Four Kings

by George Kimball

  There would be other fights for Hearns and Duran, and even a few for Leonard, but the members of the fabled quartet would never face one another again.

  Chapter 11

  Après Le Déluge

  It was a great time to be a fighter, and a magical time to be a fight fan.

  Tim Dahlberg , Fight Town

  On December 20, 1989, twelve days after Duran-Leonard III brought down the curtain on the rivalry among the Four Kings, American forces bent on overthrowing the regime of Manuel Noriega invaded Panama in what the U.S. government called Operation Just Cause. Charged with drug trafficking, the Panamanian strongman took refuge in the Vatican Embassy. American troops attempted to drive him out by blasting Van Halen’s “Panama” and George Benson’s “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You” around the clock from loudspeakers set up across the street. On January 3, Noriega surrendered and was transported to the United States, where he was eventually tried, convicted, and imprisoned at a federal penitentiary in Miami.

  El Chorrillo, the Panama City slum in which Roberto Duran had been raised, was utterly destroyed during the invasion. “We turned Chorrillo into an ash tray,” said journalist Kevin Buckley, whose book Panama: The Whole Story recounted the American intervention.

  A few weeks later Duran’s old manager Carlos Eleta Almaran was released from a federal prison in Atlanta, and the drug and money-laundering charges that had led to his arrest were dismissed. Eleta’s lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, told the New York Times that the dismissal of charges “confirms the truth of the situation, that Mr. Eleta was and is innocent of all the charges that were brought against him.”

  Duran continued to box until beyond his fiftieth birthday. After losing to Leonard at the Mirage he had twenty-six more fights, in which he went 18-8. The last of them, ironically, was a 2001 loss in Denver to Hector Camacho, the same man who had ended Leonard’s career. Cholo might have been tempted to fight on beyond the Camacho loss, but in October of that year he was injured in an auto accident in Argentina, where he had gone to promote his latest salsa CD. Several broken ribs and a collapsed lung accomplished what no man had been able to do. Manos de Piedra went out with a career mark of 103-16, with half the losses occurring after he had turned forty. When Duran was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007, Hagler flew in from Italy to join the festivities at Canastota, New York.

  One of Duran’s sons had a brief flirtation with the fight game. Roberto, Jr., won his first five bouts, but in 2004 he lost a decision to another novice, Nicasio Sanchez, in Panama City and never boxed again.

  Shortly after the Leonard fight, a disappointed Marvin Hagler moved to Italy. He would never lace on a pair of gloves again. In 1989 he co-starred (with Francesco Quinn and Brian Dennehy) in Indio, a spaghetti-adventure film directed by Antonio Margheriti. Marvelous Marvin’s character was a Rambo-like half-Indian former Marine named Sergeant Jake Iron. (Sgt. Iron was resurrected two years later for Indio 2: La Rivolta .) In 1997 Hagler starred with John Savage and Jennifer Youngs in another Italian-made film, Notti di paura . He works occasionally as a ringside analyst for both Italian and British television.

  Married to Kaye Guarrera, Hagler continues to live an expatriate existence in Milano. “He’s become more Italian than I am−and I was born there,” said Hagler’s old foe Vito Antuofermo. (“That,” supposed Michael Katz upon hearing Antuofermo’s observation, “could be because so much of Vito’s blood rubbed off on Marvin.” )

  Marvelous Marvin’s transmutation to continental bon vivant seems all the more remarkable because of the distance he traveled to get there from Newark and Brockton. On his first journey to Monte Carlo nearly thirty years ago, Marvin seemed genuinely surprised to discover that the denizens of San Remo and Nice, less than fifty miles apart, spoke entirely different languages, and reflected his astonishment by telling me, “I’ve even heard that the Chinese and the Japanese can’t even understand each other!”

  That Hagler was going to be a world champion seemed to me a foregone conclusion. That in his dotage he would occupy a box at La Scala was somewhat less predictable.

  Somewhat reclusive, Hagler also maintains a summer cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he returns each summer to vacation with his children. Having finished his career with a 62-3-2 record, he was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1993, his first year of eligibility. He frequently returns to Canastota in June for the annual induction ceremonies.

  “I run into Marvin from time to time when I’m in Europe,” said Emanuel Steward. “He seems very content to me, happy in his role in life. He drinks a bottle of red wine a day, but he gets up at five in the morning to run and still looks in shape. I bet he doesn’t weigh more than 175 today.

  “The only dissatisfaction in his life, I’d say, is that he’s still bitter about the Leonard decision. He still believes he won that fight and that they stole something from him. I doubt if he’ll ever get over that .”

  In Boxing Illustrated’ s 1990 poll of boxing writers to select the Fighter of the Decade, Hagler, with 297 points, outstripped Leonard, who was second with 248. (Hearns, with 88 points, was ranked seventh; Duran, with 76 points, eighth; with Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, Julio Cesar Chavez, and Salvador Sanchez in between.)

  After his rubber match with Duran, Ray Leonard had two more fights. He lost them both and was badly embarrassed on both occasions.

  And his HBO broadcasting career came to an end even before his ring career did.

  In July of 1990, seven months after Duran III, the newly divorced Leonard, accompanied by bodyguard James Anderson, traveled to London for the All-England Championships. HBO had the broadcast rights to the early rounds of the Wimbledon fortnight, and Ray spent several days watching the tournament unfold, hobnobbing with the players by day and partying his way through London by night.

  On the day of the Wimbledon final that year, a number of high-ranking network executives−including Chairman Michael Fuchs with his date, and HBO Sports President Seth Abraham and his wife, Lynn−had taken their places in their Centre Court box, expectantly awaiting the arrival of their celebrity guest.

  Leonard and Anderson never showed up, but a pair of scantily clad ladies bearing their tickets did, precipitating a mini-scandal that would have repercussions back in the Time-Warner offices in New York.

  “Their attire was totally inappropriate,” said Abraham. “I mean, you don’t have to wear a gown to Wimbledon, but they were dressed like, well, a couple of hookers.”

  There was a good reason for that. They were a couple of hookers.

  “It just wasn’t cool on my part,” said Leonard. “I think I was just hung over and wasn’t thinking. I think James got in more trouble than I did over it. He was supposed to keep me from doing shit like that.

  “Did that end my HBO career? I don’t know,” Leonard reflected. “It could have.”

  “I spoke to Ray about it when we got back to the states,” said Abraham. “Yes, some people were upset about it, but as far as it being a cause and effect for our ending our relationship with Ray, it wasn’t.

  “A few months later Mike Trainer began negotiating for the Terry Norris fight, and as the process went on it became clear that he was pretty aggressively shopping the fight to Showtime. That, frankly, miffed me. Ray’s contract was up for renewal at the time and I finally told Trainer, ‘This just won’t do. We can’t have an HBO announcer fighting on Showtime,’ so that’s how it ended.”

  In his penultimate comeback fight, Leonard challenged for Norris’ WBC junior middleweight title at Madison Square Garden in February 1991. He was knocked down twice−in the second and seventh−and lost a runaway decision. One judge didn’t score a round for Leonard, and another awarded him just one.

  Ineligible for the Hall of Fame until five years after the Norris fight, Leonard was elected in a landslide in 1997. Between his election and that June’s induction, a forty-year-old Leonard came out of mothballs one more time to fight Camacho in a fight that was bill
ed for the IBC middleweight title. Leonard was stopped for the only time in his career when the bout was halted in the fifth. Apart from the decision to Duran in Montreal, those last two fights were the only losses of his 36-3-1 career.

  “I don’t regret either of those fights, just the way they turned out,” said Leonard. “I should have won them both.

  “The Norris fight was right after my divorce, and my head wasn’t in the right place,” said Sugar Ray. “And not to discount Terry Norris’ talents, but if I’d been even 75% physically I could have beaten him. When I was training for that fight I got a hairline fracture in one of my ribs sparring with Michael Ward. The doctors told me it would only heal with rest, but I kept sparring, wearing a flak jacket, hoping it would be all right. Just before the fight a doctor gave me four shots of Novocain in my ribs, but it didn’t help enough. Norris just beat the shit out of me.

  “Camacho should have been a great fight, and I would have knocked him out if I’d been healthy,” continued Leonard. “Before that fight I started working with Billy Blanks as a strength and conditioning coach. I had the bright idea that I’d start lifting weights at the tender age of forty. I tore a calf muscle doing squats, and in the fight my leg wouldn’t support me. It’s probably just as well, because if I’d beaten Camacho they were already talking about me fighting Oscar De La Hoya. I’m just as glad that didn’t happen.”

  Leonard has since dabbled in promotion (heading up Sugar Ray Leonard Boxing, which for a time regularly staged ESPN2 shows) and in 2004 joined forces with Sylvester Stallone, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mark Burnett and Jeff Wald to produce a made-for-TV reality series called The Contender . (Former Kronk Gym staffers Prentiss Byrd and Jackie Kallen were affiliated with the program in its first season on NBC; for its third, by which time it had migrated to ESPN, Pepe Correa had come on board as a trainer.) Leonard is also a partner in the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain.

  Leonard remains in demand as a motivational speaker (he recently shared a dais with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing a throng of 15,000) and devotes his leisure time to improving his golf game. He is a member at Riviera Country Club in L.A., where he maintains a fourteen handicap.

  Divorced from Juanita in 1990, Leonard walked down the aisle for the second time when he married Bernadette Robi, the daughter of Platters singer Paul Robi (and the ex-wife of onetime Super Bowl MVP Lynn Swann) in 1993. The couple had been introduced by the saxophonist Kenny G at a Luther Vandross concert five years earlier, and when Ray proposed, he presented his wife-to-be with a $340,000 engagement ring. “Marvin Hagler,” he joked, “paid for this.”

  The wedding guests included Thomas Hearns. Ray and Bernadette Leonard have two young children and live in Pacific Palisades, California.

  Hearns, who won the WBC middleweight title Leonard had vacated and lost it to Iran Barkley in his first defense, found it even more difficult to leave the ring. Although Hearns never again approached the level to which he had risen against his great rivals, he did win one more legitimate world championship (the WBA light-heavyweight title, which he lost−once again to Barkley−in his first defense) and two lesser ones, the WBU and IBO cruiserweight belts. He won fifteen of the seventeen bouts in which he engaged after the 1989 draw with Leonard, the last of them a ten-round stoppage of Shannon Landberg in Auburn Hills in 2006.

  Hearns won’t be eligible for election to the Hall of Fame until the Class of 2012−and that’s if he doesn’t fight again−but his place in Canastota is secure. Although his destruction of Duran was the only recorded win in his four encounters with the Duran-Hagler-Leonard nexus, he was the loser in two of the greatest fights in the annals of the sport. It wasn’t just that Hearns gave both Leonard and Hagler hell; their fights against Hearns virtually defined the greatness of both men.

  The two Barkley losses are generally regarded to have been an aberration, and his only other loss came at the age of forty-two, when he broke a leg in the second round against Uriah Grant. The Hit Man otherwise beat everyone who was put in front of him−the best of his own generation, and a couple of other generations, too.

  “One night a few years ago, Tommy and I were in London to open up a new Kronk Gym there, and Marvin Hagler showed up,” recalled Steward. Marvin asked Tommy what he was up to and Tommy told him, “I still want to fight.”

  “Man, are you crazy? ” Hagler told him. “You ought to think about doing something else. You need to get on with your life.”

  “Then Tommy asked Marvin what he was doing, and Marvin told him he was making these movies in Italy where he was some kind of Rambo-type character, and Tommy asked. ‘How much do you make for doing that? ’ related Steward.

  “When Marvin told him, ‘I got about $175,000 for doing the first one,’ Tommy said, ‘Man, that ain’t enough money,’ and Marvin said, ‘Tommy, it’s not always about the money. It gives you something to do, and it keeps your name out there.’”

  After a standout basketball career at American University, the Hit Man’s son, Ronald Hearns, somewhat to the displeasure of his father, opted to follow in Tommy’s footsteps. By June of 2008, billing himself as the Motor City Cobra (one of his father’s discarded nicknames), Ronald had accumulated a 19-0 record as a middleweight.

  Angelo Dundee, who had been in Muhammad Ali’s corner throughout his career from start to finish, did not complete the journey with Leonard. The rupture following the 1987 Hagler fight was never repaired. Dundee remained involved in the sport, however, and in 1994 the man who had been in Ali’s corner for his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman was in Foreman’s when he upset Michael Moorer to become, at forty-five, the oldest heavyweight champion in history. Inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1994, Dundee, now 84, lives in Florida with his wife, Helen.

  Marvelous Marvin Hagler was Goody Petronelli’s first world champion, but also his last. Although Petronelli developed the skills of middleweight Steve Collins (and worked his corner in his unsuccessful 1990 WBA title challenge to Mike McCallum), the Irishman had returned to his homeland and European management by the time he won the WBO middleweight and super-middleweight championships. Twenty years after Hagler’s last fight, Goody continues to train boxers in Brockton, with his most prominent moment on the world stage coming in 2005, when his Irish heavyweight, Kevin McBride, scored a stunning upset that sent Mike Tyson into retirement.

  Although he eventually parted ways with Tommy Hearns, Emanuel Steward’s career has flourished both in and out of the ring. A man who had made his reputation developing local boxers from their amateur days became one of the most sought-after hired guns in the game, and has trained thirty-two world champions, including Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya, Evander Holyfield, Julio Cesar Chavez, and Jermain Taylor.

  In late 2007, Steward’s stable included a pair of world champions −heavyweight Wladimir Klitschko and welterweight Kermit Cintron−along with Irish middleweight prospect Andy Lee, whom he signed out of the 2004 Olympics. He also serves as a ringside commentator for HBO, and in July of 2007 he combined the roles, working the corner during Cintron’s Atlantic City knockout of Walter Matthysse before hastily changing into his tuxedo to join the cable network’s broadcast team for that evening’s main event, Alfonso Gomez’ career-ending knockout of Arturo Gatti. Steward was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1996.

  “I’ve done it every way there is,” said Steward. “I took two kids, eight and ten years old, from the same block −Thomas Hearns and Milton McCrory−and turned them into world champions. And I’ve had the experience of being brought in when it looks like a guy’s career is all messed up.

  “I had Holyfield after he’d been beaten by Riddick Bowe and Lennox, after I knocked him out with another fighter [Oliver McCall]. I got involved with Julio Cesar Chavez after he’d lost his first fight, Oscar after he’d looked bad in a controversial win over Pernell Whitaker,” said Steward. “I was never fortunate enough to get the superstars where somebody would pay them millions of dollar
s and then give them to me. The only time I ever got those guys is when their careers were in trouble, but in almost every case I succeeded with them.”

  A disappointed Ray Arcel never worked with Roberto Duran again after the 1982 Benitez fight, but he remained in the game for a few more years, and teamed up with fellow Hall of Famer Eddie Futch to train Larry Holmes for his 1982 fight against Gerry Cooney. Holmes was the last of Arcel’s heavyweight champions; James J. Braddock had been the first. Arcel, who trained twenty world champions in all, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991. He died, at age ninety-five, in 1994.

  Freddie Brown lapsed into such depression after the No Mas fight that he never worked another corner. Nestor “Plomo” Quinones remains active on the boxing scene, most recently working with Cuban lightweight champion Joel Casamayor.

  The oft-told tale of the once-famous boxer who winds up punch-drunk, dead broke, or both tends, alas, to be more the rule than the exception. Joe Louis spent time in a mental institution and, with the IRS on his tail, found himself hustling a buck in the wrestling ring, just like the fictional Mountain McClintock in Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, before playing out his days as window dressing at Caesars Palace. Mike Tyson made over $400 million in the ring but was virtually penniless by the time he last went off to prison. Late in his life, Sugar Ray Robinson was so afflicted by Alzheimer’s−quite possibly boxing-related−that he scarcely knew where, or even who, he was.

  Happily, none of the Four Kings wound up punch-drunk, and none of them wound up dead broke. Two decades later, Leonard, Hagler, and Hearns are all millionaires. Duran, despite having squandered several fortunes, lives comfortably.

  From the outset of Leonard’s career−just about the time the $21,000 with which the original investors in Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc., had been repaid−Mike Trainer began to lay the foundation for the fighter’s financial future. Trainer (who did not take a percentage from his earnings, but rather billed his young client on an hourly basis) began to salt away a portion of the income from Leonard’s purses, endorsements, and television advances in long-term investments: T-bills, blue-chip stocks, tax-free bonds, and real estate tax shelters.