Four Kings

by George Kimball

  Leonard, who had reportedly engaged in some hellacious sparring sessions with Simon Brown back in Maryland, toyed with a trio of locals at a Worcester gym the day the press was invited to watch him spar, going a round apiece with Dave Rivello, Keith Stevenson and Jose Ruiz.

  Angelo Dundee told Horgan that day that he had been “flabbergasted” by Leonard’s decision to come back. “I was surprised, because he’s financially set, and he was doing very well at what he was doing after he retired,” said Dundee. “But nothing takes the place of being the best at what you do.”

  “He missed the ring,” echoed Kevin Howard. “He missed the glory, and he missed his fans. I know. I was one of them.”

  Although Leonard never mentioned Hagler’s name in the run-up to the fight, it wasn’t far from anyone else’s lips. A Hagler-Leonard announcement, Trainer hinted with a wink, “might come sooner than you think,” but Dundee urged caution.

  “After this fight we’ll evaluate Ray’s performance and decide what to do next,” said the trainer. “It’s too early to talk Marvin Hagler. We really won’t know a thing until Friday night.”

  Hagler seemed decidedly unsympathetic when it came to Leonard’s malady.

  “If he’s foolish enough to step into the ring with me, then I’m foolish enough to rip out his eye,” said the middleweight champion.

  Dundee had become something of an expert on boxing comebacks, having overseen at least three of them by Muhammad Ali. “It’s a tougher struggle with a big guy,” said Angelo. “Plus, Muhammad didn’t do nothing while he was away. He just got big and husky and put on weight. How much? I was afraid to even look at the scale.

  “But Ray stayed in shape.”

  Although it was a ten-round, non-title fight, HBO paid $2.5 million to showcase Leonard against Howard. It was Ray’s first taste of combat in twenty-seven months, and in the fourth round, Howard caught him with a hook that knocked him on his backside, leaving him spread-eagled on the ring mat, staring up at the Centrum roof. An embarrassed Leonard made up his mind to re-retire even before he got up.

  “I was shocked to see myself on the canvas, and I thought, ‘It just wasn’t there,’” Leonard would explain at the post-fight press conference. “I knew it wasn’t there, and that’s when I decided it was time to retire for good. If I didn’t feel it tonight, I never will. There’s no sense in going on.”

  Leonard regained control after the knockdown and was well on his way to winning when referee Dick Flaherty stopped the bout at 2:28 of the ninth.

  Although some were critical of Flaherty’s stoppage, the referee said that Howard’s legs were “wobbly,” and that he would “rather stop a fight five seconds too soon than one second too late.”

  When Howard protested, he only fueled the referee’s argument.

  “If they were going to stop the fight they should have done it when he went down,” said Howard. “I knocked him down and he got up, and he knocked me down and I got up.” Informed that he had in fact never been off his feet, Howard shrugged and murmured, “that’s regardless.”

  Hagler and the Petronellis had once again been invited to be on hand, and Marvin had fully expected to be called out at the post-fight press conference. Arum had confided that he would have $10 million apiece in the bank for Hagler and Leonard the following week.

  “That,” sighed Marvelous Marvin, “is the story of my life.”

  Hagler wasn’t the only one who got played that night. Ray also stiffed his sometime employers at Time-Warner, allowing them to get beat on what should have been their own story. When HBO’s Larry Merchant interviewed Leonard in the ring immediately after the fight, he asked Ray point-blank whether he might quit.

  “I’ll have to think it over,” Leonard told him.

  Twenty minutes later, Ray walked into the press conference and not only announced his retirement, but revealed that he had reached the decision midway through the fourth round as he lay on the canvas.

  “I wasn’t trying to intentionally mislead [Merchant],” Leonard recalled. “I just wasn’t thinking too clearly at that moment. The fight had only been over for a few seconds when he interviewed me.

  “But I’ll tell you who was even more disappointed than Marvin−Kenny and J.D.,” added Leonard. “If I’d kept fighting then, they would have been my promoters. They left a lot of money on the table that night.”

  Two months before Leonard fought Howard, Hagler had consummated his oft-delayed meeting with Juan Domingo Roldan, stopping El Martillo in the tenth round of their title fight at the Riviera.

  Roldan was credited with a first-round knockdown, enraging Hagler, who said he had been tripped. Three months later, at a meeting held on the eve of the Duran-Hearns fight, the Nevada State Athletic Commission levied a $500 fine on the Argentine for having used an ammonia capsule to revive himself on the stool between rounds in the Hagler fight.

  “The rules are there to be enforced,” I wrote in reporting Roldan’s punishment, “but it says here they’re fining the wrong guy. Did you ever try to snap open an ammonia capsule while wearing boxing gloves? ”

  Roberto Duran had not fought since his loss to Hagler.

  With time off to challenge for the middleweight title, nearly a year had elapsed in which Duran had not defended the 154-pound title he had won from Davey Moore, and he found himself under increasing pressure from the WBA. Reluctant to meet the organization’s mandatory challenger, Mike McCallum, he searched for a big-money fight.

  In the meantime he was going through his windfall from the Hagler fight in typically profligate fashion. He hired his own orchestra and performed Latino music around Central America. The old entourage swelled, as did his body. Once again Duran ballooned to nearly 200 pounds.

  After several months of negotiation, a Duran-Hearns bout was made. Although it loomed as a matchup of two reigning junior middleweight champions, it would not be a unification bout, because the WBA ruled that its title would become vacant the moment Manos de Piedra stepped into the ring against anyone other than McCallum.

  Exactly how much the WBA championship was worth without Duran’s name attached to it was illustrated when McCallum was left to fight Mannion for the vacant title later that year. The bout went to a purse offer, which was won by Top Rank. Bob Arum’s winning bid was $75,000, and in October 1984 he put the fight on the undercard of Hagler’s defense against Mustafa Hamsho at Madison Square Garden.

  The Duran-Hearns fight was originally scheduled for Nassau in the Bahamas. Both fighters had already gone there to train, but promised local backing failed to materialize. The fight was moved to Caesars in Las Vegas, where it was hastily christened “Malice at the Palace.”

  Caesars had already constructed another huge temporary stadium in anticipation of a heavyweight title unification fight between WBC champion Larry Holmes and WBA titlist Gerrie Coetzee. Since the heavyweight bout fell apart just about the time things began to unravel in the Bahamas, it made for a fairly seamless transition from Nassau to Vegas, but there was no way in the world Duran-Hearns was going to fill a 25,000-seat arena.

  Officially the bout was a co-promotion of Shelteron, a consortium put together by Hearns’ former publicist Shelly Saltman and Bill Kozerski, a Detroit promoter who had staged many Kronk shows. The chief financial backing came from a Los Angeles automobile dealer named Steve Taub. Taub, a millionaire sportsman who two decades later would enter a colt named Imperialism in the Kentucky Derby, would recall his brief flirtation with boxing as “the most expensive six minutes of my life.”

  A decade earlier, Saltman had been in charge of publicity for Evel Knievel’s ill-fated attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon−an event Arum had promoted. Incensed by what Saltman wrote about him in a subsequent book, the motorcyclist vented his displeasure with an aluminum baseball bat, breaking Shelly’s left arm and wrist in several places.

  Saltman won a $13 million judgment after the attack, but was unable to collect because Knievel declared bankruptcy. The AP’s scribe Fa
st Eddie Schuyler, who didn’t have much use for Saltman, suggested that Evel Knievel should have been presented with the Silver Slugger Award.

  Hearns was guaranteed $1.8 million, Duran $1.6 million for the bout, which Hearns viewed as a necessary step to force the fight he truly coveted −a matchup with Hagler.

  “I don’t need to just win, I need to be devastating, ” said Hearns, who had confidently forecast a second-round knockout and never backed off that prediction.

  Steward recalls Hearns’ training for the Duran fight as the best of his career. “We had the best preparation in the world,” said Steward. “I’d been named an assistant coach with that year’s Olympic team, so many of them trained at the Kronk for the Games in Los Angeles. Hearns sparred with Mark Breland every day. He also boxed with Frank Tate and Pernell Whitaker, and Steve McCrory. We had those guys from the Olympics, plus Mike McCallum, John Collins, Milton McCrory and Hilmer Kenty. They were all sharp, and it must have been one of the best camps in boxing history. Compared to sparring with Mark Breland, Duran was like fighting molasses.”

  A few days before the fight there was a chance meeting between the combatants and their entourages at a bank of elevators at Caesars.

  “I kill you! I kill you!” growled Duran as he brandished a fist. Manos de Piedra already had his game face on.

  “No mas! No mas!” replied a laughing Hearns in Motown-accented Spanish.

  “For some reason, Duran had always seemed very uncomfortable around Tommy,” said Steward. “I never fully understood it myself. Once, years earlier, we were out in Vegas when Duran was fighting somebody. We were walking through the casino and came upon Duran, surrounded by a bunch of reporters asking questions.

  “Tommy sneaked up behind him and kind of playfully flicked him in the back of his head with his finger,” Steward said. “Duran wheeled around with his fists up, as if he was going to attack whoever did it, but when he saw it was Tommy he just put his hands down and walked away, leaving the crowd of people standing there.

  “There was something about Tommy that spooked him,” insisted Steward. “He had his number. Duran tried to intimidate Leonard, he tried to intimidate Marvin, but he never did try it with Tommy. He was always very respectful, even humble, around Hearns. He just didn’t seem comfortable in Tommy’s presence.”

  In the days before the bout Steward predicted, “No one has ever really tried to hurt Duran, but Tommy will.”

  If that sounded like a backhand slap at Hagler, it probably was.

  “Tommy’s hand speed is a lot quicker than Marvin’s,” said Steward. “But the biggest difference is that Tommy’s a gambler. Hagler had Duran in trouble a couple of times, but he had so much respect for him that he didn’t seize the advantage. Tommy won’t worry about getting knocked out. If that happens with him, he’ll just throw the dice and take his chances.

  “And he might get hit doing it,” added Steward. “These are both real, macho street-fighters, you know. I can really envision this thing turning into a war, a real toe-to-toe slugfest.”

  After his final workout at the Sports Pavilion, Hearns peeled off his gold-and-red Kronk singlet and flung it into the crowd. (“Grown men happily fell upon one another as they dove for the sweaty garment,” I described the occasion in the Herald. “It might as well have been Bo Derek’s discarded underwear instead of the Detroit boxer’s they were fighting over.” )

  When Hearns sat down to talk a few minutes later, it was evident that while it was Duran he was fighting, Hagler wasn’t far from his thoughts, either.

  “I was impressed with Duran in the Hagler fight,” said Tommy. “I even gave him the decision over Hagler. He dictated the fight. He made Hagler fight the way he wanted him to.

  “As a matter of fact,” sniffed Hearns, “there wasn’t too much Hagler brought out that night that I can use against Duran. Duran dictated the fight against Hagler, but he won’t dictate this one. He’s going to discover that fighting me is a lot tougher than fighting Marvin Hagler.”

  Someone wondered if Hearns might worry that some of what he was saying might find its way back to Hagler.

  “I certainly hope so,” Hearns replied with a sly grin.

  CBS had the rights to the delayed broadcast, and Ray Leonard was on hand to provide the color commentary.

  “I wouldn’t bet this fight,” said the man who had beaten both contestants. “Duran was the toughest fight I ever had, and Hearns had the best jab of anyone I fought.

  “Duran has to take the fight to Hearns, try to slow him down and mix it up,” supposed Leonard. “Hearns can make it easy on himself if he stays outside and boxes, but I think they’re both capable of knocking each other out. I expect something significant−a knockout or at least a knockdown−by the fifth or sixth round.”

  Hearns said he was glad to have Leonard there, “because he’s a good color man.”

  Leonard, as it turned out, was not at his ringside microphone for Duran-Hearns. Two days before the bout, Juanita went into labor and Ray flew back to Maryland, just in time for the birth of his second son, Jarrell.

  Hearns opened at 2-1, and a day before the fight was bet down to $260/+$200, or roughly 13-10, man-to-man. More interesting was the fact that the sports books made it 2-1 that the fight would go the distance.

  Hearns had stopped thirty of his first thirty-two opponents, but only two of his last seven. In ten fights going back to Montreal, Duran had dispatched just two opponents−Cuevas and Davey Moore.

  On the way to the morning weigh-in we ran into Eddie “The Animal” Lopez, gorging himself at the breakfast buffet. Lopez would be fighting un-beaten Steward-trained heavyweight Tony Tucker on the undercard, but right now he seemed more interested in his bacon and eggs.

  “The only time I’m worried,” confirmed the Animal, “is when I’m going to court.”

  The weigh-in was scheduled for 8:00 a.m.−the wee hours of the morning, by Vegas standards−on the day of the fight. Despite the unsocial hour, the Sports Pavilion was choked with members of the media, Nevada commission officials, Duran’s entourage, and in their gold-and-red regalia, the entire Kronk Boxing Team.

  “I just hope you get this good a turnout tonight,” someone told Shelly Saltman. The neophyte promoter responded with a weak grin. (That night’s crowd would number 14,824, and the Duran-Hearns fight would, in the final tally, lose over $3 million.)

  A glowering Duran weighed in at precisely the divisional limit. Hearns was half a pound lighter at 153 1/ 2 .

  Padilla was once again appointed to be the referee, while the panel of WBC judges was comprised of Harry Gibbs, Newton Campos and Hans LeVert. Their services, it turned out, would not be required.

  At the rules meeting Spada requested a waiver of the rule calling for eight-ounce gloves in a 154-pound title fight. Using the ten-ounce gloves Duran wanted might also have benefited Hearns, in that it would have provided an extra bit of protection for his questionable right hand, but when the request was denied, Steward proclaimed it a victory.

  “We’d rather have a puncher’s glove,” he said.

  Steward expressed confidence that Hearns’ hand was fully healed and would hold up in battle.

  “He hasn’t hesitated to cut loose with it in the gym,” said Steward. “But I’m going to make sure I wrap it good, anyway.”

  The undercard was a showcase for Steward’s Kronk boxers: Jimmy Paul stopped Alvin Hayes in six to win the USBA lightweight title, and Tony Tucker knocked out Eddie the Animal in the ninth round of their fight.

  Two other Steward-trained fighters won that night: junior-middleweight Duane Thomas, who two years later would knock out John “The Beast” Mugabi to win Hearns’ old WBC title, stopped Tony Harrison in eight, and British middleweight Errol Christie TKO’d Stan White in five. Another prelim saw former WBA lightweight champ Arturo Frias win a ten-round decision over Jose Torres.

  In terms of ring accomplishments, Hearns and Duran might have been near-equals, but in this fight, more than any o
ther involving the Four Kings, size mattered.

  At 6-foot-1, Hearns was the tallest member of the quartet, Duran at 5-foot-7 the shortest. More tellingly, the Hit Man enjoyed a thirteen-inch reach advantage, which figured to make it difficult for Duran to even get close to him with a jab.

  Although Duran presented his usual menacing countenance, it rapidly became clear that he was, quite literally, in over his head.

  “I will use a ladder if I have to,” Duran had said.

  Perhaps he should have brought one along.

  “Tommy’s style was always going to be good for Duran,” said Steward. “He mastered in fighting shorter guys, where he could utilize his jab and his reach.”

  Physical attributes aside, Steward also wanted Hearns to get inside Duran’s head by intimidating him from the outset.

  “Whenever I have a fighter going up against a bully, I tell him to bully the bully,” said the trainer. “Like with Lennox Lewis against Mike Tyson and Andrew Golota: If you whip up on him right away, the bully starts crying.

  “In the first round Tommy pulled Duran’s head, stepped on his feet, and threw him down. It was all done on purpose, and it got Duran all fucked up, because he was used to being the bully. Duran never got untracked that night.”

  Early in the first, Hearns opened a cut above Duran’s left eye with a left uppercut. Cholo, seemingly unhurt, continued to box as he attempted to analyze the task before him.

  Two minutes into the round, Hearns’ jab had yet to be a factor. Duran decided to move inside, hoping to neutralize the right. Lowering his head, he lunged toward Hearns, throwing a right hand as he did. The next thing he saw was Hearns’ right fist, a split-second before it crashed against his head. Suddenly the floor was spinning upward in Duran’s direction.

  Hearns would say later that he could sense Duran warily eyeing the jab.

  “I had him looking for the jab by then,” recalled Hearns. “And I got him with the sneak right.”

  Duran bounced up and even managed an embarrassed grin as he took Padilla’s mandatory eight-count, but the instant the referee turned him loose, Hearns pounced again, this time felling Duran with a hard left hook. Duran got up just before the round ended.