Four Kings

by George Kimball

  The Kronk Gym split its two fights among the supporting acts. Light-heavyweight Ricky Womack outpointed David Vedder, while the up-and-coming Luis Santana scored an upset when he stopped Steward welter-weight Darrell Chambers in three. Angelo Dundee–trained heavyweight Alex Williamson fought to a draw with Canadian Willie deWit. In what was supposed to be the co-feature, Eddie Futch–trained Cuban junior welter Irleis “Cubanito” Perez was awarded a decision over Pat Jefferson. The crowd lustily booed the decision.

  Hearns and his substantial entourage marched in to the strains of “Hail to the Victors,” the University of Michigan fight song. Hagler chose John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” for his entrance music.

  Before the fighters were introduced, Doc Severinsen did a solo rendition of the national anthem. Even as Severinsen’s trumpet notes were echoing through the outdoor stadium, Billy Hearns was taunting Hagler from across the ring. Seemingly oblivious, Marvin continued to shadow-box.

  “I saw him,” recalled Hagler later. “I was thinking right then, ‘All you’re gonna do is get your brother’s ass kicked!’”

  The opening bell finally rang, unleashing eight minutes of mesmerizing action. Hagler and Hearns tore out of their respective corners and were immediately consumed in a war in which no quarter was given, and none expected.

  Less than ten seconds into The Fight it had already become apparent that whichever way this one ended, the judges’ opinions weren’t going to matter. Hagler and Hearns engaged with an unsurpassed ferocity, Tommy firing rights at Hagler, who, head down, resolutely marched straight at his taller foe, winging right-hand jabs and hooks from his southpaw stance.

  The conventional wisdom had been that at some point it would come down to a test of Hearns’ right hand and Hagler’s head, and with Marvin charging right at Tommy, that anticipated encounter wasn’t long in coming. Early in the wild first round, Hearns rocked Hagler with a right uppercut that momentarily appeared to have stunned the champion, but Marvin kept charging forward.

  “I wanted him to know who was the boss from the opening bell,” Hagler said later. “I knew I could take everything he had.”

  With a minute left in the first, Hagler was pursuing Hearns toward the challenger’s corner when Hearns landed a right that opened a deep cut to Marvin’s forehead. Blood spewed forth, but by the end of the round Hagler had trapped Hearns in his own corner and was landing almost at will. Just inside the ten-second mark Hagler landed a right-left combination that appeared to shake Hearns to his boots.

  “At first I was wondering when this guy was gonna stop punching, but I was sorry to see that round end,” Hagler reflected later. “I hated to give Tommy a chance to go back to his corner and recover.”

  The furious first round had delighted the crowd, and drew comparisons to some of the great opening stanzas in the annals of pugilism−Graziano-Zale, Torres-Tiger, Frazier-Quarry and Dempsey-Firpo−but in the corner between rounds, Goody Petronelli had other matters on his mind.

  “Don’t worry about the cut,” he told Hagler as he swabbed away at the wound.

  “Close your eyes,” he warned the champion as he poured adrenaline solution into the cut.

  Hagler’s cut was nearly in the center of his forehead, and while his bald pate accentuated the appearance of the gore as it spread across his glistening head and ran down into his face, it could have been much worse had the wound been to one side or the other. As it was, the blood flowed almost straight down between his eyes, and not into one or the other.

  Because he was the one who was bleeding, Hagler’s corner was the focus of attention, but across the ring there was also cause for concern.

  “When Tommy came back to the corner after the first round he told me, ‘My hand’s broke,’” recalled Steward. “I said ‘What do you mean? Is it sore? ’”

  “No,” said Hearns. “It’s broke. ”

  It was, said Steward, but “the idea of quitting never entered my mind. That just wasn’t who Thomas Hearns was.”

  Hagler charged out of his corner to land a long right, but Hearns avoided further damage by retreating. Then, with Hearns on the run, Hagler briefly, but inexplicably, switched to an orthodox attack. That interlude consumed no more than half a minute; there were other times in the fight when he waded in with such a two-fisted attack that it would have been difficult to tell which hand he was leading with.

  Hearns, who had fought the first as if he expected it to be a one-round fight, was much more cautious in the second. Attempting to maintain his range, he did his best to jab away at Hagler from a safer distance.

  Late in the second Hearns appeared to be in full retreat, doing his best to counterpunch against Hagler’s charge, but his own rights were increasingly wild. Hagler’s jab seemed to be finding its mark as the champion repeatedly cut off the ring to take away Hearns’ avenues of escape. A Hagler left caught Hearns off balance and momentarily appeared to stagger him. The challenger’s spindly legs were beginning to look suspect.

  “Box, Tommy! Box!” shouted Steward.

  “It’s pretty tough to box,” said Ralph Citro, the boxing record-keeper working as the cut man in Hearns’ corner, “when you’re being attacked by a swarm of bees.”

  Toward the end of the round Hagler trapped Hearns on the ropes, as he had in the first. Just before the bell Marvin landed a right-left combination followed by another right hook. All three punches appeared to find their mark.

  Hearns wobbled back to his corner, and Petronelli went back to work on the cut between rounds.

  “I was a little worried that they might stop it because of the cut,” Hagler confessed later.

  As the third began, Hagler again switched to an orthodox stance, and then further confounded Hearns by landing three straight right-hand leads.

  Steele had allowed the third to begin, but half a minute into the round the blood was pouring so copiously from Hagler’s cut that he halted the action and brought the ringside physician, Donald Romeo, into the champion’s corner.

  “[The doctor] asked me if I could see all right and I said, ‘Sure, I can see fine,’” recalled Hagler. (The champion would later claim that he told Romeo, “I ain’t missing him, am I? ” but the rejoinder was almost certainly supplied after the fact by Pat Putnam. Tapes of the doctor’s visit to the corner suggest that if Hagler actually did utter that now classic line, he must have been an even better ventriloquist than he was a boxer.)

  Allowed to resume, Hagler and Hearns went right back at it.

  “I’ve been refereeing for fifteen years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much intensity in a fight,” Steele would say afterward.

  Just beyond the midpoint of the third, Hagler, in pursuit of Hearns, caught the Hit Man off balance with a lunging straight right to the head. Hearns, dazed, went reeling across the ring in stutter-steps, finally coming to a halt when he believed himself to be out of harm’s way. As Hearns began to turn his head, the traces of one of those brief “Hey-I’m-not-hurt!” smirks had just begun to form on his lips when he realized that Hagler had chased him across the ring and was right on top of him.

  Hagler landed two crushing rights, punctuated by a left that missed mainly because Hearns had already begun to fall. The first of the right hands started Hearns on his trip to the canvas. The second ensured that he would have great difficulty getting back up.

  Hearns hit the deck flat on his back, staring up at the desert sky. It initially appeared that he might not get up at all, but he struggled to his feet and barely made the count. One glance at the blank expression on Hearns’ face was all Steele needed to stop the bout. As he cradled Hearns in his arms the beaten fighter sagged, and the referee, realizing he was all that was holding the Hit Man erect, gently lowered him back to the canvas, where he remained for another minute or two.

  “It was really the only way to fight a guy like Tommy Hearns,” Hagler would later recall. “I had to go inside and work him. I told you I’d cut him down like a tree, and
I did just that.”

  As Hagler celebrated across the ring, QB Hines, the gentle Kronk giant, bent over to pick up Hearns and carried him, like a baby, across the ring. QB was incongruously clad in a white dinner jacket, a red boutonniere in his lapel, and the picture of the big man holding Tommy appeared in papers all around the world.

  Rudimentary computerized statistics of the day revealed that Hagler and Hearns had unleashed a combined 339 punches in just eight minutes of boxing, and that each had landed well over half the punches he threw. Hagler connected on 96 of 173, Hearns 94 of 166.

  “I want to give Tommy all the credit in the world,” said Hagler afterward. “He put up an excellent fight. He came out the only way he could if he wanted to take something away from a champion.”

  Emanuel Steward would say years later that Hearns fought the last five minutes of the eight-minute dance on raw courage alone.

  “After the first round,” said Steward, “his hand was broke and his legs were gone. But that night, Tommy told me not to mention anything about the hand. He said he didn’t want to take anything away from Hagler’s victory. That’s the kind of guy Tommy was.

  “So we wrapped it real good and put ice on it. Tommy didn’t even go to the hospital that night because word would have leaked out. We gave him some pain pills, but he didn’t see a doctor about it until we got back to Detroit.”

  “He came in, took my best shot, and fought his ass off,” said Hearns of Hagler.

  “It was a roll of the dice,” said Citro. “They both had to gamble. Hagler gambled and won, Hearns gambled and lost. I think he just punched himself out.”

  In Citro’s medical opinion, Hagler’s wound would have forced a stoppage had Hearns been able to last another round or two. “A cut like that just spurts blood all night long,” he said. By the time Steele stopped it, Hagler was also sporting a cut across the bridge of his nose.

  Once he revived, a weary Hearns, accompanied by Steward, made his way along the corridor in the Sports Pavilion and presented himself in Hagler’s dressing room to offer his congratulations.

  The trash-talking of the past few months was quickly forgotten as the two adversaries embraced.

  “You’ve got a lot of class coming in here like this,” Hagler told him before promising, “If I had lost, I’d have done the same thing.”

  The two gladiators hugged again.

  “I want you to keep on winning, Marvin,” Hearns told the champion. “You were the better man tonight−but we both deserved that $5 million.”

  Actually, Hagler’s end came closer to $10 million, despite the disappointing take in some areas of the country.

  “We did very well in most places,” said Arum. “It fell off a little in the South, and didn’t do as well as we expected in Texas. The Northeast, especially New England, did very, very well. But Chicago sucked.” In contrast to the approximately 200,000 buys The Fight engendered in the New York area, Chicago had only 20,000.

  When she laid eyes on her father for the first time in weeks the next morning, three-year-old Charelle Monique Hagler ran her finger over the bandage on his head.

  “Daddy got a boo-boo,” she said.

  As it turned out, Tommy had one, too. When he got back to Detroit, X-rays confirmed what Hearns had known after the first round. He had broken a bone in his right hand.

  Even though by most estimates it had been one of the most exciting fights of all time, not even its promoter seemed interested in a rematch. The devastating manner in which Hagler had finished Hearns effectively squelched talk of a return bout.

  “I couldn’t sell it,” said Arum. “Even though The Fight was a big success, in order to sell a rematch we would have to convince people that if they fought again the result would be any different. Who would pay to see it? ”

  Two years later Gene Mayday, the proprietor of Little Caesars Sports Book on the strip, told the Boston Herald ’s Mike Globetti that the Hagler-Hearns fight had resulted in a half-million dollar bloodbath for his establishment.

  “All the money toward the end went to Hearns and actually made him the favorite,” Mayday told Globetti, but several well-heeled Hagler supporters (“close friends” of the middleweight champion, the bookmaker described them) had swooped in to bet Hagler by knockout in the early rounds.

  Little Caesars’ original line for a Hagler third-round KO had been 25-1.

  “His people started betting it at $1,000 or more a pop, so it went down,” said Mayday. “But, hell, they kept betting it. 22-1. 20-1. They still kept betting it. We got killed .”

  In the aftermath of Hagler’s devastating performance, speculation reigned over the question “Who’s next? ”

  The most likely suspect immediately took himself out of the running.

  “If I ever needed a reason to stay retired, that was it,” said Ray Charles Leonard.

  At Hagler’s victory party at Caesars a few hours after the fight I was approached by Butch Lewis, who promoted light-heavyweight champion Michael Spinks. Lewis wanted to put together a fight between the two champions.

  “Gee, I don’t know, Butch,” I told him. “Do you really think Michael can make 160? ”

  The idea of a Hagler-Spinks fight did appeal to Tommy Hearns, who urged Marvin to consider it.

  “Sure,” snorted Hagler. “So you can move up and have the middle-weights? ”

  The most obvious challenger was James Shuler, 21-0 and ranked No. 1 by both the WBC and WBA, but the public barely recognized his name. The hope was that his anonymity might be improved with more high-profile exposure before Hagler had to engage him in a mandatory defense.

  As it turned out, Shuler would have only two more fights. (In the first of them, later that summer, he won a decision over Hagler’s sparring partner Jerry Holly.)

  A day after The Fight Arum had set his sights on the next foe−the un-defeated Ugandan John “The Beast” Mugabi.

  “Mugabi is the hot fighter right now, and he’s the one the TV people want,” agreed Pat Petronelli. “We can always make a deal with Shuler, put him on the undercard, and promise him the winner.”

  “Mugabi is a dangerous knockout specialist,” said the promoter. “People would want to see that fight.”

  Chapter 8

  The Super Fight

  Hagler–Leonard

  Caesars Palace, April 6, 1987

  The devastating nature of his win against Hearns finally brought Hagler the acclaim he had sought. When the Boxing Writers Association of America voted for the recipients of its awards for 1985, Marvelous Marvin was the overwhelming choice as Fighter of the Year. At the same dinner at which Hagler was honored, I received the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism. There was little doubt in my mind that my election had come on Marvin’s coattails.

  The following spring, Hagler would engage in a fight that unwittingly provided the springboard for the matchup he’d dreamed of since 1973−a chance to confirm his greatness against Sugar Ray Leonard. Nobody could have guessed it at the time, but his 1986 fight against John “The Beast” Mugabi would be the last he would ever win.

  Born in Uganda, John Mugabi had come of age amid the repressive regime of Idi Amin Dada, and won a silver medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. When he turned professional and relocated to London under the aegis of Mickey Duff, Mugabi was rechristened “The Beast” and fought primarily in Europe before Duff shifted his operations to the United States in late 1982.

  Over the next three years, The Beast ate his way through a collection of respectable, though decidedly second-tier, American middleweight and junior-middleweight contenders. In one of those early fights, Duff matched Mugabi against a solid opponent, Curtis Ramsey, on a card promoted by Don King.

  “I’d been telling Don that I had a boy who was going to be a champion,” recalled Duff. “I kept pestering him to use Mugabi on the undercard of a show he was running in Atlantic City.

  “Put him in tough,” Duff told King. “I don’t mind.”

  �
�I had to fly back to England on business, so I left Mugabi in the hands of [trainer] George Francis, and told George to ring me collect the minute the fight was over,” said Duff. “So here I was, sitting at home in London when George called to tell me John had knocked out Ramsey in the first round. He said he hit him with a punch that was so hard it knocked Ramsey and the referee, Larry Hazzard, right out of the ring and onto the press table.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Francis added, “Mr. King would like a word with you.”

  “Hey, Mickey,” said King over the transatlantic line, “I’m in! Heh-heh-heh! That is the meanest motherfucker I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “You know,” King continued, “I had a little talk with Mugabi after the fight, and he says he wants to go with me, but of course I told him you and me were in this together.”

  “I let him get it all out,” said Duff. “And then I said, ‘Don, if that conversation took place then you must be fluent in Swahili, because the lad doesn’t speak a word of English.’ ”

  By August 1985 Mugabi’s record stood at 25-0 and he had risen to No. 1 in the WBA’s world rankings. Not one of his opponents had lasted the distance.

  Arum had initially slated the Hagler-Mugabi fight for November 1985, but after the champion injured his back in training, the bout was rescheduled for Monday, March 10, 1986, at Caesars Palace.

  Despite The Beast’s fearsome credentials, Hagler was a better than 3-1 favorite, and at a pre-fight news conference at Caesars promised that he would “feast on The Beast.”

  “Look, I realize this man Mugabi’s got a dream,” said Hagler. “I had my own dream once, but these things are not easy to come by. I can see him eyeing my clothes and checking out my jewelry, but I spent a long time in this game before I could even put food on the table.”

  Mugabi, with former lightweight champion Cornelius Boza-Edwards serving as his interpreter, suggested that the thirty-two-year-old champion’s time had come and gone, and that he was ripe for the taking.

  “Mugabi,” Hagler turned to face his adversary, “you better be nice to me. You keep calling me an old man, you’re only going to make me meaner.”