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

by George Kimball

  Duran would later blame the lingering effects of a car crash in which he had been involved a few weeks before the fight, but his handlers knew better. When he, Eleta, and Arcel repaired to a Manhattan restaurant later that evening, a disconsolate Duran was in tears.

  “You didn’t lose that fight in the ring, you lost it in training,” Eleta admonished him.

  Duran would meet DeJesus in a rematch two years later. Once again Cholo went down in the first, but this time he got up and knocked DeJesus out with a right to the head in the eleventh.

  Duran would rule the lightweight division for the next half-dozen years. Apart from the first DeJesus fight, he won thirty-three times, twenty-five of them by knockout, and made a dozen defenses of his championship−and on several occasions embellished the reputation for savagery he had established in the Buchanan fight.

  In his first title defense Duran hit Jimmy Robertson with a right hand in the first round that knocked three of the American’s teeth out. Then he knocked Robertson out for good in the fifth.

  Hector Thompson was an Australian Aborigine who had killed a man in the ring. Unimpressed, Duran knocked him out in eight.

  In a 1975 defense at the Gimnasio Nuevo Panama, Duran put Ray Lampkin down with a left hook that left the American in convulsions, twitching on the canvas. Although Lampkin was rushed to the hospital, Duran insisted that he hadn’t even landed his best shot.

  “If I had,” he told reporters, “he wouldn’t be in the hospital. He’d be in the morgue.”

  Six months later, Duran fought a fellow named Pedro “El Toro” Mendoza in a non-title bout in Nicaragua. Mendoza was a local favorite, held in such esteem by Nicaraguans that the country’s dictator, Gen. Anastasio Somoza, had personally asked Duran to carry El Toro long enough to avoid embarrassing him, but Cholo couldn’t help himself and knocked him out in the first round. Bobby Goodman, then a Don King publicist, was in Managua for a WBA convention, and had gone to watch Duran−along with another of King’s fighters, Wilfredo Gomez−perform that night, and recalled a wild melee in the ring afterward.

  “Some woman, I think it was Mendoza’s wife, jumped in the ring and made a beeline for Duran,” Goodman recounted to Al Goldstein in A Fistful of Sugar. “He just whirled around and flattened the broad with a right hand, better than the one he starched Mendoza with.

  “The thing about it was, there was nothing contrived about any of it,” Goodman recalled to me more than three decades later. “Some guys try to create an image by acting like some kind of animal, but not Duran. He actually was a fucking beast.”

  In his twelfth title defense, Duran met his old foe DeJesus, who had by then acquired the WBC version of the lightweight title. The rubber match took place at Caesars Palace, in January of 1978, and Duran reunified his championship with a twelfth-round TKO.

  Although he would not formally relinquish the belts for another year, the third DeJesus fight would be Duran’s last as a lightweight. To this day his name would be included on any list of the two or three greatest lightweights of all time, but by 1978 he had been struggling for years to make the 135-pound limit, and he could do it no longer.

  Duran had already won five fights as a welterweight by June of 1979 when he was matched against the estimable Carlos Palomino, who had held the 147-pound title for three years before losing it to Wilfred Benitez earlier that year. Duran firmly established his welterweight credentials, winning nine of ten rounds on all three cards at Madison Square Garden, and might have qualified for a title challenge then and there.

  Benitez had other ideas. Duran could wait. Benitez’ handlers had an offer on the table that would pay him more than a million dollars for what looked to be an easier fight. Against Sugar Ray Leonard.

  Leonard’s march toward a title challenge had reached a furious pace by 1979. In the first nine months of that year he fought eight times, all of them against respected opponents.

  In January he took on Johnny Gant, a veteran of fifty-eight pro fights, and stopped him in eight at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland. In February he traveled to Miami Beach, where he flattened the Canadian light-middleweight champion, Fernand Marcotte, in eight. It was Marcotte’s sixtieth pro fight, Leonard’s nineteenth.

  In March he went to Tucson to face Daniel Gonzalez, who was 52-2-4 going into the fight, and knocked him out in two minutes.

  In April and May he won decisions over, respectively, Adolfo Viruet at the Dunes in Las Vegas and Marcos Geraldo in Baton Rouge, though the latter was hardly perfunctory. Geraldo, a rugged Mexican middleweight, was at 160 pounds by far the biggest opponent Leonard had ever faced, and early in the fight he hit Leonard so hard that a dazed Sugar Ray complained to Dundee that he was literally seeing three Geraldos in the ring.

  (Dundee summoned the time-honored cornerman’s advice in these confounding situations: “Aim for the one in the middle.” )

  Leonard recovered to post a comfortable decision, but it would be eight years before he would face another full-blown middleweight.

  In June of ’79, Leonard met Tony Chiaverini, a tough former college football player with a 30-3-1 record. Chiaverini quit on his stool after four rounds.

  In August he faced yet another contender, Pete Ranzany, whom he had beaten as an amateur in Boston six years earlier when Ray was a sixteen-year-old prodigy and Ranzany a U.S. Army sergeant. This time Leonard stopped him in four.

  In September he was matched against Andy Price at Caesars Palace in a bout for the North American welterweight title. It was Leonard’s first scheduled twelve-rounder.

  Virtually every one of Leonard’s 1979 fights had been shown on network television, as the Price fight would be. Americans were by now more familiar with Leonard’s face than they were with that of the heavyweight champion, which was the reason Leonard-Price (along with another bout pitting Duran against Zeferino Gonzalez) had been added to the bill, the ostensible main event of which was Larry Holmes’ title defense against Earnie Shavers, the hard-punching Cleveland heavyweight Ali had nicknamed “The Acorn.”

  Price was a twenty-five-year-old Californian with a 27-5-3 record, but he was known as a spoiler in the welterweight division, having rung up wins over both Carlos Palomino and Pipino Cuevas in non-title fights. Earlier in his career he had been managed by actor Burt Reynolds, but by the time he met Leonard, the singer Marvin Gaye had his contract.

  During the week of the fight, Leonard was the center of attention. Duran− the man now renowned as “Manos de Piedra,” or “Hands of Stone”−also seemed to attract more interest than Holmes. When Duran worked out at the Sports Pavilion, Leonard was among the curious onlookers.

  Holmes went down from a thunderous right in the seventh round, but rose to stop The Acorn in the eleventh. Duran seemed at times to struggle against the aptly named Speedy Gonzalez, but posted a comfortable win by decision.

  Leonard-Price lasted less than three minutes. In the first round, Leonard landed a solid left-hook, overhand-right combination that knocked Price into the ropes and jumped straight on him, turning his foe into a speed bag. There were at least a dozen rapid-fire, unanswered punches, the last of them a big right hand that put Price down. He tried to rise, teetered for a moment, and collapsed in a heap, where he lay for a full minute before he was carried back to his stool.

  The quick knockout did not entirely please Dundee. Because of their stylistic similarities he had hoped to use the Price fight as a tune-up for Benitez, but the brevity of the bout had obviated its value as a learning experience. On the other hand, it had once again been an awesome display of another side of Sugar Ray Leonard, one that seemed to impress even Duran’s handlers.

  “In another year,” said Freddie Brown with a shrug to Hugh McIlvanney, “he could even be ready to try Duran.”

  Marvin Hagler had also been active during this period, though not all of his campaigns were in the ring. Already angered by Hagler’s exclusion from King’s U.S. Boxing Championships, a pair of powerful Massachusetts politicians
had been enlisted in his cause, demanding that he be allowed to fight for the middleweight championship.

  After the Briscoe fight, Hagler fought a Texas veteran named Willie Warren at the Boston Garden and stopped him in seven. On the under-card, an up-and-coming Italian-born New York middleweight named Vito Antuofermo had fought Kansan Mike Hallacy in a bout memorable largely because Hallacy appeared to accomplish the unthinkable and out-bled Antuofermo, prompting Don Dunphy’s immortal ringside call: “That’s Antuofermo with the white trunks and the red blood and Hallacy with the green trunks and the red blood.”

  Since the beginning of 1979, Hagler had scored a first-round knockout of Ray Seales in their third meeting, and knocked out Bob Patterson and Jamie Thomas in a pair of New England fights, but he seemed no closer to the brass ring than ever.

  Hagler had by now aligned himself with Sam Silverman’s onetime associate, Anthony “Rip” Valenti. Prior to Silverman’s 1977 death, the grand-fatherly Valenti had primarily focused on amateur boxing−he had been the promoter of record for the 1973 AAU tournament where Marvin made his first big splash−and his sphere of influence was limited to New England. Hagler had gotten as far as he had while keeping himself clear of entangling alliances, but now it was time to strike a deal. Even Rip agreed that what Marvin needed now was a promoter with some juice.

  The United States might have been the epicenter of boxing, but not of the middleweight division. The great Argentinean champion Carlos Monzon had ruled the 160-pounders for most of the decade, and the middleweight title was securely controlled by Top Rank’s Bob Arum and Arum’s Italian partner, Rodolfo Sabbatini.

  Between 1970 and 1979 there had been twenty-five middleweight title fights. Seventeen of them had taken place in Europe, seven in South America. During that span only two American-born fighters had challenged for the championship, and the only middleweight title fight to take place in the U.S. had been Monzon’s defense against Tony Licata at the Garden in 1975.

  The New York Times ’ Michael Katz, who had become the fourth estate’s most prominent booster of Hagler’s cause, had suggested to the Petronellis that their surest route to a title fight would be to align themselves with Arum, but, recalled the “Wolf Man,” “they were rightly paranoid about promoters following Hagler’s absence from the Don King tourney.”

  “I had received letters from Ted Kennedy and from Tip O’Neill, threatening that they would hold congressional hearings if I didn’t get Marvin a title shot,” recalled Arum. “Most of my middleweight fights had been in Europe, so I didn’t know much about Hagler, other than that he was a terrific fighter and that King had fucked him over by keeping him out of that tournament. But I knew I didn’t want Congress on my back.”

  Arum did not realize that the saber rattling on the part of the politicians had been the result of some prodding by former Brockton Mayor George Wainwright, whose eccentric lawyer son Steve now represented Hagler and the Petronellis.

  “But it wasn’t like I went out and recruited Hagler. I knew Rip Valenti because we’d done closed-circuit business with him in the past. He brought the Petronellis down to my office in New York,” continued Arum. “Rip assured me Hagler was the real deal and that the Petronellis were good people. It turned out to be a fortuitous thing for all of us.”

  The long-term contract arranged that day called for Hagler to fight an Argentine middleweight named Norberto Cabrera, who owned an earlier win over champion Hugo Corro, on the undercard of Antuofermo’s challenge to Corro in Monaco that summer, with the understanding that if he performed up to expectations his next fight would be against the winner.

  The Hagler party was headquartered in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, providing Hagler his first glimpse of the country in which he would later box and, eventually, live. (Antuofermo trained in the south of Italy, near his old home in Bari.)

  The pre-fight press conference also took place in San Remo, and was conducted in French, Italian, and Spanish. Periodically Hagler heard his name mentioned, but had no idea what the speaker might be saying. He turned to Michael Katz and said, “I feel like a piece of meat.”

  “The Petronellis didn’t bring any sparring partners,” recalled Katz, “because Arum had assured them that there were plenty in Europe and that it would be cheaper. That was ‘yesterday.’ When ‘today’ dawned, Marvin’s only sparring was against Goody, holding the mitts, so for the first few rounds against Cabrera, Marvin was effectively getting in the sparring he’d missed.

  “The French crowd, which adores middleweights, was going ‘Ooh-la-la!’ at Marvin’s brilliance,” remembers Katz, “and by the time the referee, Stanley Christodoulou, stopped it, I swear the only thing holding Cabrera up was Hagler’s uppercuts.”

  On June 30, 1979, Marvin Hagler stopped Cabrera at the Chapiteau de Fontvielle in Monte Carlo. In the main event that night, Antuofermo won a split decision to take the middleweight championship from Corro.

  Hagler-Cabrera had been taped by ABC, to use on the telecast in case the title fight ended prematurely. After Hagler’s bout but before Antuofermo’s, Howard Cosell approached Katz at his ringside position and said “You call that a great fighter? I was just on the phone to New York and told them not to put that piece of shit on the air!”

  “You must have a piece of that guy,” Cosell muttered to Katz as he walked away. The Wolf Man and a colleague from Sports Illustrated seated next to him were left staring with mouths agape.

  Only later did the reason for Cosell’s outburst−and for his reluctance to allow his call of the Hagler-Cabrera bout to see the light of day−become clear.

  The network had done a “live-for-tape” call which could not be re-dubbed. Cosell, who had berated Hagler’s performance (a virtuosic one, in the eyes of most other observers) had, at the fight’s denouement, turned his scorn upon the referee for stopping the bout.

  “Cosell was pissing all over Christodoulou, saying he was in bed with Arum, he should never work another fight, he should be run out of town,” revealed Katz. “Someone in the ABC truck interrupted to tell him through his earpiece ‘Howard, he stopped the fight because Cabrera’s corner threw in the towel.’”

  Arum was true to his word. On November 30, 1979, Hagler, in his fiftieth pro fight, would meet Antuofermo for the middleweight championship of the world at Caesars Palace, but much to his chagrin he would once again be playing second fiddle to Leonard. Antuofermo-Hagler was relegated to the undercard of Leonard’s coming-out party−his challenge to Benitez for the WBC welterweight championship.

  “I had promoted the Benitez-Palomino fight, so I still had options on Benitez,” said Arum. “Even though Trainer had already made his deal with Benitez, he still had to go through me. I think that may have been my first dealing with Mike Trainer.”

  Trainer had already negotiated the terms with Benitez’ manager, Jimmy Jacobs. He had also sidestepped the fight’s eventual promoter in arranging the site before he came to Arum with the arrangement.

  Caesars Palace was anxious to host Leonard’s first title fight. Bob Halloran, a former Miami sportscaster who was by then the president of Caesars Sports, had telephoned Angelo Dundee to ask about Trainer, whom he had never met.

  “He’s a small lawyer with one secretary,” Dundee told Halloran. “And when he’s not in the office he’s usually on the golf course.”

  Halloran was a former scratch golfer who often played with the casino’s high-rolling customers. He phoned Trainer and in the course of the conversation baited the hook by saying, “I hear you play a bit of golf. Are you any good? ”

  “How many shots do you want? ” asked Trainer.

  “Say no more,” Halloran told him.

  A few days later, said Halloran, “I flew into National, rented a car, and drove to Bethesda. When I pulled up in front of Mike’s house, he was out on the lawn, wearing a pair of shorts and swinging a golf club.”

  “By the time we got to the tenth hole that day we had a deal,” said Halloran.

  Ca
esars agreed to post a site fee of half a million dollars to host the Benitez-Leonard fight.

  The agreement Trainer brought to Arum promised the challenger an unheard-of $1 million purse, the champion $1.2 million. Hagler’s purse, by contrast, was just $40,000. Although it was a career-high payday, it was precisely what Leonard had made for his maiden voyage, and what Andy Price had been paid for serving as Sugar Ray’s foil two months earlier.

  Arum covered his investment by peddling, for $1.9 million, a package of three world championship fights to ABC for a night-long boxing marathon that would fill the network’s entire Friday night prime-time slot. Antuofermo-Hagler was the second of the title bouts. The other would be Marvin Johnson’s challenge to WBA light-heavyweight champion Victor Galindez of Argentina.

  “I’d already sold the telecast to ABC, but at that time the sanctioning organizations were flexing their muscles, and [WBC president] Jose Sulaiman, in his infinite wisdom, decreed that we couldn’t even have a championship fight from the other organization on the same card as a WBC fight,” recalled Arum. “Sig Rogich was the head of the Nevada commission, and he went along with Sulaiman.

  “We had no alternative but to move the Galindez-Johnson fight to New Orleans and use a split feed for the telecast,” Arum said, “so then to help the live gate at the Superdome, we put on a co-feature using another upand-coming young welterweight, Tommy Hearns.”

  Although Hearns’ decision over Mike Colbert wasn’t part of the ABC bill, clips of it were shown on that evening’s telecast after Johnson stopped Galindez in the eleventh. For many television viewers, that night provided their first exposure to both Hagler and Hearns.

  Dismissive of Antuofermo’s punching power, Hagler referred to the champion as “Vito the Mosquito” and handed out souvenir fly-swatters at the pre-fight press conference.

  Antuofermo, who realized he could not hope to match Hagler’s quickness or boxing ability, tried to force the fight to the inside, but Hagler could brawl as well as box, and by the middle rounds of their fifteen-round bout, the champion’s face looked like somebody had used a fungo bat on a over-ripe tomato.