit, but he might as well have been his psychiatrist.
“You have to understand Thomas,” Dr. Lewerenz told Sports Illustrated ’s Pat Putnam. “His whole value judgment is based on how hard he can hit. This man actually lives and exists mentally from the power of his right hand. It’s his self-image.”
Ray Leonard had his own medical issues in early 1984.
Sugar Ray had grown restive in retirement. His ringside work for CBS and HBO kept him close to the sport, but the proximity constantly reminded him how much he missed it.
When Leonard asked Mike Trainer to initiate preparations for his comeback, the direction in which he planned to go was self-evident. The first opponent Trainer contacted was, like Hagler, a lefthander, and he was approached about fighting in New England.
Sean Mannion was a rugged southpaw who answered to the nom de guerre of “the Galway Gouger.” Mannion was a former Irish national amateur champion who had boxed for his entire career in the United States, and by 1984 he was rated No. 2 among junior-middleweights by the WBA. “The only stipulation was that the guy had to be free of promotional entanglements and in a position to make a deal,” said Trainer. “We didn’t want to be wrangling with any outside promoters over this thing, and I told [Mannion manager] Jimmy Connelly that more than once.”
Although it was never announced, Ray’s older brother Kenny and match-maker J.D. Brown had undertaken preparations for a new company that would have promoted Leonard’s future bouts−including, presumably, a fight against Hagler, had it occurred in 1984. Entering into a contract with an opponent encumbered by promotional baggage might have complicated that plan.
Mannion had been under contract to Top Rank, but that pact had expired with his last fight. Cash-strapped, Connelly apparently tried to use the Leonard offer to squeeze Bob Arum. In a phone call, Arum reminded him that he had worked hard to get Mannion into position for a title challenge, and warned him that a loss would imperil his No. 2 WBA rating.
Connelly and Mannion hopped the shuttle to New York that night and, in exchange for a $10,000 signing bonus, agreed to a contract extension with Top Rank.
“It was a pretty stupid move on their part,” said Trainer. “Mannion would have gotten more money for fighting Ray−$100,000−than he wound up getting to fight Mike McCallum for the title, and even if he’d lost to Ray but looked good, his career wouldn’t have suffered. And when you look at what happened in the two fights, Mannion probably had a better chance of beating Ray, who was coming off the layoff, than he did McCallum, which was zero.”
After Mannion took himself out of the picture, Trainer turned to Kevin Howard, a Philadelphia journeyman with a record of 20-4-1. The bout was scheduled for February 25 at the Centrum in Worcester, but had to be postponed when Leonard’s Massachusetts physical revealed yet another abnormality in his eyes.
Massachusetts Boxing Commissioner Tommy Rawson had asked that Leonard be examined two weeks before the scheduled bout rather than the more standard two days. The detached left retina that had prompted his retirement proved to be fully healed, but in the course of his examination, Dr. Edward Ryan observed “some peripheral retina problems,” specifically, a lesion in the retina of Leonard’s right eye. The imperfection was corrected at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary by what Ryan described as “prophylactic cryosurgery.”
The Howard fight was postponed indefinitely, and Leonard flew back to Baltimore after the operation.
I was at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo when the postponement was announced, but in Leonard’s absence Ryan precipitated something of a fire-storm
when he told the Herald ’s Tim Horgan: “In no way would I recommend that Sugar Ray Leonard ever fight again.”
Once the bout was rescheduled for May 11, Leonard’s handlers trotted out Dr. Ryan for the Boston press conference, at which the retinal specialist clarified his remarks to Horgan. What he had meant to say, Ryan explained, was that he didn’t think anyone, including Leonard, should box at all, whether they’d had an eye injury or not. And although he was predisposed against the sport on general principles, he allowed that Leonard was probably at no greater risk than any other boxer.
After Ryan’s address, reporters were informed Leonard would entertain no further questions about his eyes. A British fight scribe in Worcester to cover the bout was moved to observe, “His bloody eye is the only reason we’re here!”
“I don’t have a license to practice medicine, but if I had to guess I’d say the eye injury went back to the Marcos Geraldo fight,” recalled Leonard years later. “Something like that can happen in my sport, because there’s trauma involved, but it could have happened playing basketball with my kids. An acquaintance of mine recently had surgery for two detached retinas, and he never boxed in his life .”
After the February bout was postponed, Kevin Howard was told to sit tight, but instead agreed to fight Bill “Fireball” Bradley in Atlantic City on February 25, and stopped him in six. “I needed the fight and I needed the work,” explained Howard, who had lost two of his previous three (to Marlon Starling and Mark Medal, sandwiched around a win over the wonderfully named Richard Nixon) and had dropped out of both the WBA and WBC rankings.
“I knew some people say I took a big risk by taking that fight,” said Howard after arriving in Worcester, “but to me it wasn’t a risk.”
“Some people” included Dan Doyle, the Leonard-Howard promoter, who said that had Howard lost to Bradley “we would have gotten another opponent,” and Howard would have been out the $100,000 he had been promised for fighting Leonard.
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