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

by George Kimball

  Gardner was not the first to notice that Duran had never quite mastered another time-honored practice of boxers-in-training. The Panamanian, observed the novelist, skipped rope “like a drunk.” In a Cleveland gym I once saw a similar display of ineptitude: Duran kept getting himself tangled up in the jump rope. Since skipping rope is universally one of the very first exercises a nascent boxer learns, this also struck me as a pretty startling revelation. It was sort of like encountering a football player who couldn’t do jumping jacks.

  Michael Katz insisted that Gardner and I were both fooled, and that Duran, when he set his mind to it, could be a dazzling, rope-skipping virtuoso: “If he skipped rope ‘like a drunk,’ he must have been imitating a drunk,” said the Wolf Man.

  Duran’s work in the gym nonetheless made an indelible impression on Gardner.

  “I saw him land a right hand that left me spellbound,” Gardner recalled twenty-seven years later. “It reminded me of some of the great fighters I’d watched on television as a kid−just a picture-perfect punch. But what impressed me even more was his exuberance. He was so full of energy, and seemed to really enjoy what he was doing. I was at the gym one day and when he finished he was ready to leap right out of the ring. The ring was a good four or five feet off the floor, so this absolutely terrified Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown, who seemed to be watching over him every second. Arcel was old, but he could move pretty fast. He raced over and helped Duran down from the ring to make sure he didn’t jump and turn an ankle or something.”

  “Later that night when I got back to my hotel I phoned a friend in California,” said Gardner. “I advised him to bet on Duran.”

  Dundee, who would turn sixty a year after the Montreal fight, was regarded as a venerable figure (“He’s been around the fight game longer than the Marquis of Queensberry,” wrote Didinger), but he was a spring chicken compared to Arcel and Brown.

  “Those two guys are older than water,” said Dundee of Arcel, who was eighty-two, and Brown, seventy-three. As a young cornerman in New York in the late 1940s, in fact, Dundee had learned many tricks of the trade from the courtly Arcel, whose experience went back to the days of Benny Leonard.

  Freddie Brown could also claim a lengthy boxing pedigree. In Marciano’s corner a generation earlier, wrote Gardner, Brown had acquired “a degree of immortality as the cut man who closed the rip on Rocky’s nose in his second bout with Ezzard Charles.”

  “Arcel, when he’s not screaming, sounds like the chairman of a college English department,” noted Vic Ziegel in describing the venerable duo. “Brown is a white-haired man with a nose that resembles a low flush in clubs. His sentence structure is equally dazzling.”

  Duran and his boisterous traveling party were booked into the staid Hotel Bonaventure. Leonard and his crew, once they arrived in Montreal, took up residence nearby at the more modern Le Regence Hyatt.

  Their sumptuous digs were a far cry from the Leonard family accommodations in Montreal four years earlier. During the 1976 Games, Ray had stayed in the Olympic Village, but his parents, Cicero and Getha; wife-tobe, Juanita; Dave Jacobs; and several Leonard brothers and sisters had driven to Canada together in a beat-up Volkswagen van they nicknamed “the Sardine.”

  The ladies had shared a single room in a budget motel, sleeping on beds, chairs, and the floor. Jacobs, Cicero, Roger, and Kenny slept in the Sardine, which was parked on the street nearby, and made occasional forays to the motel room to sneak in a shower.

  Now, in 1980, Duran’s and Leonard’s respective headquarters were only a few blocks apart, and it was inevitable that there would be chance encounters in the days leading up to the fight. Roberto Duran might not have spoken much English back then, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t give Leonard the finger whenever he saw him.

  One morning Leonard’s sister Sharon was walking down the street when she looked up and saw Duran leering at her from a passing car, “flashing a message,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times scribe John Schulian, “that did not require an interpreter.”

  “Once his wife even gave my wife the finger,” said Leonard. “Duran was just weird.”

  The macho gamesmanship took its toll on Sugar Ray. Dundee would later admit to Dave Anderson that “[Leonard] got out-psyched. Duran abused Ray, and Ray couldn’t handle it. Duran would see Ray walking with his wife in the streets in Montreal and he’d yell, ‘I keel your husband. I keel your husband!’ The night of the fight, Ray wanted to keel him. Ray wanted to fight the guy, not box him.”

  Twenty-seven years later, Leonard conceded that Duran did a masterful job of winding him up.

  “I don’t think it was calculated, ” said Leonard. “It was more a case of Duran being Duran. He had that bully’s mentality, and he always tried to intimidate opponents. But he did challenge my manhood, and I wasn’t mature enough to know how to respond. All I could think about was retaliating.”

  Wolf Man Katz, in Montreal to cover the fight for the New York Times, dropped by Duran’s hotel one morning to find the lobby filled with Panamanian militiamen, zealously guarding Duran and swatting away any hotel guest who might venture too near. Duran spotted Katz across the room and, shooing away his protectors, walked over and hugged him. The two chatted for a moment, and as they parted company, Duran winked at Katz and told him, “I hope you bet beeg on me.”

  “So I did,” said the Wolf Man.

  The boxers reported to the Quebec commission offices on Monday for their pre-fight physicals. Shortly thereafter Arcel got a phone call in his hotel room, informing him that Duran’s EKG had revealed an irregularity−an unexplained arrhythmia−and that the fight might be in jeopardy.

  “How can he have a heart condition? ” asked Arcel. “Duran doesn’t even have a heart.”

  Arcel informed Eleta, who phoned Torrijos, and by nightfall the foremost cardiac specialist in Panama was en route to Montreal on a private jet.

  The next morning Duran underwent a four-hour battery of tests at the Montreal Institute of Cardiology and was cleared to fight. The cause of the irregularity on the initial EKG was never confirmed, but it was widely speculated that it could have been precipitated by diet pills Duran had consumed in a frenetic attempt to shed extra poundage in the days before the fight.

  If that was the case, the diet apparently succeeded. At the weigh-in, both made the welterweight limit with ease. Leonard weighed 145, and Duran was just half a pound heavier.

  In retrospect, believes Leonard, “I probably came in too light for that fight.”

  Jose Sulaiman, the WBC president Arum once described as “a fat Mexican dictator,” had elected to stay at the same hotel as Leonard. Sulaiman had further enraged the Duran camp when he appointed Carlos Padilla as the referee.

  The previous November, it was Padilla who had intervened to stop Leonard’s fight against Benitez with six seconds left in the final round, and more recently had appeared somewhat squeamish in working the first Alan Minter-Vito Antuofermo fight. In the opinion of Brown, who had been in Antuofermo’s corner, the referee’s disinclination to let Antuofermo work inside had cost his man the title.

  Brown complained that whenever Antuofermo worked his way inside under Minter’s jab, the Englishman would grab him, and when Vito continued to punch with his free hand, the referee would break the fighters.

  “I want a referee that’ll let my fighter fight,” moaned Arcel.

  At the weigh-in Arcel made it a point to lecture the Filipino referee. Arcel plainly hoped to gain an advantage for Duran when he reminded Padilla that the customers had paid to see the two boxers, not him.

  “Give us a great fight,” he said to Padilla. “The whole world is going to be watching. Let them fight.”

  “The night before the fight, several of us were having a drink at the bar atop the Hyatt when Jose Sulaiman sat down and joined us,” recalled Katz. “He told us that night that he had instructed Padilla to let the fighters fight. I think this had a lot more to do with the conduct of the fight than anything Ray Arcel migh
t have said to the referee.”

  With the advance sale less than half the house, the local promoters had been relying on a big walk-up crowd the night of the fight, but it began to rain early that afternoon, and a steady drizzle continued to fall as the preliminary bouts got underway.

  In its original concept, Stade Olympique was to have a retractable domed roof, which would be opened and closed by cables suspended from a 537-foot tower. On the drawing board, the roof resembled the lid of a giant teapot. Inhospitable weather, a protracted labor dispute, and engineering foul-ups had delayed its completion, and the 1976 Olympics had taken place in the open air.

  The tower remained, but four years later the 60,000-square-foot roof was still in Paris. The roof wouldn’t be installed until 1986, and in 1991 it collapsed, raining fifty-five tons of concrete into the fortunately unoccupied interior. The cost of the stadium had initially been estimated at $120 million, but by the time the Expos fled to Washington in 2006 the figure topped a billion dollars, and 8% of the price of each pack of cigarettes purchased in Quebec was going to defray the debt service from an Olympiad held three decades earlier.

  That the roof was still not in place for the Duran-Leonard fight proved a boon for those who had purchased tickets in the cheap seats, most of which were protected from the elements, but the ring had been set up in the baseball infield, between the pitcher’s mound and second base, meaning that the prime ringside seats were at field level and fully exposed.

  Ushers in the $500 sections walked about dispensing ponchos. When they ran out of those, they distributed plastic rubbish bags for the high rollers to wear over their clothes.

  Paid attendance would eventually reach 46,195. Had the Expos been able to draw such numbers they would still be in Montreal today, but on this evening it translated into nearly 32,000 empty seats. Far from recouping its investment, the Quebec Olympic Installation Board would be driven even further into the hole.

  The ringside press seats were also exposed to the elements, and many of us watched the undercard from beneath the roof, in the stands above the first base line. Others watched from the comfort of the Expos’ pressroom.

  Tragedy would visit the proceedings in the second bout of the evening, a rubber match between lightweights Cleveland Denny and Gaetan Hart, who had split two earlier meetings. In the final minute of their ten-round bout, Hart rained a succession of unanswered blows on Denny’s head.

  Far too late, the Canadian referee, Rosario Ballairgeon, tried to stop the fight, but even in his belated intervention he was hopelessly out of position. Ballairgeon stood behind Hart, frantically waving his arms, while Hart, unable to see the referee, kept pounding away at Denny.

  Once Hart was pulled away, Denny keeled over, his head thumping off the canvas. For several minutes he lay there as chaos reigned in the ring. Over a quarter-century later, the moment remains etched in Leonard Gardner’s mind.

  “I’d never seen anyone die in the ring before, though I’ve seen it since,” said Gardner. “It seemed apparent that that had happened, even at the time. Denny seemed to change color before my eyes. He looked like he was turning gray. It was a weird thing to see, or to think you’ve seen.”

  Eventually a stretcher was summoned. Denny, still convulsing, was strapped to it and wheeled from the ring. By then Michael Katz and I had gotten back down to ringside, and as we looked at him on the gurney, Denny’s eyes had rolled back into his head, evincing only white, and his mouthpiece was still clenched between his teeth.

  “I think we both knew right then he wasn’t going to make it,” Katz recalled a quarter-century later.

  “You’ve got to get that mouthpiece out!” I told one of the paramedics.

  A familiar face emerged from the mob surrounding Denny.

  “I’ve been trying for the last ten minutes,” a weary Ferdie Pacheco told me.

  The Fight Doctor, scheduled to work as part of the broadcast team, had followed his instincts and his Hippocratic Oath, abandoning his TV position to assist the stricken boxer.

  My Boston Herald American colleague Tim Horgan had been assigned to write the Duran-Leonard lead that night. Now it appeared that this preventable tragedy might also be an important story. After quickly conferring with Horgan, I jumped into a cab and followed the ambulance bearing Cleveland Denny to Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital.

  Denny was scheduled for immediate surgery to relieve a subdural hematoma, but no other information seemed to be forthcoming. Denny’s wife, Clarine, had accompanied him in the ambulance, but less than an hour later, on the advice of the hospital staff, she summoned another cab and returned to the stadium.

  “Well, if she’s going back to the fight, I’m going back to the fight,” I reasoned.

  Denny would linger for nearly two weeks. His brain stem had probably herniated when he hit the floor. He was pronounced clinically dead on July 2, but his wife elected not to remove him from life support systems, opting to rely on prayer. He lasted five more days before he died on July 7.

  In my absence a pair of Canadian middleweights, Eddie Melo and Fernand Marcotte, had battled to a 10-round draw, but I got back in time to see the conclusion of the semifinal, which on another night might have provided comic relief.

  In what was supposed to be the first step in the rehabilitation of John Tate, Arum had matched him against the Canadian heavyweight champion, Trevor Berbick. Fighting in the same city where he had been ingloriously knocked out by Teofilo Stevenson in their semifinal match four years earlier, Tate had more than held his own for eight rounds, but in the ninth Berbick caught him with a big right hand, and Tate responded by turning his back and literally running away.

  As Tate fled across the ring, Berbick chased him, still throwing punches, the last of which caught the American on the back of his head and knocked him headfirst through the ropes. Landing with a belly flop on the canvas, Tate came to rest with his head dangling over the edge of the apron, a position he retained as he was counted out. The only perceptible movement from Tate came in the involuntary twitching of his legs, and in that instant it crossed more than one person’s mind that we might have been looking at two ring fatalities in one night.

  “Tate landed almost directly in front of Bob Arum,” remembered Katz. “Arum had a look of shock on his face, and even as the referee was counting I could hear the unmistakable cackle− Heh! Heh! Heh! −of King from across the ring.

  “I looked over at him and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got Berbick, too!’”

  King enthusiastically nodded his head. Yes, he did.

  Duran, the first of the main event competitors to make an appearance, seemed so eager to fight that he almost raced from the dugout to the ring, accompanied by the beat of drums. When Leonard approached center stage, his wife and sister climbed atop their chairs, dancing as they sang, “Hey, Sugar Ray!”

  I also seem to recall that once they reached the ring, the principals were forced to stand through three different national anthems, and that, as usually happened in Montreal, the rendition of “O, Canada!” turned into a contest between the French- and English-speaking segments of the crowd, each trying to drown out the other by singing in its preferred tongue.

  As the boxers were introduced, another division of loyalties became evident. Despite his history in the venue, Leonard was far from an overwhelming crowd favorite. The cheers for Duran were even more pronounced, and boos and whistles could be heard amid the applause that greeted Leonard’s name.

  Leonard, for possibly the first time in his career, was even outswaggered. Duran exuded confidence. Leonard, despite a nervous smile, looked like a man about to face a firing squad.

  “This was a big fight, bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before,” said Leonard. “I can remember looking around at all those people in the stadium, looking at myself on the big TV screen, and thinking ‘Wow. This is huge. ’ I was in awe from the sheer magnitude of it.”

  Whether Leonard’s hand speed and ring quickness would offset
Duran’s street-fighting tactics would quickly become a moot point. For much of the night Leonard tried to beat Duran at his own game.

  The tone for the evening was set at the opening bell, when Duran charged straight out of his corner and tried to hit Leonard in the balls with the first punch he threw.

  Duran spent most of the opening three minutes trying to bull his way around the ring, and Leonard spent most of it trying to shake his way clear. Duran landed the best punch of the round when he speared Leonard with a right-hand lead, and Ray responded by shaking his head to indicate that he hadn’t been hurt.

  When a boxer does that, it is usually a safe bet that he has been.

  In the second, Duran caught Leonard high on the head with a left upper-cut that knocked him backward into the ropes. Stunned, Ray tried to clinch, but even as he grappled and looked to the referee for help, Duran kept pounding away.

  “Starting out I’d given him some head movement and a few little feints, but then Duran caught me with an uppercut and just knocked the shit out of me,” said Leonard.

  Katz recalled the same punch as a right-hand lead. “The shock to me was that Duran had hands as quick as Leonard’s,” said the Wolf Man. “Ray was hurt by that punch, and he didn’t recover for rounds. ”

  Before the fight Dundee had predicted that “the key will be Ray’s left hand,” but Leonard hadn’t showed that weapon. On the other hand, he had answered another question that hadn’t been asked in his twenty-seven previous fights.

  “I showed I could take a punch,” he said.

  Duran continued to punish the champion over the next two rounds, pounding Leonard with solid right hands, and while Leonard sometimes landed spectacular flurries of punches, he spent much of the evening allowing himself to be pushed around the ring. Although he had been expected to set the tone with his jab, Leonard failed to establish a rhythm that would allow him to use it, and when he tried to go on the attack, Duran was able to rely on his superior counterpunching.