Aliano and Citro had each worked over 100 world title fights, but, said Citro, “Way back when Eddie fought, I was his cut man. He was such a lousy fighter I had to teach him to be a cut man, too.”
Aliano didn’t argue with that, but he pointed out that this was not the first time he and Citro had eyed each other from opposing corners.
“I stopped Hearns with Barkley,” said Eddie.
That having been duly noted, the Hearns brain trust appeared to have a considerable edge in big-fight experience. Pepe Correa had worked a few title fights with IBF welterweight champion Simon Brown, but this would be his first exposure to the international limelight.
Arum, visions of a full-fledged Seniors Tour dancing in his head, ensured the presence of Hagler and Duran at the Hearns-Leonard fight by hiring them to work on the English and Spanish closed-circuit telecasts.
Duran was unabashedly rooting for Leonard in the hope of a rubber match of their series. (A rematch with Hearns, on the other hand, did not seem to appeal to Cholo.)
“Leonard has to win so he can fight me. It’s 1-1 with me and Sugar,” Duran said through his interpreter, “so I think Leonard owes me a fight. I want to fight Leonard and nobody else.”
Asked why he was still boxing at his advanced age, Duran cheerfully replied, “for the money.”
Hagler, who would man a microphone alongside Tim Ryan and Gil Clancy, didn’t arrive until Sunday, the day before the fight. Although he was on the promoter’s payroll, Hagler didn’t sound much like a man trying to sell Hearns-Leonard to the public.
“War? ” Hagler snarled. “The war was between me and Tommy. This is not war. This is a chess-and-checkers game.
“You know,” added Hagler, “these guys have been watching me fight for a long time. When I fought Duran, Hearns was watching. Then once I exposed Hearns, he started getting banged around by everybody else. That’s the only reason Leonard is taking this fight now.”
Although he said he found it difficult to pick a winner, Hagler, who never lost a rematch, pointed out that “once you’ve defeated a fighter before, it not only gives you confidence, but the knowledge of how to do it. The other guy isn’t going to be able to do much different.”
Hagler added that “if Tommy tries to bang Leonard out right away, he’s making a big mistake. He was winning their first fight until he got stopped−and this one is only twelve rounds.”
Marvelous Marvin seemed to be enjoying retirement. He had already completed shooting on his first movie.
“My hardest job is staying out of the boxing game,” he said. “I’ve got nothing left to prove.”
But “you never say never,” allowed Hagler.
“Who knows? ” he managed a laugh. “If these guys beat each other up bad enough it might make it easier for me to think about returning.”
Arum and the imaginative Caesars Palace publicity crew had distributed souvenir plastic Army helmet liners advertising The War. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever got Leonard or Hearns to wear one, but when I ran into Duran at poolside one afternoon he happily donned a helmet. When Cholo strolled through the casino wearing it later that day I was moved to note in the Herald that he looked “for all the world like one of General Noriega’s enforcers.”
The arrival of the Fight Mob at Caesars for Hearns-Leonard II coincided with a convention of 18,000 Southern Baptists in Las Vegas that week. On the strip just outside Caesars, flag-waving Baptists were trying to pass out Jesus Loves You literature to drug dealers from Detroit, while a few feet away, a rather jaundiced-looking Vegas wino offered pamphlets advertising a local escort service. A taxi driver taking a boxing writer to Tocco’s Gym over the weekend reported that his cab company had just ferried two carloads of Baptists out to The Ranch−a legal brothel on the outskirts of town.
The weekend before the Hearns-Leonard rematch, my Herald colleague Michael Gee surveyed several local sports books for a story on the gambling aspects of the fight and discovered that Leonard was a 7-5 favorite in some betting parlors, while others gave the slight edge to Hearns. Ray was 2-1 to win by either knockout or decision, Tommy 3-1 by knockout, 5-1 by decision.
Gee discovered more than thirty-two betting propositions on offer, including a 15-1 price on a Hearns first-round knockout, 10-1 on a Leonard first-round KO. Interestingly, the story, which ran across three columns, did not address the possibility of a draw.
Gee was, however, standing in the Sports Book at Caesars the next day when he came upon what he described as “two young men just off the plane from Copenhagen,” staring intently at a large television set as a replay of the Hagler-Leonard fight played on the screen.
“Is there still time to get a bet on this fight? ” asked one of the Danes.
Gee briefly considered offering a man-to-man wager before informing the visitors that the fight they were watching had been over for a couple of years.
Over the course of the week most of the questions surrounding The War revolved around Leonard−his inactivity, the relative inexperience of his corner, and the red-herring steroid issue−but on Sunday morning the shocking news from Detroit struck Vegas like a lightning bolt and suddenly made Thomas Hearns the focus of attention.
Less than forty-eight hours before Hearns was supposed to enter the ring against Leonard, a nineteen-year-old girl had been shot dead at Tommy’s suburban Southfield home. And the boxer’s youngest brother had been charged with the murder.
Police described it as “a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”
When Tommy departed for Las Vegas, he had left his twenty-two-year-old brother, Henry, in charge of the house. Shortly after midnight on Saturday, at what appeared to have been a party gone awry, an argument broke out between Henry Hearns and his girlfriend, Nancy Barile.
“Mr. Hearns ordered the victim into a room she didn’t want to go to,” Oakland County Prosecutor Lawrence Kozma would describe the shooting at Henry Hearns’ arraignment.
According to Kozma, a witness had heard Henry Hearns threaten, “I’m going to blow your brains out.”
“The victim’s brains were in fact blown out,” added the prosecutor.
Although Thomas Hearns was by all accounts a solid citizen−even after becoming a professional boxer he had served as an auxiliary policeman in Detroit−his entourage had always included some unsavory types.
Shortly before the Iran Barkley fight, Tommy’s former girlfriend Kimberly Craig (the mother of his daughter Natasha) had been killed by a shotgun blast while sitting in her car in Detroit.
A year or two earlier, a Kronk hanger-on and sometime Hearns bodyguard named Rick Carter had been wounded in a bungled assassination attempt. When the assailants learned that they hadn’t finished the job, they broke into the ward and gunned down “Maserati Rick” in his hospital bed.
And of course there had been the gun-cleaning incident at the Caesars swimming pool before the first Leonard fight.
Back in 1980, just before Hearns was to fight Eddie Gazo in his final tune-up before the title fight with Cuevas, Tommy’s father had died. On that occasion Steward kept the news from Tommy until after the fight, but there would be no shielding him from this tragedy.
“I doubt if something like this could affect Tommy this close to the fight,” said one longtime Detroit friend of the Hit Man. “But the way it affects his Mom might. There’s nobody in the world he cares more about, and she’s taking this pretty hard.”
Hearns resolved that it would be business as usual. Steward and publicist Jackie Kallen arranged for round-the-clock security−not for the boxer’s protection, but to shield him from the swarming media. Otherwise Tommy meticulously followed the schedule Steward had already plotted out for him.
At Tommy’s urging, his mother, Lois Hearns, remained with him in Las Vegas. (Another brother, John Hearns, a UNLV student, was dispatched home to represent the family at Henry’s arraignment on Monday, the morning of the fight.)
Tommy stayed in his suite watching the Pistons play the Lakers
in the NBA Finals that afternoon, and then slipped off to Tocco’s for some light shadow-boxing. He didn’t return to Caesars that night. He and Steward quietly spent the night in a private residence, just as they had planned to do.
Shortly after word of the shooting reached Vegas, Arum had raced to the pressroom to assure the media that the show would go on.
The promoter said he had spoken to Hearns during the day and reported that the fighter “had never even considered” pulling out of the fight.
“He said, ‘I’ve waited eight years to knock out Sugar Ray Leonard, and nothing will deter me,’” reported the promoter. “He was blocking out everything. The only thing that concerned him was how and when he’d put Leonard on his ass Monday night.”
On Monday morning, Henry Hearns was charged with first-degree murder. At the arraignment, Nancy Barile’s parents expressed their displeasure that people seemed to be less concerned with their daughter’s fate than with how it might affect Tommy Hearns’ chances against Leonard.
At Monday morning’s weigh-in at Caesars, Leonard dropped his guard long enough to console Hearns.
“I totally lost it when I went to Tommy to express my condolences,” said Leonard as he recalled the exchange. “It was completely out of character for me. I should have waited till after the fight and then done it. Fighters need to remain in that zone. That’s your job. But I’d stepped outside it.
“When I went back to the house where we were staying after the weigh-in, I already knew I was in for a long night,” added Leonard. “I felt flat, bland. I could barely eat. ‘What’s going on? ’ I found myself wondering. I guess my biorhythms must have been low or something, because there’s a way you’re supposed to feel before a fight, and I didn’t feel that way.”
Henry Hearns would be convicted of second-degree murder. Thomas Hearns would pay $685,000 to settle a wrongful-death suit brought by the victim’s family.
Oddly, the betting line barely budged when news of Hearns’ troubles began to circulate around Vegas. In fact, as had been the case with nearly all of the Hit Man’s big fights, a late rush of Hearns money poured through the sports book windows in the twenty-four hours immediately preceding the fight.
On the morning of the fight, it was apparent that any concern over the weight had been misplaced. Hearns removed his outer garments, but he stepped on the scale still wearing a pair of blue terry cloth shorts and a formidable gold chain, and weighed 162 1/ 2 −five and a half pounds under the divisional limit.
Had Hearns weighed in excess of 164 he would have incurred financial penalties. Now people were wondering whether he should be entitled to a refund.
Leonard removed his Franklin Sports warmup suit but retained a pair of black bathing trunks and a green, black, and red tank top with the legend “FREE SOUTH AFRICA” in gold letters across the top. Leonard weighed 160−five pounds less than he had for Lalonde.
As Nevada’s senior and most prominent referee, Mills Lane had been expected to draw the Hearns-Leonard II assignment, but Lane had encountered such difficulty trying to pry Hearns loose from Kinchen that the NSAC guarded against a repetition by appointing the larger and stronger Richard Steele.
None of the Three Blind Mice who had worked the 1981 fight were on the panel of judges for the rematch. (Minker and Ford had been promoted to supervisory positions.) Nevadans Dalby Shirley and Jerry Roth were named to the tribunal, with New Jersey’s Tom Kaczmarek occupying the third seat.
The question of a post-fight steroid test never came up at the rules meeting, even though the commission seemed prepared to order one had either side requested it.
“The subject was never brought up,” shrugged Minker. “Emanuel knows how to ask.”
With the fight scheduled for the off-day between Games Three and Four of what would be a Detroit sweep in the 1989 NBA Finals, Michael Gee was shuttling between Vegas and Los Angeles. On his Monday-morning return from LAX, Pat Morita, Olivia Newton-John, and Cathy Lee Crosby were all on the same flight.
Pistons coach Chuck Daly also dashed over from L.A. on Monday, presumably to root for the Hit Man.
“I’m just looking for a knockout punch,” Daly, whose team would score one of its own the following evening, told Gee.
“This was my first time covering a big fight in Vegas, and nothing had prepared me for the heat,” recalled Gee. “A few days before the fight, one of the sidepiece screws in my glasses broke while I was in the pressroom. It was late in the morning, and I asked someone if there was a Lenscrafters in the area so I could get them fixed, and was told that there was in fact one located about half a mile away.
“I got up to leave Caesars and walk over, when [Caesars publicist] Andy Olson stopped me. He personally escorted me to the entrance and put me in a cab, saying, ‘No writers are dying of sunstroke on my watch.’ It was 109 outside at the time.
“So on Monday evening, I was supposed to write a sidebar on the light-flyweight Michael Carbajal, who was facing Eduardo Nuñez in the fourth bout of the evening. In my naiveté, I was in my seat for the first fight. The only people there to watch the fights were the 300 or so gambling addicts who’d bet on them.
“Anyway, the action in the first three fights consisted entirely of each man attempting to maneuver his opponent into the east side of the ring, where he’d be blinded by the sun. It made for some pretty weird-looking fights.”
The first two bouts of the evening showcased a couple of Leonard protégés, Canadian middleweight Dan Sherry and light-heavyweight Andrew Maynard, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist, who registered TKOs over John Tunstall and Stephen Schwann.
The third fight saw Ray Mercer, the former Army sergeant who had won the heavyweight gold medal in Seoul, win his sixth pro fight by knocking out Ken Crosby.
Carbajal, a future Boxing Hall of Famer, stopped Nuñez in four, while another future world champion, seventeen-year-old Mexican lightweight Manny Medina, scored a fifth-round TKO over Jorge Cazares.
The other two prelims saw a pair of Arum-promoted, Tarkanian-backed boxers win six-round decisions−Robert Wangila barely edged veteran Buck Smith, and McKinney outpointed David Moreno.
Celebrities were periodically introduced from the ring.
Chuck Daly got the biggest round of applause, presumably from the Motown fans, and then only, wrote Michael Gee, “after a photo finish with Kirk Douglas.”
Gee noted that “because this was a carefully crafted promotion, there was a celebrity for every taste. Nobody made a sound when George Peppard was introduced. Saddest of all was Hollywood Squares host John Davidson, who was roundly booed.”
Also in the audience that night were Don Rickles and Jerry Lewis, Tom Selleck and Mr. T, Dionne Warwick and Ed Marinaro, Lou Gossett and Barry Switzer.
And while no Pistons or Lakers players joined Daly at ringside, a number of NBA stars from non-competing teams were in attendance, including Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, and Chris Mullin.
The Pointer Sisters were also seated at ringside, and just before the main event performed the national anthem.
In keeping with the socially conscious “Free South Africa” theme Leonard had initiated at the weigh-in, Ray made his ring entrance wearing a red-and-white robe with a single word− AMANDLA −written across the back. A Zulu term meaning “power,” it had been adopted as a slogan in anti-apartheid demonstrations. Once he shed the robe, the waistband of his red-and-white candy-striped trunks bore the same legend.
Hearns was attired in the gold Kronk livery he had worn against Duran and Hagler. (Both he and Leonard had worn white trunks in 1981.)
Once the bell rang, noted Pat Putnam, “neither seemed in a hurry to earn his astronomical payday.” Hearns, whose dominant weapon figured to be his jab, repeatedly came up short with it, noted Putnam, “as though fearful of exposing a chin that had failed one recent test and barely survived two others.”
“From the time the fight was announced most writers were saying that Hearns was shot, that he s
houldn’t fight, that he might get hurt,” remembered Leonard. “Throughout training camp people kept telling me the same thing. I kept telling them that Tommy would rise to the occasion because he was fighting me, but I don’t know whether I convinced myself. I’d gotten in shape, but I didn’t feel threatened, and I think in my mind I was thinking, ‘Hey, Tommy’s just one punch away from getting knocked out.’”
Midway through the third round, Leonard, who had been rather indifferently chipping away at Hearns without significant effect, lowered his head and moved inside to throw a two-punch combination to the midsection. Hearns responded with a short right that stopped Leonard in his tracks, and followed it by slamming another right to the side of the head.
As the crowd gasped, Leonard tumbled to the canvas. More embarrassed than hurt, he bounced to his feet, assured Steele he was all right, and endured a mandatory eight-count.
Hearns chased Leonard around the ring for the remaining half of the round, but Ray survived without further damage and recovered sufficiently to win the next round.
In the fifth, Leonard rocked Hearns with a right to the head and a hook to the chin. Hearns staggered backward until he came to rest against the ropes, which he used to steady himself as he endured Leonard’s onslaught. My account of Round Five in the next morning’s Boston Herald read:
For a solid minute Leonard flailed away at his wounded quarry. During this episode he hit Hearns with everything but the ring post, but failed to put him down, and toward the end of the round, Leonard appeared as vitiated as Hearns, having punched himself out in the spirited but vain attack.
When Hearns staggered back to his corner after the round, Steward told him, “ That is what makes a great champion!”
Leonard seemed to have edged his way into control, but in the seventh Hearns jolted him again, this time with a right hand.
In the ninth, Hearns was cautioned by Steele for a low blow, after which Leonard delivered his own warning, a shot that was patently aimed below the belt, but not at a critical spot.
Although a right from Leonard opened a cut below Hearns’ right eye in the tenth, Citro’s quick work in the corner between rounds minimized the damage, and in the eleventh, Hearns stunned Leonard with a huge over-hand right. Ray went scurrying toward a neutral corner with Tommy in hot pursuit. When he caught up with him, two hammering rights and a left put Leonard on the floor again.
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