Four Kings

by George Kimball

  Warren had no dearth of known enemies. Mickey Duff was promoting a show of his own that night across town at the Elephant & Castle. When he was informed of the shooting, Mickey said, “Thank God I’m here, else I’d be the chief suspect!” (Terry Marsh, the former IBF light-welterweight champion, was later arrested and charged with the shooting, but when the case came to trial he was acquitted by a London jury.)

  While Leonard and Duran prepared for the third bout of their trilogy, the undefeated young heavyweight champion was also in town. Mike Tyson, slated to meet cruiserweight champion Evander Holyfield the following spring, was sparring at Tocco’s Gym for a tune-up bout in Japan against a journeyman heavyweight named Buster Douglas.

  Although most fight writers were picking Leonard, Ray’s dubious performance against Hearns, coupled with Duran’s against Barkley, had convinced some experts that Cholo had a better-than-middling chance. Among them were Duran’s ninety-year-old ex-trainer Ray Arcel, eighty-three-year-old promoter Chris Dundee, and Harold Conrad, the seventy-seven-year-old press agent widely assumed to have been the model for Budd Schulberg’s Eddie Lewis character in The Harder They Fall .

  “The guys from his own generation,” noted Katz, “are picking Duran.”

  Although he was estranged from the Leonard camp, Chris Dundee’s younger brother liked his former pupil’s chances. “Ray can lick him, but he’s got to keep punching straight up the middle,” said Angelo Dundee. “He can’t come in there winging punches the way he did with Lalonde and Hearns, else he’s gonna lose.”

  Having had six months to digest the films, Leonard had determined that his performance against Hearns could be written off as “an off night.” Still, he had been down three times in his last two fights. The suggestion was that if Leonard had slipped as much since the Hearns fight as he had between Lalonde and Hearns, he could be in for a long night.

  And Roberto Duran seemed to have something else in his favor: He had been campaigning as an old fighter for a lot longer than Leonard had. If everything else was equal on Thursday night, guile and treachery might prove to be the difference.

  A few days before Uno Mas, Bob Arum was threatened with arrest by representatives of the U.S. Treasury Department. Although Arum was a former Justice Department attorney who had been introduced to the sport via an investigation into boxing, the feds were now threatening to clap him into irons should even one minute of the Duran-Leonard fight appear on a Panamanian television station controlled by that nation’s strongman, General Manuel Noriega.

  Two months earlier Arum had peddled the television rights to a state-controlled Panamanian station. Relations between the George H.W. Bush administration and Noriega had subsequently deteriorated to the point that the U.S. had ordered a full-fledged embargo.

  Arum dodged the bullet by repackaging the Panamanian rights to the privately owned Telemundo Canal 13, which in turn reimbursed the government-owned station, getting the promoter off the hook and ensuring that Duran’s countrymen could watch the bout.

  The feds had a busy week in Vegas. Two years earlier the IRS had mistakenly issued Duran a $1.6 million refund, and Cholo had cashed the check and long since spent the money. Now the government was prepared to gain restitution by attaching Duran’s purse from the Leonard fight. That the feds meant business was confirmed over the weekend preceding the fight. IRS agents looking to settle a back-tax beef raided Redd Foxx’s Vegas home and carted off everything from jewelry to television sets. By the time the agents left, Redd’s house looked like the set of Sanford and Son.

  The Nevada State Athletic Commission named Steele to referee the bout, while the NSAC and WBC agreed on a slate of officials that included local Jerry Roth, Joe Cortez of New Jersey and Belgian Bob Logist.

  The Duran camp voiced some displeasure at the fact that there were two U.S. judges but no Latin American representative.

  “Duran might as well be an American,” said Trainer. “He’s lived more of his adult life here than he has in Panama. He’s made 98% of his money here, and when he couldn’t go back to Panama after the second fight with Ray, he chose to live in Miami.

  “Besides,” noted the lawyer, “Roth is the judge who scored the last fight for Hearns.”

  In the days before the weigh-in it had become clear not only that neither man would have a problem making the 162-pound contractual limit, but that each might actually enter the ring as a middleweight.

  On the morning of the fight, Leonard weighed 160, Duran 158. Since Duran still held the WBC 160-pound championship, under the time-honored rules of boxing, that title would be on the line as well. When I approached WBC president Jose Sulaiman on the matter, he replied that Duran’s middleweight title would “absolutely” be at stake in the fight.

  This proved to be unsettling news for Mike Trainer. The contract he had drawn up for the fight was for the super-middleweight title only, and specifically excluded Duran’s belt.

  “As far as Ray is concerned, the contract is for his title only,” Trainer told reporters. “That’s what the contract specifies. Ray has no interest in winning Duran’s middleweight title. He’s already won one of those.”

  Trainer then blamed me for having ignited the controversy by bringing the rule to Sulaiman’s attention.

  “I guess this all got started a few days ago when some writer [this one] with a knowledge of boxing history brought up the situation to Jose,” said Trainer, labeling the weight issue a “misunderstanding.”

  A Las Vegas newspaper described the canon as “a little-known rule.” Actually, that the champion could lose his title in a fight in which both boxers were within the prescribed weight was a principle encoded in the sport since the days of the Marquis of Queensberry, which is why champions historically had been careful to ensure that one belligerent or the other was over the weight even in scheduled “non-title” fights.

  “I just wish somebody in our camp had known about it before the weigh-in,” said Duran’s advisor/promoter Mike Acri.

  Had one boxer or the other been even half a pound over 160, Duran’s claim on the middleweight title would not have been threatened. This could have been easily accomplished by mounting the scale with a roll of silver dollars in his pocket−a ruse Leonard himself had used in the Lalonde fight.

  After reviewing the language of the WBC rules, Sulaiman clarified his position. Duran would “definitely” lose his WBC title if he lost to Leonard in a 160-pound fight, but Leonard would not necessarily win it. “That,” said Sulaiman, “would be up to our executive committee.”

  WBC executive Steve Crosson somewhat grandiosely announced that the organization would “neither expect nor accept an additional sanctioning fee.”

  At a meeting with Arum and Trainer a few days earlier, Steve Wynn had revealed his intention to accompany the Grand Opening with a marching band and a fireworks display. Arum shrugged and said, “Fine. Have what you want.”

  It was so cold on the appointed night that the musicians’ horns nearly froze to their lips. The fireworks, on the other hand, commenced without warning just after the conclusion of the undercard. Unsure whether the explosions signaled incoming artillery fire or a mutiny by Duran’s bodyguards, Pat Putnam and the Boston Globe ’s Ron Borges both dove for cover.

  Leonard had wanted to wear tights underneath his trunks to protect against the December desert chill, but the Nevada commission denied the request. Correa brought along a large blanket, in which Leonard was swaddled between rounds, and when Sugar Ray entered the ring wearing a balaclava, he looked like a Ninja warrior, or perhaps a second-story man.

  “I had that ski mask, and towels underneath my robe,” recalled Leonard. “I was wrapped up like an Eskimo.”

  “They were better prepared than we were,” said Mike Acri. “It was thirty-eight degrees outside. Leonard had a blanket in the corner and Duran didn’t. Not only that, our guys kept putting an ice pack on Roberto’s neck between rounds.”

  “Every time I’d look over in the other corner be
tween rounds they were throwing water on Duran,” recalled Leonard. “It’s a wonder he didn’t start growing icicles.”

  It didn’t take Duran long to realize that if he hoped to avenge the events of New Orleans nine years earlier he probably should have brought along a gun. He wasn’t going to get close enough to Leonard to hurt him any other way.

  While his tactics may have lacked aesthetic appeal, Leonard’s game plan virtually guaranteed a lopsided victory. He danced, he moved, he lashed out from his preferred range. For the better part of the evening Duran looked like a snarling dog, tethered to a post in the middle of the ring while a cruel boy poked at him with a stick.

  In this fight, Manos de Piedra might as well have changed his nickname to Piernas de Piedra −Legs of Stone. Unable to cut the ring off on Leonard, Duran was reduced to imprudent charges, which were invariably smothered as Leonard clinched. Ray danced, mugged, and teased his old rival.

  Duran drew first blood in the fourth round, when he butted Leonard in the face, splitting his lower lip, but his efforts seemed otherwise futile.

  For five rounds Leonard outran and outmaneuvered Duran, and when Leonard finally elected to engage in the sixth, he outbrawled him as well. Possibly in response to the restive taunts of the crowd, he caught Duran coming in with two left hooks, slammed a right and a left off his head, and, shades of New Orleans, enacted a mocking shuffle. Then he predictably wound up as if to throw a bolo punch, but this time, instead of throwing the jab as he had nine years earlier, he banged the windmill punch off Duran’s head.

  Duran responded with a sheepish grin.

  Leonard had apparently determined to use this fight as an excuse to hand Duran a dose of his own medicine. Sugar Ray repeatedly hit Duran on the break, threw what were seemingly deliberate low blows, and even paused−out of the sight of referee Richard Steele−during one clinch to give Duran an apparent noogie.

  Only occasionally did Leonard deign to take the fight to the trenches, and when he did it was usually on his own terms. Near the end of the ninth he caught Duran with a combination followed by a pair of jolting left hooks, and he closed the tenth by pummeling his foe with a flurry of punches.

  As a restive crowd chanted, “Bullshit! Bullshit!” Leonard was eventually forced into action, and in the eleventh he ventured near enough to incur more damage than Duran had inflicted in their first two meetings combined. Duran picked off a right-hand lead, lowered his head and charged into Leonard. Blood immediately spurted from Leonard’s forehead, and Correa shouted at Steele that his man had been butted again.

  It certainly looked as if he had been, but replays later revealed that the cut had been inflicted by a Duran uppercut.

  Aliano was unable to do much with the cut between rounds, so Leonard fought most of the final stanza on his bicycle. Had Duran been able to open the cut with four rounds, rather than four minutes, left in the fight, it might have proven troublesome, but as it was, Leonard successfully avoided contact until less than a minute before the final bell, when a Duran right ripped open yet another cut−this one above the right eye.

  This time it was the crowd who said, “No mas.” Long before it was over, 16,305 voices were voicing their displeasure, and at the final bell they booed victor and vanquished alike.

  “Ray was reluctant to fight Duran, and he turned off a lot of fans,” said Tommy Hearns’ cornerman Prentiss Byrd. “Ray didn’t give the people what they paid to see.”

  There was little suspense to the reading of the verdict: Logist didn’t give Duran a single round, scoring it 120-110, while Roth (119-109) gave him one and Cortez (116-111) four. My scorecard had Leonard winning 118-111.

  CompuBox’ punch-stats appeared to bear out the judges’ opinion: Leonard had landed 227 of the 438 punches he threw that night. Duran had thrown even more−588−but had missed with 504 of them.

  Said Acri: “One wouldn’t and the other couldn’t.”

  “I fought my kind of fight,” said an unapologetic Leonard. “I heard the boos, but I’m not going to change the things that got me here. I’m not Marvin Hagler. I’m not Tommy Hearns. I’m Sugar Ray Leonard, and I fought the way I wanted. I’m proud of my performance tonight, and I fought the only way I knew how.”

  So, for that matter, had Duran. “I knew he was going to come in here and clown around,” groused Legs of Stone. “I came to fight and he didn’t. He was just running around out there. When he did hit me, I hit him back.”

  “I think a lot had to do with the fact that Duran is thirty-eight years old,” supposed Leonard. “Duran is a veteran and he came to fight, but I figured if I stayed outside I was out of harm’s way. The outside was my territory.”

  Carlos Hibbard blamed Steele for having abetted the snooze-fest. “That Siamese twin of a referee worked against Roberto all night,” complained Duran’s trainer. “He never let him get inside and punch his way out of a clinch. He made him stay on the outside.”

  But Acri conceded that the fight had for the most part been just what most newspapers called it the next morning−a bore.

  The two old foes managed an embrace before they went their separate ways that night.

  “Leonard won the fight,” said Duran. “The judges saw it that way. I am going to say goodnight and have some champagne and go back to Miami.”

  Sugar Ray Leonard didn’t drink any champagne that night. He went to Valley Hospital, where it took sixty stitches to repair the damage Duran had done to his face, a reminder that the old dog had some teeth in him yet.

  The audience appeared to share Duran’s view of the proceedings, but Bill Nack’s Sports Illustrated piece the following week lauded Leonard for his disciplined approach. Wrote Nack:

  The twelve-round fight had all the beauty of a bullfight, but without the expected horror of the kill. Still, the fans didn’t like it. Leonard gave them artistic perfection when they wanted heated battle, and they booed lustily. Most fight fans would not spend a dime to watch Van Gogh paint Sunflowers, but they would fill Yankee Stadium to see him cut off his ear.

  When he met with reporters the following morning, he looked more like Ray Charles than Ray Charles Leonard. The dark glasses could not mask the patchwork of stitches on his face.

  “I could have fought and won and been untouched,” reflected Leonard. “I could hear the crowd. They wanted to see us toe-to-toe, you know, bang-bang, like Hearns and Lalonde. But that’s just not my fight. I wanted to box and not get hit, and if I’d been smart I’d have just stayed out there instead of trying to accommodate the demands of the public.

  “The best way to beat Duran was to score points,” he said. “If I’d fought him inside all night long I think I still could have won, but it would have been a much uglier−and much closer−fight.”

  Bob Arum was still fuming at Wynn the morning after the fight.

  “He thinks this is Alice in Wonderland,” the promoter grumbled. “He thinks he can buy anything he wants.

  “I think Mr. Wynn is going to discover that loyalties in boxing run deeper than they do in the casino business,” said Arum. “It may be easier and simpler than building a big hotel. Maybe it’s easier and simpler than raising $600 million by selling 18% junk bonds, but it’s still a very complicated business.”

  In a not-so-oblique reference to Wynn’s overture to Riat, Arum said, “I’m going to watch my ass. I don’t think it’s right when I’m promoting a fight here that one of his staff propositions someone who’s working for me that he thinks is working for one of the fighters. In my view, that’s disruptive.”

  Although the live gate for Uno Mas had topped $9 million−at the time the largest in boxing history−Wynn still lost a few million on the fight.

  Leonard was noncommittal on the subject of retirement. (“Right now I’m not even going to think about it. I’m going to go home and enjoy the holidays.” ) But few, including Arum, expected him to fight again. Ray had enriched himself by another $17.6 million, but a man who had been cut just once in thirty-six previous fi
ghts had sustained three cuts in one night, and had not appeared to enjoy it.

  Duran’s guarantee had been $7.6 million (four times what he had earned in the first fight in Montreal), but Cholo got out of town with considerably less. Between its normal tax bite and the other $1.6 he owed the IRS from the erroneous refund, the government took almost $3.5 million off the top.

  And by this stage of his career Duran had become a boxing version of the Max Bialystock character in Mel Brooks’ The Producers: He’d raised capital by selling off pieces of his only asset, which in this case wasn’t Springtime for Hitler, but himself. The usual manager’s and trainer’s shares came to 30%, and the courts had upheld Luis Spada in his claim for a share of Duran’s earnings. Between them, Duran’s promoters Mike Acri and Luis De Cubas, and his previous promoters, Jeff Levine and Gerry Cooney, were entitled to over a million dollars.

  However much Duran got out of Las Vegas with, it seemed a fairly safe bet that it wasn’t going to last long.

  “Duran will keep fighting,” predicted Arum. “Duran wants more money, because Duran likes to spend money. We’ll look for guys who want to stand toe-to-toe and fight Duran.”

  Marvin Hagler, who had been at ringside as a commentator for the closed-circuit telecast, was asked by Gil Clancy about coming out of retirement for a rematch with Leonard.

  “I’d like to be smart and say no,” said Hagler, “but if they want to wave $20 or $25 million in my face, who knows? ”

  But it seemed clear enough that the era of the mega-paydays had vanished that night.

  The most immediate casualty of the evening was a guy who hadn’t even fought. Hearns had hoped to face the winner, but the anticlimactic manner in which Duran-Leonard III had played out left him without a natural rival.

  “I guess,” sighed Prentiss Byrd, “the only thing left for Tommy is to be a cruiserweight.”

  In fact, the whole fanciful notion of a protracted Seniors Tour involving Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran seemed to have evaporated amid the chorus of boos that serenaded Leonard’s exit at the Mirage after what would be the last win of his career. The era of the Four Kings had ended, not with a bang but a whimper.