Hoping to beat Leonard to the punch as the first man to win world titles in five different divisions, Hearns scheduled a fight against Fulgencio Obelmejias, Hagler’s old Venezuelan foe, who now owned the WBA super-middleweight title. They were to face off at the Las Vegas Hilton on November 4−three nights before Leonard-Lalonde.
A few weeks before the bout, Obelmejias suffered a rib injury in training and withdrew from the bout. James Kinchen, a respectable pug from San Diego with a 45-4-2 record, replaced Obelmejias as Hearns’ opponent, and the newly created World Boxing Organization agreed to recognize the Hearns-Kinchen winner as its first 168-pound champion.
The WBO had yet to establish much credibility in the boxing world, but Bob Arum noted, not unreasonably, that to dismiss the WBO as “a joke” suggested that the other organizations were not.
Although Hearns built up an early lead, in the fourth round Kinchen followed a big right hand with a left hook that put Tommy on the floor. He got up woozily, barely able to stand.
Hearns’ inability, or unwillingness, to clinch had cost him the first Leonard fight, but in the intervening years he had apparently learned his lesson well. He got through the round only by seizing Kinchen in what I described as a “Motown Death Grip.”
“I was holding him like he was my woman,” Tommy confessed afterward.
Mills Lane, who had to keep prying Hearns loose from Kinchen, was not as amused−particularly when he was nearly throttled by the same strangle-hold Hearns was applying to Kinchen. After numerous warnings, the referee took a point from Hearns (“The best point he ever spent,” noted Tommy’s hometown scribe, Mike O’Hara) and appeared to be within an eyelash of disqualifying him altogether.
Hearns, in any case, survived the round, and, ultimately, the fight. Although the verdict came in the form of a narrow majority decision (Bill Graham and Cindy Bartin scored it for Hearns 115-112 and 114-112, while Larry Rozadilla had it even at 114-114), the Hit Man prevailed.
The victory set the stage for a long-awaited rematch with Leonard the following June. The first time they had met, each owned a share of the welterweight championship. This time it would also be a unification bout, with both the WBC and WBO super-middleweight titles on the line.
Leonard prepared for Hearns II in Palm Beach−less than an hour’s drive north of Dundee’s home in Pembroke Pines.
Ray was working with his third trainer in as many fights. Following Dundee’s acrimonious departure after the Hagler fight, Janks Morton had walked away after the Lalonde bout.
Morton had moved to Phoenix, where he occupied himself with other boxers−among them former heavyweight champion Greg Page and Canadian heavyweight contender Donovan “Razor” Ruddock−during Leonard’s several retirements.
For public consumption, he had departed for reasons similar to those voiced by Jacobs seven years earlier. Off what he’d seen in the Lalonde fight, he, too, had urged Ray to retire, and declined to countenance his further participation in the ring.
There was a lingering suspicion that, like the Dundee situation before, this was a rift that probably could have been resolved by money. Those closest to Ray suggested that Morton had erred in attempting to haggle with Trainer over his proposed fee, rather than taking his case directly to the boxer himself.
“But Janks had another problem,” a Leonard associate confided. “He‘d known Ray since he was a little boy, and he still tended to talk down to him. Ray doesn’t like that.”
Now, to supplant Jacobs in the corner, Ray turned to a man he’d known as long as any of them−Pepe Correa, the man who’d helped Jacobs start the boxing program back in Palmer Park eighteen years earlier.
When Correa left Palmer Park (“for personal reasons,” he says) he established an inner-city boxing club called The Latin Connection at 14th and Columbia in Washington. Among his pupils there had been Simon Brown and Maurice Blocker, both of whom would become world champions. Outside the District of Columbia, few boxing people even knew Correa’s name before he joined the Leonard camp, and he didn’t make many new converts once he had the spotlight. Not only was he replacing Angelo Dundee, a revered figure in boxing circles, but he was also telling anyone who would listen that it was no great loss, because “I’m a better trainer than he is, anyway.”
Leonard was still in Palm Beach when he publicly confirmed for the first time that he and his wife had separated.
The couple had actually split nearly a year earlier, but with Leonard in camp, Trainer learned that the media was looking into the story of the marital breakup. “I sat down with Ray and told him, ‘You probably ought to announce it yourself. It’s the only way you’re going to keep the Washington Post out of your bushes,’” said Trainer.
Charlie Brotman was instructed to issue a statement. When the item broke into print several days later, it was buried in a two-part Post series on Leonard and merely mentioned in passing that the couple had separated “some time earlier.”
Juanita and their two sons had actually visited Leonard in Palm Beach, and planned to fly to Vegas to attend the Hearns fight together.
“It was a mutual decision, and it’s been a very amicable arrangement,” said Trainer, who had handled his share of divorce cases over the years. “If all separations were like this, I’d be broke.”
For nearly two months Leonard and Hearns periodically interrupted their training to appear in Arum-arranged press conferences around the country. Although their rematch had been christened “The War,” one of Arum’s public relations geniuses had suggested that the two gladiators cast themselves as spokesmen addressing world issues.
In Chicago, Leonard and Hearns announced that they were declaring “War on Crime on Public Transportation.” In Los Angeles (where Arum presumably wasn’t counting on many pay-per-view buys from either the Crips or the Bloods), the theme became “War on Gangs.” In Hearns’ hometown, the subject was one nearer and dearer to many Detroiters’ hearts−“War on Imports.”
“I understand Tommy’s been working a lot on a bicycle,” teased Leonard at one of the press stops. “But the thing about it is, people don’t punch you while you’re riding a bicycle going backwards. Sooner or later his legs are going to say, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m tired’ −and when those legs give out, the fight is over. ”
When Leonard described Hearns as “a shot fighter,” Tommy responded: “ You more shot than I am.”
According to Trainer, “the biggest mistake Hearns made was agreeing to play cards with Ray on the press tour. Ray suckered him in, and before Tommy knew what had hit him, he’d lost $2,000 playing ‘in-between’ on the Caesars plane.”
Leonard had been guaranteed $14 million, Hearns $11 million, but Arum was predicting that closed-circuit and pay-per-view revenues might gross between $60 and $80 million, “which,” noted Pat Putnam, “would send the boxers’ purses soaring to national-debt levels.”
Moreover, although the fight was for a 168-pound title, the bout agreement called for both contestants to weigh 164, with financial penalties should either exceed that.
In what was probably a calculated approach, both boxers tended to downplay comparisons between The War and their earlier meeting.
“I don’t punch that hard anymore,” admitted the thirty-three-year-old Leonard.
“I don’t remember shit about the first fight,” said Hearns. “I’ve had a lot of fights since then [sixteen in all; Leonard, remarkably, had engaged in just four]. You shouldn’t even think about that fight in ’81. It was a long time ago.”
Asked why the return bout had been so long in the making, Hearns replied “I think he was waiting around for me to slide. And after viewing my last couple of fights, he thinks it’s time.”
But in a more pensive moment, Hearns admitted that he was still haunted by the first fight.
“Eight years of pain, with a little monster following me around,” he described it. “This whole thing is about payback. [Leonard] knows how bad I want him.”
Four days before The War, at the final pre-fight press conference at Caesars, the Hearns camp dropped a bombshell by invoking the S word. Leonard’s upper body appeared conspicuously more bulked-up than it had been for the Lalonde fight the previous autumn, and Tommy, for one, suggested that he might have had some help.
“I’ve been working on my legs, but you been working on your body,” Hearns told Sugar Ray. “I think you want to be a bodybuilder. The way you pumped up, you look like you been taking steroids or something!”
Nervous titters of laughter greeted the Hit Man’s taunting, but when Emanuel Steward repeated the charge it was no longer a joking matter.
“I’m seriously considering asking them to test both boxers for steroids,” said Steward. “I’ve been hearing rumors for some time. A source told me Leonard had been using steroids.”
The steroid question became the burning issue for the day. Reporters flocked to Dr. Elias Ghanem, the chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and to NSAC executive director Chuck Minker. “It’s not part of our testing procedure, and I see no reason to test for it at this time,” said Ghanem, but Minker appeared to take it more seriously, allowing that testing “might be considered” if either camp requested it at the following day’s rules meeting.
“I haven’t especially been working on my body,” said Leonard. “I’m thirty-three years old, and that’s what happens when you’re thirty-three.”
Although Leonard laughed off the accusation, Mike Trainer was outraged.
“What Hearns said and what he did was, well, good theater. It’s actually flattering that Ray looks that good, and I’m just glad Tommy noticed,” said the lawyer.
“But that’s a cheap shot coming from Emanuel. I’ll tell you what we’ll do: We’ll each put up $100,000, and they can test Ray before the fight, after the fight, and they can take a break after the sixth round and test him then, too. We’ll see how good his ‘sources’ are.”
Trainer added that he wouldn’t even ask Hearns to take a test. “Tommy,” he said, “doesn’t look like he’s been taking steroids.”
When Leonard was asked if he had any objection to the inclusion of steroid testing in the pre-fight exam, he replied “Not at all.
“How do you do it, anyway? ” he asked.
A urinalysis, somebody guessed.
“In that case,” said Ray, “can I do it right now? ”
Hearns had engaged James Kinchen, his most recent opponent, to spar with him in Las Vegas.
This time nobody even bothered with trying to put a disguise on J.D. Brown; the espionage was conducted right out in the open. One afternoon, Roger Leonard had walked right into the Sports Pavilion and taken a seat in the audience assembled there for Hearns’ public workout. Ray’s brother subsequently delivered a blow-by-blow assessment of the engagement.
“Incidentally, that was no low blow,” Leonard twitted Hearns about an incident Roger had seen in the sparring session. “In fact, I’m gonna throw the same damn punch.”
Kinchen was due in Atlantic City, where he was fighting Stacy McSwain two nights later, but Steward offered manager Wes Wambold an extra $2,500 if he would stick around for one more sparring session. Kinchen went three rounds with Hearns on Wednesday and flew to Atlantic City on the morning of June 8th. He stopped McSwain in five that night.
After losing to Leonard, Donny Lalonde−poet, vegetarian, actor, and sometime Bob Dylan consort−had announced his retirement from the ring on the grounds that he could no longer reconcile causing deliberate pain with the rest of his philosophical outlook.
Lalonde had arrived at this epiphany in mid-ring during a New York sparring session with Hector Rosario.
“There was just this tremendous sense of guilt about hurting another human being,” he recalled in Vegas that week. “And this was a sparring partner . The thought stayed with me from that day on, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was not a good thing to be in a boxing ring in that frame of mind.”
Lalonde voiced his opinion that instead of fighting each other, Leonard and Hearns should join him in retirement.
“Personally, I think it’s quite unfortunate,” said the Canadian, who had earned $5 million for being knocked out by Leonard the previous November. “I suppose the biggest question I have deals with motivation: Why are they fighting again? I mean, between them, they must have made well over $100 million, so if it’s about money, you’re talking about extreme greed.
“And if it’s ego, my God, with all these two have accomplished, if they don’t feel good about themselves by now . . . ”
Steward seemed to admit that Lalonde had a point.
“If Tommy was fighting anybody but the senior-circuit guys, I’d hate to see him fight again at all,” said Steward, who promised “he will not fight any of the younger fighters, period.
“There aren’t that many of the old fellows left, anyway,” added Steward. “Duran, Hagler−I still say he’s going to come back−and maybe another re-match with Ray if this is a really great fight. But Tommy can’t get himself motivated to fight these younger guys, and the rewards for fighting a guy like Barkley or Nunn just don’t measure up to the risks involved.
“What’s Tommy got to gain compared to what he’s got to lose? He can’t get up for these guys, and if he beats a Michael Nunn, people will just say, ‘So what? ’”
Hearns was asked whether he might walk away from the sport if he avenged his loss to Leonard.
“Naw,” he replied. “I would like to have a rematch with Marvin Hagler. But Barkley doesn’t really mean as much to me.”
Bob Arum had brazenly predicted an unprecedented viewing audience of one billion, but by Thursday he was beginning to waver. His fanciful projection had apparently included an unspecified number of viewers in China, but five days after the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, the state-controlled television stations in that nation did not seem to be running many Hearns-Leonard promos.
“You can’t trust those Orientals,” said Arum. “They’ll do anything to up-stage you.”
Most of his audience groaned. Arum’s Japanese-American wife, Sybil, rolled her eyes in embarrassment.
“I’m a promoter, and it’s my business to hype fights,” Arum said that day. “But this is worth considering: When they met in Manila, Muhammad Ali was nine months older than Ray Leonard will be Monday night. Joe Frazier was a year older than Tommy Hearns, and had lost two of his last three fights. But on October 1 in 1975, I saw the greatest fight I’ve ever seen in my life!”
By 1989, Arum was virtually at war with NBC in general, and with Dr. Ferdie Pacheco in particular. The network was backing away from its commitment to boxing, and the Fight Doctor, who had approval on the matches NBC did buy, had been shunning Top Rank’s fights.
After Arum charged that Pacheco knew “next to nothing about boxing,” the Fight Doctor responded by describing the Hearns-Leonard matchup as “a battle of two sinking battleships.”
Although the 15,000-capacity stadium guaranteed that the audience would only be 60% of that for the 1981 Hearns-Leonard fight, tickets were the hottest commodity in the country.
Six days before the fight, authorities in Detroit arrested a man they described as “a very high-level drug dealer” and found him to be in possession of a pair of $800 ringside tickets.
Noting that “our office is obligated by law to preserve the value of the property seized during the pendency of the action,” and recognizing that the ducats would be worthless after Monday night, Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney Marshall Goldberg contacted Arum for advice on how to proceed.
“Send them back,” Arum told him. “I’ll sell them again.”
Hearns shook out at the Sports Pavilion on Saturday, and despite shadow-boxing six rounds in 100-degree heat appeared to be bone dry.
“When you’re not sweating like that, it means you haven’t been taking liquids,” noted Evander Holyfield. “That usually means you’ve got a weight problem.”
It seemed unlikely that Hearns would have difficulty making 168, but every ounce over 164 would reduce his purse.
A month earlier, Eddie Futch had broken his leg in an automobile accident. His top assistant, Freddie Roach, had taken charge of Futch’s stable of boxers while he recuperated. The seventy-seven-year-old trainer was at Caesars for Hearns’ final shakeout and reflected on Monday night’s fight.
“I like Leonard, of course,” said Futch. “Hearns has had just too many tough fights lately, with Roldan, Barkley, and Kinchen, and his legs are showing the wear and tear from them. His chin, which never was great, figures to get him in trouble.
“But Hearns can still punch,” added Futch. “He’ll be dangerous for three or four rounds. Leonard can’t afford to get hit like he did against Lalonde, but he should win around the eighth or ninth.”
Although no one accused him of being a spy, another of Leonard’s Washington neighbors, Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, dropped by to watch Hearns’ final workout. UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian was also conspicuous by his presence during the week leading up to the fight. Tark the Shark had a minority interest in a couple of Las Vegas-based boxers, Kenyan welterweight Robert Wangila and American bantamweight Kennedy McKinney.
There would be four men in each corner on the night of The War. Steward, Prentiss Byrd, and Walter Smith had all been there for the first Hearns-Leonard fight. The only new face was that of Ralph Citro, the cut man who had replaced Don Thibodeaux.
In Leonard’s revamped corner only Ollie Dunlap remained from the first fight, and Ollie was the first to admit, “I don’t even understand boxing. I just yell a lot, and in between rounds I hand up the bucket.”
Correa, who was the chief second, said of being reunited with Leonard, “I’ve been in and I’ve been out. I’m kind of like the Billy Martin of this camp.”
Dave Jacobs, of course, had been wearing a Kronk jacket when Leonard and Hearns fought in 1981. Those three would be joined by cut man Eddie Aliano.
Four Kings Page 31
