Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing

by George Kimball

  The paternity suit came without warning. Leonard had never denied paternity of his son. Somewhat embarrassed officials explained that they had merely been following a pro forma procedure mandated by a recently enacted law intended to winnow out welfare cheats, but the damage to his public image was both immediate and devastating.

  “Several companies who’d expressed interest in me backed away,” said Leonard. “When the news broke about the paternity suit, all hell broke loose and it killed a lot of deals. Juanita started getting threats. My family blamed her for the suit and jumped on her.”

  As the promised endorsements evaporated before his eyes, Leonard realized that the carefree life of a college student was no longer an option. If he was going to capitalize on his Olympic triumph, he was going to have to go to work, and the obvious choice of occupation would be the one he knew best.

  “It was the only career where I wouldn’t have to start out at the bottom,” said Leonard. “I already had a pretty good resume.”

  Unlike the bureaucrats of Prince George’s County, the denizens of El Chorrillo, the desperately poor Panamanian slum area into which Roberto Duran was born in 1951, did not place a high premium on formalities such as matrimony. His mother, Clara, would eventually give birth to nine children by four different men. His father, Margarito Sanchez Duran, had also fathered another of Clara’s sons, but the boy, Alcibiades, died of heart disease as a toddler, and was buried in a municipal graveyard in Panama City.

  Roberto’s father was a U.S. soldier of Mexican descent, and once his tour of duty in the Canal Zone was up, he disappeared. He was subsequently stationed in California and in Germany, and upon leaving the service, he married and settled in Arizona. He might never have been heard from again had it not been for his son’s successes. Duran was a grown man, a world champion and purportedly wealthy, by the time his father deemed it propitious to make contact.

  Margarito Duran had been a street fighter of some repute, and when he abandoned Roberto, it was later noted, “the only thing he left his son was his punch.”

  With jet-black hair and the dark, piercing eyes that Joe Frazier would later liken to Charles Manson’s, Duran was nicknamed “Cholo,” the Panamanian designation for one of mixed white and Indian blood. Although Clara did her best to raise her disparate flock of children, Roberto was often left to fend for himself on the streets. From nearly the time he could walk he hustled for change, shining shoes and selling newspapers. The latter occupation often required that he defend himself against older newsboys who tried to steal his allotment of papers. Fistfights for street-corner turf were not uncommon, and young Cholo more than held his own.

  Food was scarce; unable to care for him, his mother literally gave the boy away on several occasions. When he wasn’t eating as a guest of the families of his friends, Duran lived by his wits, often foraging like some feral animal among the garbage cans of El Chorrillo.

  His formal education ended in the fourth grade. Duran’s older brother Toti Samaniego told Christian Giudice that Roberto had “tried to hit a male teacher, and then tried to kiss his female replacement.” Duran’s own version (in a Sports Illustrated profile) held that “in school one day a kid came over to hit me, and I moved. We exchanged positions, so his back was toward the steps. I hit him and he fell over backward and down the steps. And they threw me out.”

  He followed Toti to a boxing gym at the age of eight, and had his first amateur bout a year later. He knocked down his opponent three times, but−possibly because the other boy was the referee’s son−he lost the decision.

  Boxing out of the Cincuentenario Club in Panama City, the young Duran attracted the attention of an established local trainer, Nestor “Plomo” Quinones. Although Duran weighed less than one hundred pounds, he enjoyed prodigious success, much of it against opponents who were both older and larger−and many of his best fights took place outside the ring.

  Duran was fifteen and walking his girlfriend home from a dance when they encountered half a dozen rowdy drunks who attempted to accost the young lady. In a few frenzied moments, Roberto knocked out five of the assailants. The sixth knifed him with a grazing blow to the back just before the police arrived.

  Duran, the girl, and his five victims all spent the night in jail together. The sixth guy got away. Only later did Duran learn that the man who had tried to stab him was the husband of one of his aunts.

  The oft-repeated tale of Duran vs. the Horse has so many versions that it is difficult to separate fact from legend. In some accounts he was fifteen, others sixteen. Ray Arcel would later claim to have witnessed the incident, and Arcel, who became his trainer, didn’t meet Duran until he was twenty. Duran’s manager Carlos Eleta later told the New York Times’ Michael Katz that the incident had taken place in the Panamanian jungle, winning Duran a bet with some workers. What everyone seems to agree on is that Duran scored his one-punch equine knockout years before Alex Karras, as Mongo, performed a similar feat in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. In some versions it was a body shot. In others, Duran dropped the beast with a punch behind the ear.

  He was indisputably sixteen years old when he knocked out the favored Buenventura Riosco to win the national light-flyweight title, and with it an expected berth in the Pan-American Games in Canada. Duran’s record at that point was 29-3. He had beaten virtually every worthwhile amateur in Panama, but once again boxing politics intervened. A soldier from the Panamanian National Guard was picked to go to Winnipeg.

  Shortly thereafter he was approached by Quinones, who found him working at one of his odd jobs.

  “I was painting houses for $1.50 a day,” Duran recalled to Giudice. “Plomo comes in and says ‘Duran, you want to make $25 to fight−win, lose, or draw? ’”

  Quinones didn’t have to ask twice.

  “Who do I have to kill? ” asked Roberto Duran.

  On February 23, 1968, Duran made his professional debut in Colon, in a four-round bout against a countryman named Carlos Mendoza. He won every round and captured a unanimous decision. Afterward he was approached by Carlos Eleta, the millionaire Panamanian sportsman.

  Eleta and Duran had actually met five years earlier. Eleta had looked out his window and spied a boy poaching coconuts from a tree on his property. This was not an unusual activity for the young Duran, who often swam across a canal and returned with sacks full of fruit to feed his family. Once, Pat Putnam related in a Sports Illustrated profile, the stolen fruit weighted him down so much that on the return journey he began to sink, and he had to be rescued by his accomplices.

  Even having caught him red-handed, Eleta admired the youngster’s audacity, and invited him into his house and fed him lunch that day. The two hadn’t laid eyes on each other again until the night Duran knocked out Buenventura Riosco. Eleta, it turned out, had planned to manage Riosco.

  Now he had a different plan. He wanted to manage Duran.

  Educated in Europe and in the United States, Carlos Eleta Almaran owned a newspaper, radio and television stations, and an airline. He was the Panamanian representative for several U.S. corporations, and was well-connected to the rich and powerful of many nations. (The ailing Shah of Iran recuperated as his guest on an island owned by Eleta.) He operated the most successful racing stable in Panama. And he managed boxers.

  Duran was nominally managed by a Panamanian jockey named Alfredo Vasquez. Instead of bankrolling Duran’s career, Vasquez had tried to hit him up for money. When Eleta offered the jockey $300 for Cholo’s contract, Alfredo jumped at it.

  For Duran, it was a propitious career move.

  Over the next ten months the teenaged Duran had eight more fights. He knocked out seven of his opponents in the first round, the other in the second.

  For the first two years of his pro career, Duran campaigned as a featherweight. In his last bout at that weight, in 1970, he stopped future world champion Ernesto Marcel in ten at the Gimnasio Nuevo Panama in Panama City.

  Though Duran feared no boxer, he idolized at least o
ne: Born in 1943, Ismael Laguna had been fighting professionally for eight years by the time Duran won his first pro fight, and in March of 1970 Laguna regained his status as a Panamanian national hero when he scored a tenth-round TKO of Mando Ramos in Los Angeles to reclaim the world lightweight title, five years after he had lost it.

  “Someday,” Duran had told Laguna, “I will be as good as you−or better.”

  Laguna’s second reign as champion proved to be short-lived. In his second defense he lost his title on a split decision to Ken Buchanan in Puerto Rico. Looking to climb back into the rankings, in his next outing Laguna fought a rematch with Lloyd Marshall, a useful New Jersey lightweight who hadn’t lost in eight years before Laguna beat him at Madison Square Garden back in 1968.

  In March of 1971, Laguna won a ten-round decision over Marshall at the Gimnasio Nuevo Panama.

  Two months later Duran was matched against Marshall in the same venue, and stopped him in four. Afterward, Duran presented the gloves he had worn to a visiting American youngster. Ten-year-old John F. Kennedy, Jr., had been seated at ringside as a guest of his host, Carlos Eleta.

  Laguna’s reward for beating Lloyd Marshall was a return bout against Buchanan. Duran’s was his first fight in the United States.

  On September 13, 1971, Laguna lost a unanimous decision in his title rematch with Buchanan at Madison Square Garden. On the undercard, twenty-year-old Roberto Duran knocked out Benny Huertas at 1:06 of the first for his twenty-fifth win in as many pro fights.

  Born in West Virginia, Emanuel Steward moved to Detroit at the age of twelve and boxed out of the Brewster Recreation Center, where the young Joe Louis had honed his craft. Winning the bantamweight title at the 1963 Golden Gloves was the pinnacle of his amateur career. Married at an early age, he never seriously entertained the notion of turning pro and became a licensed electrician for Detroit Edison.

  When his younger brother James expressed an interest in following his older sibling’s footsteps, Emanuel took him to an inner-city gym called the Kronk Recreation Center. He shortly found himself giving pointers to other boys in the gym and signed on as a part-time boxing coach there.

  Even in its early days, the Kronk embodied Steward’s team concept. Boxers were thrown together, irrespective of weight class, for hellish sparring sessions in the dank, steamy gym, but once they stepped out of the ring they were members of a fraternity, blood brothers forged in the cauldron of a shared experience only they could understand.

  Initially the Kronk colors were blue and red, but when a Kronk alumnus returned on leave from the service, he brought along his red-and-gold Marine Corps boxing robe, which he donated to the gym. Gold was added to the color scheme.

  Kronk boxers wore matching gold-and-red trunks, and the more accomplished members were awarded handsome letter jackets, which they proudly wore, both on the streets of Detroit and to the national competitions to which they soon began to travel.

  “Boxing in Detroit was dead, period, until I came along and started my group,” recalled Steward. “But within a few years we started winning things, and people started to pay attention to the Kronk Boxing Team.”

  Thomas Hearns had been born in Memphis, but, like Steward, he had moved to Detroit at an early age, and was raised on Detroit’s east side. Although he had the quintessential pug’s nose, it didn’t come from boxing. Hearns had broken his nose in a bicycle accident when he was nine, before he’d ever laced on a pair of gloves. As a result of that injury, he experienced nasal problems throughout his career, and years later would undergo surgery for a deviated septum.

  “Tommy must have been ten, and didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds when he first walked into the gym,” said Steward. “He was always a skinny little kid, all through his amateur career. Even though he wasn’t one of the top fighters in our gym right away, he was always special. He always gave it his best effort, and he always worked hard.

  “Back then we were the only gym that traveled. At other gyms a kid might get two or three fights when the city recreation tournament came around, and outside of that they might have got two or three other fights at most. But from 1969 on I took our kids on little out-of-town trips,” recalled Steward. “I’d load ’em all into my car and we’d drive off to Columbus or Chicago for the weekend, and of course they loved it. When a kid came from a house with no father and a lot of poverty, that meant a lot.

  “At first, out of maybe ten kids, Tommy might have been the sixth-most talented,” added Steward. “Sometimes he’d lose three in a row, but he was always gracious and grateful. Whenever we got back he’d make it a point to say ‘Thank you, Mr. Steward, for taking me on that trip.’”

  Two years younger than Leonard and four years Hagler’s junior, Hearns was a few steps behind his future rivals in his progression through the amateur ranks. Only fourteen, he didn’t accompany Steward to the 1973 Gloves and AAU tournaments, but by 1975 he had earned his first berth in the national Golden Gloves.

  “He weighed about 110 pounds, but he surprised me,” said Steward. “He lost to Mike Ayala, who went on to win the bantamweight championship that year. Ayala had had 238 amateur fights. I don’t think Tommy had even had twenty.”

  Hearns, recalled Steward, “was real quiet, but he always tried hard, even when he lost. And even though he was always so thin, he only lost to the top fighters. He lost to Ayala, who won everything, in 1975. Then in the AAU that year I let him go up to 126, and he lost a decision to Ronnie Shields, who also won everything at that weight. The next year he lost in the Gloves 132-pound final to Aaron Pryor, and in the AAU final he lost to Howard Davis.”

  Just a few months later Davis would be named the Outstanding Boxer of the 1976 Olympics.

  “Tommy didn’t go to the Olympic Trials,” said Steward. “He was still a year or two behind those guys, but he did have Howard Davis hurt in the second round of their fight.”

  Like Marvin Hagler, Hearns also had to overcome the fact that he had come from virtual obscurity.

  “Nobody ever outboxed Tommy, even then,” insists Steward. “He was a master boxer. But you’ve got to remember the politics of this era in amateur boxing. Rolly Schwartz, who headed up the amateur program, was from Cincinnati, and of course the metropolitan New York organization was also very strong. It seemed like one or two of Rolly’s fighters got through to the final every year, no matter what.

  “Guys like Pryor [from Cincinnati] and Davis [from New York] would throw these little flurries to make it look good, and of course the judges all knew these guys. They were politically well connected, but nobody knew Tommy. He was just a skinny little guy from a Detroit club, and nobody knew who he was. This was all a new experience for me, too, and nobody from Michigan had any clout whatsoever,” said Steward. “A couple of Tommy’s fights against Pryor, for instance, were very close, but you always knew the Cincinnati guy was going to get it.”

  Hearns had made enough of an impression that he was picked to box on a team of American amateurs sent to Europe after the ’76 Olympics. It was his first taste of international competition, and he won all of his matches.

  “Then something happened between 1976 and 1977,” said Steward. “Tommy just blossomed. Up until then, like a lot of tall kids, he’d move up a weight division each year, but he’d have grown another two inches in height, so he was getting bigger but he wasn’t getting any stronger. But beginning at the end of 1976, he went up to 139, but he didn’t grow taller in height. For the first time you could actually see muscles develop. He was physically much stronger than he’d ever been.”

  By early 1977 Leonard had turned pro. Dave Jacobs phoned to ask Steward if Hearns could come down to Maryland to spar with the Olympic champion.

  “Tommy stayed at Jacobs’ house for several days,” said Steward. “Dave called me up and told me Tommy and Ray had boxed at Palmer Park. He said the whole place was packed, and what was amazing is that Tommy had outboxed Ray. It was a good workout, and nobody got hit clean, but Ray had problems with
Tommy.”

  “The thing is, Tommy was an amateur, I was a professional, and he was younger than I was,” recalled Leonard of the episode. “I never even dreamed that just a few years down the road Tommy would wind up being one of my biggest rivals and foremost adversaries. I still thought of him as a young kid.”

  Young Hearns’ progress became even more evident when the national tournaments rolled around that spring. In the semifinal of the 1977 National Golden Gloves, Hearns faced Ronnie Shields, who had beaten him the year before. He knocked Shields out on his way to winning the Gloves championship, and then added the AAU title by outpointing Bobby Joe Young. (A decade later, Bobby Joe Young would administer the first and only defeat of Aaron Pryor’s professional career.)

  Emanuel Steward had been grooming his stable of amateurs for nearly seven years. Now it was time for the next step. “I always knew they would turn pro eventually, and when they did, I would too,” said Steward. “That was the plan all along.”

  On November 25, 1977, a month after his nineteenth birthday, Thomas Hearns was one of four Kronk boxers to make their professional debuts on a card at the Olympia in downtown Detroit. In the main event, Mickey Goodwin knocked out Willie Williams in the first round. Hearns stopped Jerome Hill in the second round of their prelim. It was his first professional win, and before he was done there would be sixty more of them.

  Unless you spent a lot of time around the New England club fight scene thirty years ago or worked as a Massachusetts prison guard, chances are you’ve never heard of Dornell Wigfall, but if there hadn’t been a Dornell Wigfall, there might never have been a Marvelous Marvin Hagler.

  By the time I met Wigfall he was in his second go-round as a pro. He’d gone 17-3 as a middleweight before he went to prison for over five years, and he went 3-3 as a light-heavyweight after he got out. By then he had developed one of those spectacular jailhouse physiques, honed by hours of lifting in prison weight-rooms, but he had no chin at all. He had become a professional Opponent, and in his last two fights he got knocked out in Atlantic City. The last I heard of him he was back in the joint, doing time again, at the state prison in Walpole.