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

by George Kimball

  Convinced that he’d been the victim of a least a larcenous decision, and possibly a betting coup, Marvin blamed the outcome of the Antuofermo fight on “Vegas judges” and vowed never again to leave the outcome to the capricious whims of mere mortals, particularly in a town where hundreds of thousands of dollars might be riding on the outcome at the sports book windows.

  Nevada might have been the only place in America where one could legally bet on a fight in 1980, but it wasn’t the only one in the world. One afternoon in London I went out and surveyed several bookie shops, where I was surprised to discover that Minter was holding firm as an 11-10 favorite. At that attractive price I placed a bet on Hagler.

  When I got back to Bailey’s that day, Marvin was sitting with Pat and Goody in the coffee shop. When I started to reveal the results of my reconnaissance mission, Marvin abruptly shouted, “I don’t want to hear it!” and stormed out of the room. Convinced that the only way he might lose this fight would be at the behest of gambling interests, Hagler was just superstitious enough to believe that advance knowledge of the odds might somehow open the door for hanky-panky.

  Although Hagler was an American challenging for an undisputed world championship, Ali was fighting Holmes at Caesars for the heavyweight title a few nights later, so the stateside press contingent was relatively small. Besides myself, Leigh Montville was in London covering the fight for the Boston Globe, as was Frank Stoddard for Hagler’s hometown Brockton Enterprise . ( Sports Illustrated saved expenses by assigning the fight to its resident Brit, Clive Gammon.) ABC would televise the bout back to the U.S., but I don’t recall seeing Al Michaels or Howard Cosell until the night of the fight.

  Antuofermo was there, having wangled a gig as a commentator for Italian television, and most evenings Vito would join Montville, Stoddard, Angie Carlino, Jimmy Quirk, and me, along with Bernie LaFratta, who had helped Arum package the European rights, and whatever Fleet Street scribes happened to be around, at our adopted headquarters−the Stanhope Arms across the street, where the publican was an affable Irishman named Peter Flood, thus ensuring that the establishment offered yet another London rarity−a decent pint of Guinness.

  The five-hour time difference in our favor, along with the British licensing laws then in effect, sometimes made for an odd drinking schedule.

  “The beauty of that trip, if I remember right, is that it was the one time in my life I could get drunk twice a day,” Montville would recall years later. “We would pound a bunch of beers before the two o’clock closing in the middle of the afternoon, then be back in the bar after watching sparring and writing our stories at night.”

  Since both Minter’s and Hagler’s sparring sessions were conducted in gyms located above pubs (Minter made the Thomas a Becket, in South London, his training headquarters), we often got a head start on the evening session, but somehow the stories got filed.

  Another presence who arrived a few days before the fight was Fulgencio Obelmejias, a tall Venezuelan middleweight who had advanced to No. 1 in the WBA rankings and thus loomed the mandatory challenger to the Minter-Hagler winner.

  The middleweight championship might have been what had by 1980 already become a boxing rarity−a unified, undisputed title−but the promotional rights were so thoroughly splintered that at least seven men had a piece of the action. Minter’s interests were represented by a four-man consortium headed up by Astaire, the Wembley impresario, along with Mickey Duff, Terry Lawless, and Mike Barrett. Arum was Hagler’s promoter-of-record, but Rip Valenti, the legendary Boston octogenarian who as Sam Silverman’s partner, and, later, successor, staged most of Marvin’s early fights, also had a piece of the American challenger, as did Rodolfo Sabbatini, a courtly Italian godfather whose mysteriously inherited interest in the 160-pound title dated back to the days of Nino Benvenuti.

  “There was a tremendous ongoing dispute, me and Sabbatini on one side and Duff and Astaire on the other,” revealed Arum. “They were supposed to have a piece of the options on Hagler, and I had a piece of the options on Minter. We resolved it by agreeing that whoever’s guy won, the others would drop out.

  “Obviously,” added Arum, “Jarvis and Mickey didn’t think Minter was going to lose.”

  Mickey Duff had provided the Hagler party with a van and driver to get them around London. The driver was a lovely kid named John who’d been in enough London club fights that his brains were scrambled by the time he turned twenty-one. John was great behind the wheel; he just couldn’t remember directions, so Duff had assigned a co-pilot, an old Welsh pug who couldn’t drive but knew London like the back of his hand.

  It didn’t take Goody and Pat long to notice that the Welshman spent a lot of time on the phone. The assumption, undoubtedly correct, was that he was reporting everything he saw back to Duff and Minter, but since everyone assumed he was a spy for the opposition, Goody made sure he didn’t see much.

  At his secluded Provincetown training camp Hagler was famous for putting himself “in jail,” spending most of his waking hours brooding in his room as he mentally psyched himself up for the task at hand. Except for road-work, sparring, and the odd meal in the coffee shop, he followed the same routine in London. It was somewhat surprising then, when a couple of days before the fight he appeared downstairs and asked Steve Wainwright and me if we felt like going for a walk.

  We spent a couple of hours strolling the streets of the British capital. Even though shaven-headed American tourists were a rarity in London back then, Marvin for the most part went unrecognized. At a tourist shop he playfully tried on a London constable’s helmet. I still have the photograph of him and Wainwright posing on the sidewalk, the bobby’s hat perched on Marvin’s head.

  At one point we came upon a building site, which gave Marvin pause to reflect on his previous occupation. For most of his boxing career, Hagler had supplemented his income working as a laborer for the Petronellis’ construction firm, as had Tony Petronelli. As Hagler watched the laborers scurry about the London building site he revealed, more with amusement than rancor, that Tony had been given a job as a bricklayer, while he was assigned to be a hod-carrier. For years Marvin had reckoned that he had the better job of the two−until he discovered the disparity in their hourly wages.

  Now that he appeared to be on the verge of supporting his family through his boxing career, Hagler confessed an ambition. He and his wife had talked it over and decided that once they had enough money they ought to open a laundromat. The notion of owning a business appealed to him. People who couldn’t afford washing machines still had to wash their clothes, he reckoned, and all he and Bertha would have to do would be sit back and watch them plop quarters into his machines.

  In keeping with another long-standing practice, two days in advance of the fight, Goody ordered up the van and had John drive him and Marvin over to Wembley to inspect the venue.

  “It’s partly to make sure everything’s all right from my standpoint, but mostly to familiarize the fighter,” Petronelli explained. “We talk about how everything is going to go on the night of the fight−which entrance we’re coming in, where our dressing room is, which route we’ll take to walk to the ring.

  “I want him to be as comfortable as possible and to know what to expect so there won’t be any surprises,” continued the trainer. “As we stood there looking up at the empty seats I reminded him that they’d all be full on Saturday night−almost all of them with hostile British fans cheering for Minter.”

  Goody could scarcely have imagined how much he had understated the case.

  Possibly because they have been disappointed so often for so long, British boxing fans don’t need much of an excuse for becoming overenthusiastic, and Minter himself abetted the jingoistic frenzy in the run-up to the fight when he promised that “no black man is going to take my title.” By injecting a whiff of racism into the issue, the champion ensured that Hagler’s reception at the arena would be nasty.

  There was a substantial presence of the anti-immigrant N
ational Front at Wembley that evening, and the prevalent mood was exacerbated by the outcome of the co-feature, which saw a young British middleweight named Tony Sibson knock out previously unbeaten American Bob Coolidge. Around the arena the bloodthirsty mob engaged in soccer chants. Many of the spectators had arrived bearing Union Jacks, which they brandished like battle-axes. There were even guys dressed in beefeater costumes.

  It didn’t help, either, that the concessionaires at Wembley were selling beer by the case. Not even a hard-guzzling Londoner can drink twenty-four beers in less than three rounds, meaning that by the time the fight reached its premature conclusion, many of the spectators had an abundance of ammunition at hand.

  “I remember standing there in the lobby of the arena watching all these skinheads buying cases of beer, hoisting them onto their shoulders, and trudging up the stairs to the balconies,” recalled Montville. “I couldn’t have anticipated what was going to happen, but I remember thinking that no good was going to come of this.”

  “I never saw anything like it,” said Arum. “It was like a huge, drunken orgy.”

  In contrast to the fever pitch of the crowd, the fight itself was almost perfunctory. Less than thirty seconds had elapsed when a Hagler right jab ripped open a gash below Minter’s left eye, and Marvin went to work on the cut, using his fists like the hands of a skilled surgeon.

  With the crowd chanting, “Minter! Minter!” the champion fought back, and even nailed Hagler with a good left just before the bell ended the first.

  Minter fought bravely in the second, but he was engaged in an uphill battle. Although Marvin was plainly concentrating on the cut, each time he missed the spot he seemed to open up a new one−first, above the left eye, then alongside the right one−on Minter’s face.

  It might have been close on the scorecards−after two rounds, two judges had Hagler up by a point, while one had Minter by the same score−but by the third round, the ring looked like an abattoir as Hagler pressed the attack, repeatedly rocking Minter with right uppercuts punctuated by the occasional straight left.

  “I always thought in most of his fights Marvin showed too much respect to his opponents,” said Montville. “He was cautious in the first Antuofermo fight, and he was the same way against Duran and Leonard. But in this one he fought with an absolute fury. Once he had Minter cut−and that was almost right away−it was as if all the frustrations of his career were being unleashed.”

  Many of the hooligans were either so drunk or seated so far from the ring they couldn’t accurately gauge the extent of the damage to Minter’s face and erupted angrily when the referee, Carlos Berrocal, stopped the fight midway through the third and led the Englishman to his corner to have the wound examined.

  When the blood was wiped away, Bidwell surveyed the damage and nodded to the referee to stop the fight. Berrocal officially terminated the action at 1:45 of the third.

  “Marvin beat the shit out of him, and when they finally stopped the fight because of the cuts, they went crazy and started throwing bottles,” remembered Arum. “In the midst of what should have been a great celebration, everybody was ducking under the ring.”

  Initially there was an angry roar, and then a second or two later the first bottle sailed into the ring, bursting and sending up a spray of beer that flashed under the ring lights. It didn’t take long for the rest of the crowd to get the same idea.

  As the bottles showered down from the rafters and exploded on the canvas, Pat and Goody Petronelli, Robbie Sims, and Danny Snyder all raced into the ring to shield Marvin from the grenade assault.

  Harry Carpenter, the English broadcaster calling the fight for BBC, described the scene as “a shame and disgrace to British boxing.”

  A wayward beer can from the cheap seats aimed at Hagler, in fact, struck Carpenter on the head. The commentator didn’t miss a beat as he continued to describe the riot.

  “I remember poor Rip Valenti,” said Arum. “Here Marvin has won the title after all these years, and I had to hold his hand and lead him out of the building. He was trembling.”

  Protected by the phalanx of bodies, Hagler was hustled from the ring toward the safety of his dressing room, which was well-attended by London bobbies. Antuofermo grabbed me by the arm and pulled me and Montville in the same direction.

  As we tried to make our way to safety, a skinhead made the mistake of whacking Vito over the back of the head with a beer bottle. The Mosquito didn’t even blink. He wheeled around and laid the guy out with a picture-perfect right cross.

  It may have been the best punch Antuofermo ever threw.

  “I always wondered if the guy even knew what had hit him,” Montville reflected. “When he came to, did he know he’d been knocked out by the former middleweight champion of the world? ”

  We managed to get through the swarm and into the dressing room of the new champion. A shaken Cosell eventually crawled from his hiding place beneath the ring to interview Hagler.

  Marvin never did get his belts that night. When he departed the arena an hour or two later, remnants of the rioting crowd still lingered outside. One of them heaved a brick and smashed the windshield of the car carrying the new middleweight champion of the world.

  By the time we got back to Bailey’s the celebration was underway. A contingent of Hagler’s Brockton friends had materialized in the bar, as had his mother, Mae Lang, and Marvin’s stepfather, Wilbur. Wainwright broke out the last of his tequila and, as the giggling sheiks looked on, made good on his wager, allowing Marvin’s wife, Bertha, to shave his head right there in the bar. He retains the Hagler look to this day.

  Marvin was indulging himself with a pint of ale. Arum was already contemplating his first defense, against Obelmejias. Pat and Goody were reflecting on the comportment of the English crowd.

  “We’re never coming back to this place as long as we live,” vowed Pat.

  By dispensation of the sheiks, the hotel bar remained open all night. The morning light was peeking through the windows of the boozy, smoke-filled room when Danny Snyder and Robbie Sims descended the staircase, carrying an American flag they had somehow appropriated. Arum and I decided to reprise a scene from The Deer Hunter and broke into a heartfelt if somewhat drunken a capella rendition of “God Bless America.” The entire room, Marvin included, joined in.

  We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were inaugurating a tradition. With Hagler facing just one American-born opponent in a seven-bout stretch that began with Minter, the scene would be repeated in venues around the world as “God Bless America” became Marvin Hagler’s post-fight celebra-tory anthem.

  By the time he met the twenty-one-year-old Tommy Hearns in August of 1980, Pipino Cuevas had defended the WBA title eleven times and only one of his opponents, Randy Shields, had survived to hear the final bell.

  The Mexican champion had been lured to Cobo Hall by the promise of a career-high purse. The card on which Hearns would win his first world title was promoted not by Don King or Bob Arum, but by the new kid on the promotional block, a fast-talking, free-spending huckster who called himself Harold Smith. Smith’s promotional firm was called Muhammad Ali Professional Sports, or MAPS. Ali had nothing to do with the operation, but had merely leased his name.

  The card in Detroit included two other WBA title bouts: Hearns stable-mate Hilmer Kenty’s first lightweight defense against Young Ho Oh, and a junior lightweight bout between Yasutsune Uehara and Sammy Serrano. Smith had overpaid for all of them.

  “He was regularly paying purses that were at least three times too big,” recalled Bob Arum. “The boxers loved it, of course, but nobody could figure out how he was doing it. He had to be losing money every time he ran a show.”

  The following year all became clear when it was revealed that Smith’s name was actually Ross Fields, and that the entire MAPS operation had been a ruse, a money-laundering scheme financed by a computerized theft of $21.3 million from Wells Fargo.

  Hearns had a tougher battle with the scale than he did
with Cuevas. Although he had been right on target to make the 147-pound limit, the day of the weigh-in, Hearns’ Detroit pal Quenton “QB” Hines told Michael Katz, “I gave Tommy some fruit to eat−plums−and they made him overweight.”

  According to Hines, Hearns had to be spirited off to a massage parlor−the Oriental Health Spa & Massage Parlor in downtown Detroit−where he was broiled in a sauna to shed the excess weight.

  Emanuel Steward, on the other hand, denies the tale to this day.

  “Tommy wasn’t that kind of kid,” said Steward. “He never went to no massage parlor. He was about 150 the day before the fight, but we just put him in a rubber suit and let him shadow-box, and he took it off with no problem.”

  Hearns, in any case, made the limit with a pound to spare. Cuevas weighed 146 1/ 2 .

  The Hit Man’s unusual dimensions figured to make him a tough opponent for Cuevas in any case, and the champion appeared to have approached the bout without a firm battle plan. He tried to box in the first round, but got caught with a right that nearly put him down.

  In the second Cuevas tried to move inside and force Hearns to brawl, with disastrous consequences. Hearns wobbled him with one right, and not much later cold-cocked him with another. Cuevas plowed face-first into the canvas, where he was counted out by referee Stanley Christodoulou.

  All of Detroit celebrated, but no one more happily than Hines, who’d provided Hearns with his pre-fight plums.

  “If Tommy hadn’t knocked him out quick he would have had no strength to go on,” sighed QB. “And it would have been all my fault.”

  In a year in which Leonard and Duran met twice and Marvin Hagler won the middleweight title for the first time, Thomas Hearns would be selected 1980’s Fighter of the Year by the Boxing Writers Association. And, making it a clean sweep for the Kronk, Emanuel Steward would win the Al Buck Award as Manager of the Year.