“I will not let him dictate the fight,” vowed Leonard. “If he comes out full steam, he can only do it for one or two rounds. He can’t keep it up.”
Hagler-Leonard would be the tenth middleweight title fight held in Las Vegas. Beginning with his fight against Sugar Ray Robinson back in 1961, Gene Fullmer had been a participant in the first three, while Hagler had fought in five of the other six. The Super Fight was Hagler’s third headline appearance in a row at Caesars, and the fourth time in four years he had topped the bill there.
“It’s getting better,” he said. “You know, before the Duran fight here I was a little bit tight. For the Hearns fight, I was a little less so. For this one, I’m confident. I know what’s ahead for me.”
Leonard was conducting public workouts at the Golden Gloves Gym, while Hagler sparred behind closed doors at Tocco’s.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Boston Herald ’s Mike Globetti was among a host of witnesses at the gym when sparring partner Quincy Taylor surprised Leonard, rocking him with an overhand left that, wrote Globetti, “seemed to shake the former champion.”
“Oh, Jesus!” cried John Madden, who had been sprawled on a folding chair, as he sat bolt upright.
Although Leonard and his handlers would, for public consumption, make light of the episode, Leonard would recall that “when Quincy hit me with that punch it knocked the shit out of me. I was hurt, and he was so surprised that he just backed away.”
If Hagler had an Achilles heel at all, it was probably the buildup of scar tissue that described his eyebrows and rendered him vulnerable to cuts. Leonard’s initial battle plan had been to go after the champion early, hoping to inflict damage that might lead to an early stoppage. The punch from his sparring partner revised that strategy.
“I thought, if this guy can hurt me, Hagler will kill me,” Leonard told Tim Dahlberg. “Thank God Quincy hit me, because I changed the plan.”
“I think what I brought back from Palm Springs helped Ray formulate his strategy,” said J.D. Brown. “But Quincy Taylor changed it even more.”
Over at Tocco’s, Hagler was sparring with old standby Bob Patterson, along with the Weaver Triplets, who had been brought in from Pomona, California, to emulate Leonard’s speed. (Pat Petronelli described them as “the three Weaver twins.” )
“They’ve done everything,” said Goody Petronelli of Floyd, Lloyd, and Troy. “They even stuck out their tongues and taunted Marvin. They did everything we expect Leonard to do.”
“It’s been tough,” Floyd Weaver acknowledged. “We knew it would be hard working against Hagler, but it’s real hard. He didn’t hold nothing back, and we didn’t either. We took a lot of bruises to the body, and Troy got a broken nose.”
Hagler and Leonard weren’t the only ones besieged by the press each day. Demands upon their respective cornermen were so incessant that Arum’s publicists found themselves arranging press conferences for Dundee and the Petronellis.
“Hagler’s been a great fighter, God bless him, and I’ve got a guy who’s not even supposed to be fighting,” said Dundee. “He’s been away, he was lousy in his last fight. It’s never been done before, but you can’t compare this to any other fight or any other fighter. Only Ray Leonard could do it.
“I respect the Petronelli Brothers,” Dundee told a flock of reporters that day. “They go with their fighter like Charlie Goldman and Rocky Marciano, like Whitey Bimstein and Rocky Graziano.”
Being showcased for the media gave the Petronellis an opportunity to trot out their Abbott and Costello act, with Pat playing Lou to Goody’s taciturn Bud.
When Goody was asked about the worst cut he’d ever had to repair, he didn’t even get to answer.
“I’ll tell you exactly when it was,” Pat interrupted. “You know that scar above Marvin’s left eye? Well, six years ago he was hanging a shower curtain in his bathroom. He slipped and hit the sink when he fell. Took fourteen stitches.”
To demonstrate that there were no hard feelings, Pasquale Petronelli and Dundee agreed to meet for dinner after the fight, with the loser picking up the tab and the winner choosing the menu. Dundee’s choice was linguine with clam sauce, Petronelli’s pasta fagioli, spaghetti and meatballs.
The weekend of the fight saw Al Bernstein make his debut as a crooner. The ESPN commentator, who would also work the closed-circuit telecast of the Super Fight, opened to rave reviews as a headline act in Caesars’ “Festival of Jazz” when he played the Olympia Lounge−the same venue in which Pat McGuigan had performed ten months earlier on the weekend of his son’s ill-fated Las Vegas debut.
Caesars was the epicenter of the boxing world that weekend, and the casino scheduled Friday and Saturday cards leading up to Hagler-Leonard Monday night.
Iran Barkley headlined an ESPN card on Friday night, facing Jorge Amparo of the Dominican Republic. Amparo held the WBC youth title, and the previous year had improbably emerged from a fight in Jakarta as the Orient-Pacific champion as well. Unimpressed, Barkley promised to relieve him of “this old tuna-fish belt he have.
“I came here to beat him up just for signing the contract,” said the Blade. Barkley won an unpopular decision despite receiving a nasty gash above his left eye that bled during the last half of the fight.
Terry Christle, who had treated Hagler in Palm Springs, might as well have used a scalpel on Albuquerque’s Sam Houston on the ESPN under-card, opening up four gashes on his opponent’s face before Davey Pearl stopped it in the fourth round.
(It would be Dr. Christle’s last pro win. Later that summer he lost for the first time, dropping a decision to Dave Tiberi in Atlantic City. He promptly retired from the ring with a record of 13-1-1 and devoted himself thereafter to the practice of medicine.)
A heavyweight bout on the Friday night show saw Orlin Norris knock out Texan Eddie Richardson in two.
On Saturday afternoon, CBS televised a live card headlined by a junior-middleweight clash between a pair of former champions, Donald Curry and Carlos Santos, won by Curry when Carlos Padilla disqualified Santos for “repeated head butts” in the fifth round. The network also carried a one-hour “Sports Saturday” special dedicated to Hagler-Leonard, with John Madden and Gil Clancy analyzing Monday night’s matchup.
Although CBS had no direct involvement with the Hagler-Leonard tele-cast, its usual boxing broadcast team of Tim Ryan and Gil Clancy would man the microphones for the live closed-circuit telecast. HBO had paid $3 million for “up to three” replays, while ABC, which had purchased the rights to the delayed -delayed broadcast, would also have a crew at ringside.
The heightened security measures surrounding Hagler’s preparation directly precipitated the goofy episode that would be recalled in Boston newspaper lore as “Cameragate.”
My newspaper, the Boston Herald, had dispatched three sportswriters and two photographers to the Super Fight. The first shutterbug, Rick Sennott, arrived just in time to learn that Hagler’s gym workouts would be off-limits. Since I was nominally the team leader and perceived as being the closest to the champion’s camp, I was asked to intercede with the Petronellis to get Sennott into the gym, but Pat and Goody, fearing that it would open the doors for a host of similar demands, refused the request.
Back in Boston, the desk wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I don’t care how you do it,” I was told. “Just do it.”
Thus was born Plan B. Although outsiders had been barred from the workouts, I knew Angie Carlino, who had been with Hagler since his amateur days, would be in the gym. Angie and I approached Goody Petronelli with a proposal: What if Carlino borrowed Sennott’s camera and took a few shots of Hagler in training?
“Well,” said Goody, “I guess if Angie did it, it would be okay.”
That night Carlino shot a roll of film with the Herald lensman’s Nikon, which he then slipped through the door to Sennott, who was waiting outside.
Not content with this modest victory, the desk back home trumpeted the pictures in the next mornin
g’s edition with a banner headline proclaiming them “Exclusive Herald Photos.”
The arch-rival Boston Globe and Hagler’s hometown Brockton Enterprise, outraged at having been scooped, protested to the Hagler camp.
Then, at Hagler’s final shakeout on Saturday night, someone at Tocco’s detected a clicking sound and, upon investigating, discovered two cameras secretly mounted above the ring.
The Petronellis’ immediate assumption was that the cameras were part of an espionage mission orchestrated by Leonard’s camp. The cameras were confiscated and the film immediately destroyed.
Leonard’s people insisted that they had had nothing to do with the cloak-and-dagger operation. “You sure Allen Funt didn’t put those cameras in there? ” laughed J.D. Brown.
As it turned out, the Leonard camp’s hands were indeed clean. The cameras had been installed by a Boston Globe photographer, Jimmy Wilson, in an apparent attempt to even the score for the Herald “exclusive.”
Even as a tearful Wilson pleaded for the return of his cameras, Globe sports editor Vince Doria (whom I somewhat gleefully described as “the Oliver North of the episode” ) acknowledged his role as the choreographer of the bungled subterfuge.
“It was just an effort to get our cameras into the gym,” confessed Doria. “Closing the workouts in the first place was ridiculous. If they’d opened it up for ten minutes on Wednesday we could have gotten all the photos we needed.”
As embarrassing as it was for the Globe −Jimmy Wilson eventually got his cameras back−the real victim turned out to be Angie Carlino.
Blaming Hagler’s personal photographer for the subsequent developments, Pat Petronelli angrily ordered Caesars official Rich Rose to revoke Carlino’s ringside credential. Banished from the champion’s entourage, Angie, who had been with Hagler throughout his career, watched his final fight from the stands.
A poll in one Las Vegas newspaper found that sixty of sixty-seven journalists covering the fight favored Hagler. One of them was Leonard’s longtime HBO broadcast colleague Larry Merchant, who picked Hagler in nine.
“I wouldn’t go onto an operating table if I knew the surgeon hadn’t been practicing regularly for five years,” said Merchant. “In any highly skilled profession, it’s impossible to maintain the same level of effectiveness when you’ve been away that long.”
Pat Putnam, who at one point had agreed to collaborate on Leonard’s autobiography, agreed with Merchant.
“A man can’t train in a tuxedo for five years and expect to beat the middle-weight champion of the world,” said Putnam. “Hagler in three−unless he hurries.”
“Hagler in four or five,” said Budd Schulberg. “I think he’ll be able to force Leonard to fight, and if that happens, he’s just too big for him.”
“Every time I look at Leonard,” said the New York Times’ Dave Anderson, “I keep thinking about Kevin Howard.”
Among the dissenters was Tom Cryan, who had flown from Dublin to cover the fight for the Irish Independent.
“I can’t see Leonard even taking this fight unless he thought he had a good chance of winning it,” said Cryan. “I can’t see either fighter knocking the other out, so I’m saying Leonard by decision.”
Michael Katz, who had moved from the Times to the New York Daily News, had also picked Leonard: “In the Hearns fight I saw that Marvin’s legs were no longer there after the first round, and in the Mugabi fight it was clear that his reflexes were fast fading,” said Katz. “He was taking shots he never would have been subjected to before.”
Katz had already written a piece for one of the London papers, in which he picked Leonard, but as the fight drew near, the Wolf Man’s resolve seemed to be wavering.
“When Larry Merchant heard I was waffling on my original pick, he suggested I write a column for the Daily News, revealing that I’d changed my mind,” recalled the Wolf Man. “He said it would be the only thing fight fans talked about in New York−and he was right about that. I looked like a genius in England and a schmuck in my own hometown.”
Hagler and Leonard shared three common opponents, and reporters chased down each of them in the days before the Super Fight.
“Sugar Ray,” said Marcos Geraldo, the Mexican middleweight who had gone the distance with both men. “He’s got more class, more boxing ability. He’s more refined.
“There won’t be a KO because both are very experienced. Sugar Ray doesn’t have enough punch to knock out Hagler, but he can win on points. Sugar is smarter and he is going to make Hagler look bad.”
Duran and Hearns were divided in their opinions.
“I fought both and I should know,” said Duran. “Leonard has no chance.”
Hearns was already on record picking Leonard. “The layoff will affect Ray, but I think he’ll be able to overcome it,” said the Hit Man. “I’ve seen how well he thinks in the ring. He’s the better boxer. If he boxes, goes side to side and gets that head movement going, he wins, but if Ray’s plan is to go toe-to-toe, I think it’s a mistake.”
Undoubtedly at the urging of some editor back in Boston, the Herald even solicited the opinion of former heavyweight champion Ivan Drago. Actor Dolph Lundgren, citing the conventional wisdom, liked Hagler. “I don’t think Ray will move as much as people think he will,” supposed Lundgren. “I think Leonard will stand there and try to go toe-to-toe with him, and eventually Hagler will just be too strong.”
Both corners had undergone some revision since each man last fought. Dave Jacobs had buried the hatchet and returned to the Leonard camp, and would work the corner with Dundee and Janks Morton.
And while Goldings had displaced Wainwright as Hagler’s attorney, Tony Petronelli would take the Barrister’s place manning the spit bucket in the champion’s corner.
“Back when I was fighting main events, he’d come into the arena with me,” reminisced Petronelli. “Instead of him working for me, I work for Marv now.”
The younger Petronelli recalled for reporters that week that back in 1978 he had nearly been matched against Leonard in the Boston fight Dickie Ecklund wound up getting. “He was a hotshot out of the Olympics, and they were fighting him up the East Coast,” said Tony. “He would’ve beaten me. He was a great fighter, and I was just a good one.”
Both Morton and Jacobs disputed this version of events.
“No way did we ever look at [Petronelli],” said Morton. “His name was never mentioned.”
“Maybe we should have,” added Jacobs. “Ecklund turned out to be a tough one.”
The final press conference at Caesars’ Colosseum Room (“a ‘room’ double the size of the real Coliseum,” noted Frank Dell’Apa) brought Hagler and Leonard together for the first time since the previous December 8 in San Francisco, just before Hagler jumped ship on the tour for good.
Leonard seemed strangely subdued, responding to most questions with one-word answers. Hagler arrived wearing a Legionnaire’s chapeau, replete with side-flaps, and kept his sunglasses on as he joked his way through the session.
“Is my hair okay? ” he asked at one point. And when someone asked what advice his trainers had imparted, Marvin replied, “They tell me that once I climb through the ropes, I’m on my own.”
When Leonard was asked about his “toughest fight,” he replied, “Bruce Finch.” (Although he had stopped Finch in three, that was the fight, it turned out, in which he had detached his retina.)
On Sunday publicist Irving Rudd handed out to the assembled media the menu for the meal Leonard had ordered up for his post-weigh-in repast: Chicken smothered in gravy and onions, creamed-style corn, fresh greens on rice, corn bread, iced tea, and fruit cocktail.
And what did Hagler plan to eat?
“Leonard,” said Unswerving Irving.
A crowd of 3,000 turned out on the morning of the Super Fight to watch Hagler and Leonard weigh in at the Sports Pavilion. Ring announcer Chuck Hull introduced the principals, who never got within ten feet of one another.
To a mixture of c
heers and boos, Leonard went first, doffing his sweat-suit top before he weighed in at 158.
Hagler, who had worn a white T-shirt lettered “CHAMPION” to the ceremony, removed the garment, as well as the hefty gold chain he wore about his neck, before he stepped on the scale.
“Marvin loses five pounds without his Mr. T starter kit,” cracked Akbar Muhammad.
Hagler’s weight was announced at 158 1/ 2 .
Neither man appeared to acknowledge the other’s presence.
For Hagler, whose weight hadn’t varied since his amateur days, it was business as usual, but Leonard’s heft represented a career high. He was not only forty pounds bigger than he had been for his first amateur fight, but weighed nearly twenty more pounds than he had when he made his pro debut against Luis Vega a decade earlier.
“All of that weight is natural,” publicist Charlie Brotman pointed out to Frank Dell’Apa. “No weights. He worked out for a year, hitting the speed bag, really banging the heavy bag, jumping rope, sparring, sit-ups. Look at his legs: I don’t know about the other guy, but Ray’s legs are really solid.”
“All I know about legs,” Pat Petronelli responded, “is that you can run faster forward than backward. And our guy is ready to go forward.”
Shielding itself in advance from criticism, the Nevada State Athletic Commission trotted out a retinal specialist, Louis Angioletti, who attested to the soundness of Leonard’s eyesight.
“I found him perfectly fit,” said Dr. Angioletti. “Boxers have a greater risk by virtue of their profession, but Ray Leonard has no greater risk than any other boxer on the card, before or after his fight. That’s the bottom line.”
Associated Press scribe Fast Eddie Schuyler was moved to note that “the commission probably told Leonard that if something happened to his eye, he could be a judge.”
At the pre-fight rules meeting, Dundee complained to the commission about the location of Hagler’s protective cup.
“He wears his trunks so high because he wears the damn cup up around his ribs,” said Dundee. “I saw a photo in the New York Times Magazine recently where Hagler was posing in a pair of shorts, and it was the first time in my life I’d ever seen Hagler’s navel. I was beginning to wonder if he had one.”
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