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

by George Kimball

  “You’ve got to remember that now Duran was even bigger in the boxing world than he’d been before. He had now reached a legendary status that transcended the Latino community, and even the sport itself. It made no difference that he didn’t speak English. He was Roberto Duran .

  “Once we got him up to Grossinger’s he went to work−though it was evident it wasn’t as hard as he worked for the first fight. It was fall, and the mornings were getting colder. Sometimes Freddie had a hard time getting him out of bed.”

  This time Don Morgan served as Duran’s principal sparring partner. Goodman also recalls that Kevin Rooney journeyed over from Catskill on several occasions as well.

  “He did the things he’d done that spring−interacting with the hotel guests, meeting with the media−but there seemed to be even more family and friends around,” continued Goodman. “Duran went through the motions and got himself into decent shape, but it seemed he didn’t spar quite as hard or exercise with the same abandon. He was so sure he could handle Leonard again that this time there was no sense of urgency to his preparations.”

  When it came time to break camp and move on to New Orleans, no one was happier than Duran. Not necessarily because he was anxious to fight but rather because it was getting cold up in the Catskills, and he was eager to get back to a more hospitable climate.

  If Freddie Brown, who had done the hands-on training at Grossinger’s, was concerned, he apparently didn’t tell Ray Arcel. When the older man was asked about the possibility of an upset, he replied, “If Duran lost to Leonard, he’d be ready to commit suicide.”

  Leonard had taken much of the summer off, dabbling in television work for both HBO and CBS, in addition to a part-time gig as a sports reporter for a Washington station. He’d done a couple of commercials as well, including a celebrated one in which he and Duran were jointly featured. Their two young sons accompanied the two boxers to the photo shoot.

  “7-Up approached us with the idea of me and Duran doing the commercials with our kids,” said Leonard. “I told Mike [to tell Duran], this was found money, easy money, but if he acts the fool in front of Little Ray, it’s fucking over! I didn’t want him making obscene gestures or threats or the stuff he used to do around my kid.

  “As it turned out, it went fine,” said Leonard. “While we were shooting it, Duran was a perfect gentleman.”

  Leonard once again trained in New Carrollton, but this time his preparations were Duran-specific. One of his sparring partners, Dale Staley, described himself as “the American Assassin.”

  In a bout against Leo Thomas at Washington’s Starplex the previous February, the American Assassin had been disqualified for taking a bite out of his opponent. It cost him the fight, but it won him a job in the Leonard camp, where he was encouraged to use his ample arsenal of dirty tricks to emulate Duran.

  “Staley was a nasty fighter, and his idol was Duran,” said Leonard. “I told him, ‘You can do anything you want, except bite me.’ The first week or so he was rough, but then I learned to compensate.”

  In camp Staley was free to employ his elbows, arms, and head. John Schulian described one sparring session in which Staley grabbed the ropes for leverage and then butted Leonard squarely in the head. Leonard responded in kind, grasping the ropes with one hand and smacking the Assassin in the face with the other.

  After Leonard’s loss to Duran in Montreal, Dave Jacobs had so strongly opposed the idea of an immediate rematch that he threatened to quit, and did, when Trainer and Dundee signed to go back up against Duran without a tune-up fight.

  “Some people wanted him to fight again before the rematch with Duran, but that would have been useless,” Dundee explained. “You don’t gain anything by fighting less than the best. We know what we have to do to beat Duran.”

  The disagreement over the wisdom of the rematch was the stated reason, at least for public consumption, for Jacobs’ departure, but there was obviously more to it than that. Jacobs had been Leonard’s first boxing coach and his father-confessor at every step of the way, but he had increasingly chafed as he saw his influence waning. Trainer was making the management decisions, Dundee the boxing decisions, and Morton seemed to increasingly have Ray’s ear as well. Jacobs still had the position of trainer, but lacked the authority implicit in that title. Nor was he being paid what he thought a man in his position ought to be.

  Jacobs’ departure was a disappointment, “because at one time he and Ray had been very close,” said Mike Trainer, “but the important thing to remember is that Ray didn’t fire him. Ray fired a lot of people over the years, but Dave Jacobs quit.”

  Since Dundee wouldn’t arrive in Washington until early November, this left Janks Morton in charge of the early preparations. Leonard, who had often sparred as many as fifteen rounds a day before the first fight, never worked more than nine for this one.

  In contrast to the corpulent state in which Duran opened camp, Leonard was a model of fitness. He weighed 173 pounds the day he commenced his workouts in earnest, and was already down to 160 by the time Dundee arrived, three weeks ahead of the fight.

  Angelo, plainly pleased by what he saw, warned that the first time around Duran had mistaken decency for weakness.

  “No more Mister Nice Guy,” said Dundee.

  “I know what I have to do to beat him this time,” said Leonard. “It will be completely different.”

  Besides, he wondered, “if he’s so tough, how come he didn’t knock me out in the first fight, even when I was fighting his style of fight? ”

  In 1923, seeking the largest possible purse for what was by any standard an ordinary defense by his heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey’s legendary manager, Jack “Doc” Kearns, had found willing accomplices among the citizenry of Shelby, Montana.

  Appealing to the spirit of boosterism among the frontiersmen, Kearns persuaded several of the Montana town’s leading lights to put up what eventually turned out to be $300,000, in addition to erecting from virgin local timber a temporary stadium that would accommodate what was hoped would be a crowd of 40,000 to watch Dempsey defend his title on the Fourth of July against a challenger named Tom Gibbons.

  Although the Shelby civic leaders, hoping to put their town on the map, had initiated the entreaty, they were clearly overmatched. As John Lardner described it, “These men marveled at Kearns’ almost religious attachment to the principle of collecting all the cash in Montana that was not nailed down.”

  No one had held a gun to the heads of the citizenry of Shelby, but they shortly found themselves throwing good money after bad, having been persuaded that “the honor of all Montana” was at stake. After Dempsey decisioned Gibbons over fifteen lackluster rounds, he and Kearns (who was somewhat weighted down with two large bagfuls of silver) slipped out of town on separate trains and reconvened in Salt Lake City a few days later. By then the first of what would be four Shelby banks to fail as a direct result of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight had already shuttered its doors.

  The town fathers who had hoped to render the town’s name a household word had inadvertently done so. Forevermore, “shelby,” both as a noun and as a verb, would be ingrained in the lexicon of boxing.

  And nobody could shelby the way Don King could shelby.

  Whether King had Kearns’ example or his own experience with the Republic of Zaire in mind when he set out to shelby New Orleans is unclear, but early on in the proceedings it became clear to the World’s Greatest Promoter that in spite of the intense interest in the Duran-Leonard rematch, he had a box-office dog on his hands.

  As the half of BADK left standing after Duran’s victory in Montreal, King had the promotional rights to the return bout. Duran, as the winner of that fight, was seeking a purse comparable to what Leonard had commanded when he was the champion. And Leonard, though willing to take a cosmetic pay cut as the challenger, had already set a high bar for himself with his unprecedented purse in June.

  By the time he had both men’s signatures on contracts, King was o
n the hook for an $8 million guarantee to Duran and another $6 million to Leonard. Now all he had to do was find $14 million.

  In Montana back in 1923, Kearns had driven up the price of poker with fictitious reports of a half-million-dollar offer from Madison Square Garden to stage the Dempsey-Gibbons fight. In 1980, King fueled a similar bidding war by obtaining a modest site fee offer from Caesars Palace and then using it to play the Astrodome in Houston and the Louisiana Superdome off against each another.

  The latter “won” by agreeing to take 90% of the promotion off King’s hands for a mere $17.5 million. This obligation was directly assumed by the Hyatt Corporation, whose hotel abutted the Superdome.

  Having absolved himself of the attendant financial obligations, King remained the hands-on promoter, and retained for himself foreign-rights television sales, which he shared with Neil Gunn, the Superdome official who had been the point man in putting together the financing of the New Orleans enterprise.

  In addition to making its pitch for New Orleans civic pride and the anticipated boost the event would provide to local tourism, the Hyatt people were relying on the gate receipts at the 79,000-seat Superdome, where a capacity or even near-capacity crowd would have covered their financial stake. That their projections were wildly off the mark did not become apparent until the week of the fight.

  Duran wouldn’t be the only one to say “No mas” in connection with this fight. The Hyatt Corporation never promoted another boxing event.

  “Neil Gunn was an awfully nice fellow, and we did our best to help him out, but they had vastly overpaid for that fight,” said Trainer. “They took a beating.”

  Both men talked a good fight that week.

  “I will beat him worse than the first time,” vowed Duran, who undoubtedly meant it. “This time I’m going to shut his mouth with my gloves.”

  Leonard, noting that he had gotten “five years’ worth of experience in one night” in Montreal, lapsed into the third person when he said, “I knew that if Sugar Ray fights his fight, he wins. But in that first fight he got into my head, took me out of my game plan.”

  Howard Cosell was performing double-duty in New Orleans that week. The night before the fight, the Saints hosted the Rams in a nationally televised Monday Night Football game. The Superdome press box was filled to capacity with boxing writers. After the game, we ended up, en masse, at the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street.

  King had provided complimentary tickets for Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, Michael Spinks, and Saoul Mamby, and made sure that the boxers were prominently seated together at ringside. Hearns and Emanuel Steward had also traveled to New Orleans. When word reached King that Thomas Hearns was in town, King had a message for the WBA welterweight champion.

  “If Hearns wants a ticket,” said the World’s Greatest Promoter, “let him buy one.”

  “We were just there to create some attention,” said Steward. “It was clear to me by then that Tommy and Ray were going to fight eventually, and I truly expected Ray to win the rematch.”

  Over breakfast at his London hotel in September of 1980, Marvin Hagler held up his two fists and declared: “This time I’m bringing my own two judges with me.”

  Ten months had passed since the draw with Antuofermo, and now Hagler was in England, once again poised to fight for the middleweight championship of the world, but this time there would be a different dance partner. The 160-pound championship now belonged to a Briton named Alan Minter.

  That Leonard-Benitez/Antuofermo-Hagler joint bill in Vegas the previous November had provided most American scribes’ first introduction to Minter. Then the World Boxing Council’s top-ranked contender, the Englishman presumably loomed the next challenger for the winner. Accompanied to Vegas by his father-in-law and trainer, Doug Bidwell, Minter was a ubiquitous presence at Caesars Palace that week, and at one point the late Hunter Thompson convinced himself that Minter was stalking him.

  Thompson began to see Minter in his sleep. Once he peeked around from behind the faux Michelangelo’s “David” statue planted in the corridor to see if “that damned Minter” might be lurking in the hallway, and on another occasion when he spotted Minter strolling through the lobby, he’d ducked under a cocktail table at the Galleria Bar to hide from the Englishman.

  In Las Vegas, Minter and Bidwell seemed to be inseparable. One night the English boxer and his father-in-law brazenly strolled through Caesars with matching hookers on their arms.

  Under normal circumstances, the controversial nature of the Antuofermo draw might have put Hagler in line for an immediate rematch, but since the Mosquito held both the WBC and WBA titles−the only ones extant a quarter-century ago−he was first obliged to defend against Minter. That fight, in March 1980, produced one of the more bizarre scoring discrepancies in the annals of the sport.

  Two judges, including one who scored the fight 7-5-3 (in rounds) for Antuofermo, had it reasonably close. The third, Roland Dakin, scored the fight 149-137, or 13-1-1 for Minter. That one-sided scorecard, coupled with allegations of misconduct on Dakin’s part, rendered Antuofermo’s rematch position even more compelling than Hagler’s.

  “When Antuofermo fought Minter, Minter won the fight, but the English judge kept signaling to the British television people after each round,” said Arum. “When the television tapes confirmed that, the WBC ordered an immediate rematch.” (Jose Sulaiman also announced that Dakin would never judge another WBC title fight, but it didn’t take him long to relent: Barely a year later Dakin was back in a judge’s seat when light-heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad stopped the Zambian Lottie Mwale.)

  “The English were delighted, of course, because Minter got another payday, but it turned out to be a year after the first Antuofermo fight that Marvin got his shot, and it had to be in England,” added Arum. “Basically, it had to be in England because of [British promoter] Jarvis Astaire fucking around with the WBC.”

  Marvin had bided his time, keeping busy with a pair of fights in Maine, neither of which got out of the second round. (In one of them he avenged the old Philadelphia robbery by stopping Boogaloo Watts, who would later become one of his most reliable sparring partners. In the other, he solidified his position in the pecking order by knocking out Hamani, the French contender.)

  Then, late that spring, Hagler had returned to Vegas, where he out-pointed Marcos Geraldo in an ABC fight. Although he won comfortably, Marvin’s performance was less than dominating, and when Minter busted Antuofermo up and stopped him on cuts in the eighth round of their re-match at the Wembley Pool in June, the comparative performances combined to produce a growing confidence among British boxing fans that Minter represented the real goods among middleweights−and that Hagler, by inference, did not.

  By the time he got to England, Hagler’s complement of sparring partners had been reduced to two: journeyman Danny Snyder and Marvin’s younger brother Robbie Sims, who had made his pro debut earlier that year. Snyder, like Minter, was a southpaw, while Robbie, in emulation of his older brother, was essentially ambidextrous and could produce a fair approximation of the Englishman’s style.

  Snyder had been in England once before. When Mike Baker challenged another lefthander, Maurice Hope, for the WBC junior middleweight title a year earlier, Danny had been the American’s principal sparring partner. In a session at the Elephant & Castle a few days before the Hope fight, Snyder accidentally knocked Baker cold. It hadn’t been a public rehearsal, but several eyewitnesses from the seemingly omnipresent London fight mob remembered him, and at Hagler’s first workout at Freddie Hill’s Gym, on the second floor of a Battersea pub, the Fleet Street crowd spent as much time interviewing “the bloke who knocked out Baker in the gym” as they did the American challenger.

  Arum had offered Sims a spot on the undercard, but Goody and Pat Petronelli rejected the idea on the grounds that concern about his younger brother could prove a distraction to Marvin. Instead, Robbie’s next fight took place five nights later back in the States, where he
knocked out Danny Heath in the first round on Rip Valenti’s live card at the Boston Garden, staged to accompany the Holmes-Ali closed-circuit telecast at the old Causeway Street edifice.

  Another key member of the entourage−and the third man in the corner during the fight−was Hagler’s attorney, Steve Wainwright. The scion of one of Brockton’s oldest and most prominent families (his father was a former mayor), Steve was a partner in the firm of Wainwright, Wainwright, Wainwright, Wainwright, & Wainwright. Despite his lofty pedigree, on fight nights Steve was now manning the spit bucket, conspicuous in a satin cornerman’s jacket with “BARRISTER” stitched across the back.

  Wainwright was partial to tequila, which someone had warned him might be difficult to procure in London. As it turned out, it was readily available in most of the better pubs, but as a safeguard against a possible drought, he’d brought along a case of the stuff.

  Like much of London, Bailey’s Hotel had recently been purchased by oil-rich Arabs. It didn’t take Wainwright long to make their acquaintance, and within a day or two he’d conducted a crash course in the ritualistic art of tequila consumption. In what became a nightly routine, around closing time at the hotel bar Wainwright would be joined by a table full of sheiks in flowing white robes, who would gleefully lick salt from their fists, toss down tequila shooters, suck on limes, and break into high-pitched giggles.

  During one such bash Wainwright promised that if Hagler won the world title on Saturday night he would shave his head just like Marvin’s.

  As a psychological ploy, or so Bob Arum claims to this day, the British promoters had initially assigned Hagler and his party to another hotel, but between the traffic and the all-night noise Marvin couldn’t sleep. Bailey’s was no doubt considered a demotion, but a blue-collar boxer from Brockton wouldn’t have known the difference. Hagler was every bit as comfortable there as he might have been at the more elegant Dorchester just up the street.

  Bailey’s was located in Kensington, near the Gloucester Road Underground stop. Each morning before breakfast Marvin, along with Goody and the sparring partners, did his roadwork in Hyde Park.