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

by George Kimball

Half an hour later an alternate theory, blaming a “stomach-ache” resulting from Duran’s post-weigh-in gluttony, quickly spread around the pressroom.

  Duran was reported to have blamed “cramps in my stomach and in my right arm.”

  “I got so weak I couldn’t go on,” Duran was said to have explained. “Leonard was weak, but I didn’t have the strength to pressure him.”

  WBC President Jose Sulaiman told Red Smith that Duran had told him that “when he threw a right hand in [the eighth] round, something happened to his shoulder.”

  Duran never met with the press that night to offer his own explanation. Purported quotes, often contradictory, were supplied by his team.

  Although the post-fight press conference took place in Duran’s absence, the “other” welterweight champion made himself available. Tommy Hearns, correctly anticipating a Leonard victory, had brought along a rubber chicken, which he flung at Leonard by way of challenge.

  Had Leonard’s triumph been accomplished by more traditional means, this might have proved an inspired tactic, but in the midst of the confusion that reigned in New Orleans that night it was a meaningless ploy, and few reporters even took note of it, and, apart from a look of mild annoyance, Leonard appeared to ignore it.

  “I didn’t feel disrespected,” recalled Leonard. “I knew it was a spoof. I knew they were just trying to get some attention, so it didn’t bother me, but frankly, Tommy Hearns and Aaron Pryor were the last things on my mind that night.”

  “But just by being there we created more attention than if we hadn’t been there,” said Steward.

  In his moment of triumph, Leonard refused to gloat. The memory of his own feelings in Montreal five months earlier still resonated, and when someone suggested that Duran’s actions had been those of a coward, Leonard sternly warned, “Don’t put words into my mouth.”

  And, oh, yes, there was a concomitant communiqué from Duran that night:

  I will never fight again. I am retiring from boxing now.

  That night over a hundred sportswriters found themselves faced with the prospect of explaining to their readers something they could barely comprehend themselves.

  “It was as if John Wayne, faced by the guy in the black hat, got a case of shaky knees,” I began to type.

  Once I had finished and filed my story I turned to the scribe next to me. “Look at the bright side of it,” I sighed. “It’ll be a long time before we have to sit through the Panamanian national anthem again.”

  Why Roberto Duran turned tail in New Orleans remains a subject of debate to this day.

  “He quit out of humiliation and frustration,” said Leonard. “It’s one of those things that happens to bullies. It’s like a guy who jumps off a bridge and halfway down he says, ‘Damn! I could have gone into therapy!’ Duran threw his hands up without realizing the repercussions it would have on his legacy.”

  My view was that Duran at the time actually believed himself to be committing the ultimate macho act. Emanuel Steward concurs.

  “Duran was completely frustrated,” said Steward. “It was like he was saying, ‘If you don’t want to fight, then fuck you. I’m not going to stand here jumping all around after you.’ In Duran’s mind I think he expected that the crowd would condemn Leonard for having made a mockery of the fight, rather than him for quitting.”

  “I think Duran was just saying, ‘I came to fight and you didn’t,’” opined Jim Watt, the Scotsman who had succeeded Duran as the WBC lightweight champion. “It was as if he were saying ‘Look, I’m going home. Here’s my phone number. If you decide you’d like to fight, give me a ring. And here’s my wife’s phone number, too. If it’s dancing you want to do, call her. ’”

  “The ‘stomach ache’ explanation was a load of bollocks, and nobody believed it for a second,” said Watt in recalling the No Mas fight a quarter-century later. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he quit out of frustration because Leonard was making a mockery of it by dancing around out there, but that’s still totally unacceptable. Otherwise, everybody who fights Floyd Mayweather would be entitled to quit.”

  Later, word came that Emile Bruneau, the chairman of the Louisiana Boxing Commission, wanted an immediate meeting with Duran and his handlers.

  Bobby Goodman hastily conferred with King, Duran, Arcel, and Eleta, essentially to make sure everyone would have his story straight. The “cramps” excuse concocted by Freddie Brown sounded as good as anything else, and would be difficult to disprove.

  Arcel walked back to the meeting, accompanied by an old friend, Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg.

  In an anteroom in the bowels of the Superdome, Bruneau had set up a table and chairs, conference-style.

  “As soon as I walked in, Bruneau told me they were going to have to hold the purse pending an investigation,” recalled Goodman. “I explained that they couldn’t hold Duran’s purse. It had already been paid by a letter of credit lodged with a bank in Panama. All that was required to release it was a newspaper article confirming that Duran had showed up and that the fight had taken place, and it had taken place.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to determine just what we can do to penalize this boxer. We have a responsibility to the fans,” argued Bruneau.

  Arcel reminded the chairman that if Duran had indeed become ill it would be just as if he had been injured during the fight, and cited the example of Liston in the first Ali fight.

  “I don’t know what happened, and if I don’t, you don’t,” Arcel told Bruneau. “I’m not even sure Roberto does. But do not rush to judgment of this man, whose hand you couldn’t shake fast enough each time he filled an arena for you.”

  “Duran is a gallant warrior,” pleaded Eleta. “He would never quit.”

  Bruneau informed the assembled parties that there would be an official meeting of the commission at ten o’clock the next morning. He then dismissed the group, asking Goodman and Duke Durden to remain behind.

  A former minor-league ballplayer who had reached the Triple-A level in the Dodgers’ organization, Durden was in 1980 the chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, in which role he had often seemed unconscionably close to King. He would later make that relationship official by resigning his NSAC position to become a vice president of Don King Productions. Since he lacked any jurisdiction at what would become known as the “No Mas” fight we must assume that he was asked to participate in an ex officio capacity.

  And, given subsequent developments, it is also reasonable to assume that whatever advice he offered was likely to benefit King.

  Conceding that he wouldn’t be able to impede the letter of credit in Panama, Bruneau determined that he would impose the maximum fine allowed under Louisiana law, which at the time was $7,500.

  After the meeting with Goodman and Durden, Bruneau met with the press, where he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything like this in all my days around boxing, and we owe it to the people of Louisiana who paid to see this fight to investigate the whole matter.”

  While the meeting was taking place beneath the Superdome, Duran had returned to his suite at the Hyatt. Ray Arcel’s wife, Stevie, went to visit him there, expecting to offer her commiseration and check on his condition. To her surprise, she found a lively party underway. Surrounded by an entourage that included several National Guard colonels, Duran and his wife were singing and dancing. From all appearances you’d have thought he’d won the fight.

  Before he left his dressing room, Duran had been examined by his personal physician, Dr. Orlando Nuñez, who had, the press had been told, diagnosed Duran’s malady as “acute abdominal cramps.”

  Many of us remained skeptical.

  “Millions of American women take Midol every day for this complaint,” I noted at the time.

  Thom Greer was moved to recall an occasion several years earlier when he’d been covering a women’s fight at the D.C. Arena and Jackie Tonawanda’s opponent had to quit because of menstrual cramps.

  Another scribe
, recalled Al Goldstein, said, “If Duran had stomach cramps, it must have been his guts shrinking.”

  After he was dismissed from the meeting, leaving Goodman and Durden to sort things out with Emile Bruneau, Carlos Eleta returned to the hotel, where, like Stevie Arcel, he was shocked to find Duran in the midst of what had all the trappings of a wild celebration.

  Eleta angrily drove the money-changers from the temple, and then ordered Duran to change clothes. At 2:30 a.m., Manos de Piedra accompanied his manager to Southern Baptist Hospital, where he was examined for the next several hours.

  That the tests Duran underwent at the hospital during those early morning hours were unable to exclude the “cramps” diagnosis confirmed Freddie Brown’s quick thinking in concocting an excuse that could not be medically disproved.

  Brown later confirmed to Michael Katz that the “cramps” story had been his own invention.

  “If they knew he’d quit back in Panama, they’d have moidered him,” said Brown.

  A variant explanation promulgated in the hours immediately after the fight held that Duran had become “nauseous” from something in his diet.

  If so, I pointed out, that would make him the first visitor since Andrew Jackson expelled the British in 1815 to leave New Orleans complaining about the food.

  Duran’s first stop after leaving the hospital was the Hyatt coffee shop, where he polished off yet another plate of steak and eggs. When he appeared before the Commission a few hours later, Duran apologized and insisted that he had withdrawn because he had become ill with cramps.

  Bruneau then announced that he was fining Duran $7,500 as the result of his “unsatisfactory performance.” Bobby Goodman reached into his pocket and produced a check in that precise amount. It was made out to the Louisiana Boxing Commission, and the funds were drawn on the account of Don King Productions.

  Although Duran was sticking to his story, the elder half of his brain trust viewed it with some cynicism.

  “Doctor? ” exclaimed Arcel. “This guy needs a psychiatrist more than anything else. If anyone had ever come to Freddie and me and said, ‘This guy will quit on you,’ I’d have spit in his eye. Duran? Quit? Never!”

  Three years later, Duran would recall to SI’ s Bill Nack, “Leonard knew I had nothing. He was running and clowning because he knew I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to let myself get knocked out and look ridiculous in the ring.”

  “What he did was so much worse,” added Carlos Eleta. “But he didn’t think about that. ”

  “I think something really was wrong with him,” Don King told the assembled press the next morning. “People talk about all the money he made and say he wasn’t hungry enough this time. Money comes and goes, but words will follow you forever−especially in Latin America.”

  “Yeah, they’re checking Duran’s birth certificate back in Panama,” cracked Fast Eddie Schuyler. “They think now he may be a Guatemalan.”

  “You guys will write about all this now and cut him up a little bit for a week or two, and then everybody will forget about it,” predicted King. “But in Panama, they’ll never forget it.”

  A few nights later Johnny Carson told his Tonight Show audience that he had considered inviting Duran to appear on his show to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  “But I’m afraid he’ll quit by the eighth day,” quipped Carson.

  Duran’s surrender was so stunning that it all but overshadowed the brilliance of Leonard’s performance, but, Ray pointed out, “I made him quit−and making Roberto Duran quit was even better than knocking him out. The fact that he quit and the way he did it doesn’t take anything away from my victory. I’m the champion because he couldn’t change and I could.”

  Interestingly, the term “No mas” did not immediately enter the lexicon. Although the Spanish phrase would become synonymous with the New Orleans rematch and Duran’s fall from grace, the words “No mas” were nowhere to be found in Ed Schuyler’s AP story read by millions of Americans the next morning, nor did they appear in mine.

  Since the fight had occurred on a Tuesday night, the issue of Sports Illustrated with Bill Nack’s account didn’t appear until eight days later, and then it was under a headline−“The Big Belly-Ache”−that still appeared to buy the “cramps” story.

  The morning after the No Mas fight, Gen. Omar Torrijos angrily ordered Duran and his entire thirty-six-member traveling party to return to Panama immediately, but the boxer ignored his country’s ruler and went to Miami instead. It was weeks later that he went back to Panama, only to discover that in his absence his mother’s home had been vandalized, his own house stoned. Newspapers questioned not only his courage, but his masculinity. A makeshift billboard reading “Duran Is a Traitor” was painted on the seawall alongside La Avenue Balboa in Panama City. He heard himself described, variously, as un cobarde (a coward), una gallina (a chicken), and as, simply, maricon, or homosexual.

  And in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, the Panamanian government had repealed the special tax exemption it had granted Duran as a “National Hero.” When he came home and tried to cash his $8 million letter of credit, the government grabbed the first $2 million off the top.

  Whatever might actually have been going on in Roberto Duran’s mind when he said “No mas,” he could hardly have anticipated the consequences. He became the butt of jokes, and even his most ardent admirers deserted him in droves.

  “His image had been destroyed in a single moment,” said Bobby Goodman. “When he got back to Panama, he didn’t even dare show his face. He lived like a prisoner in his own home.”

  Goodman had been with Duran every day for months on end at his training camps for the two Leonard fights, and knew him as well as anyone.

  “Duran had great pride, and the heart and soul of a warrior,” said Goodman over a quarter-century later. “He was the ultimate warrior who had come ready to do battle, but his opponent changed the rules and he wouldn’t submit to being humiliated like that.”

  It was, in any case, a moment that would haunt Duran for the rest of his life. Worse still, he had turned his despised adversary into a boxing hero.

  Sugar Ray Leonard would no longer be regarded as boxing’s pretty boy. He had added a new scalp to his collection. He was now the man who had made Roberto Duran quit.

  Chapter 4

  The Showdown

  Hearns–Leonard I

  Caesars Palace, September 16, 1981

  As the entourages of victor and vanquished spilled into the ring and 23,618 high-rollers, celebrities, and boxing aficionados began to file out of the stadium in the direction of the casino’s gaming tables, the sky lit up with a gaudy and expensive fireworks display Caesars Palace had commissioned for the occasion.

  It was September 16, 1981, and the fight advertised as “The Showdown” had more than lived up to its billing. For almost fourteen rounds of nonstop action, Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns had gone back and forth, each getting a nose in front only to be overtaken by the other. It had been a thrilling war of give-and-take, ebb-and-flow, and when it was over only one man was left standing.

  But, the beaten Hearns would say, accurately, once it was over: “We put on a great show for them. If you never see another fight, but you saw this one, that would be enough.”

  Twenty-six years later it remains high on anyone’s list of the great boxing matchups of all time.

  Had the two fought, as they almost did, in Providence back in 1978, remember, Leonard would have made $100,000, Hearns $12,500. Three years later, their respective guarantees were $8 million and $5.1 million, and each would earn millions more against what turned out to be a $36 million gross.

  Although his introduction to the professional game had been less auspicious than Leonard’s, by 1980 Hearns had attracted the attention of boxing insiders, if not the public at large.

  After the Cuevas fight, Hearns−posing as the Hit Man, wearing a gang-sterish zoot suit with (of course) a tommy gun tucked under his arm
−had been featured on the cover of The Ring magazine. And it had been the still-undefeated Hearns and not Leonard (2-1 in 1980) who was the reigning Fighter of the Year.

  “When we finally made our deal with the Hearns camp, we did things the way I’d always felt a big fight should be done,” recalled Trainer. “We did all our negotiating with Hearns’ representatives and with Caesars Palace first. Then we went out and hired somebody to act as the promoter.”

  Officially, the promotion was staged by a four-way consortium of Dan Doyle and Shelly Finkel, along with the husband-and-wife team of Dan and Kathy Duva, who headed up Main Events. Their prior experience had for the most part come in the promotion of small club-fight shows in New Jersey.

  “Shelly had kind of been the intermediary,” said Trainer. “He helped work things out with Hearns’ people, and he was close to the Duvas. We basically hired them to put on the promotion, and it pretty much put Main Events on the map.”

  Doyle, as a reward for his loyalty and past services, was listed as a co-promoter, but, said the erstwhile basketball coach, “My real job was to raise the capital for the fight and handle the New England pay-per-view sale. Dan, Kathy, and Shelly handled a variety of tasks, and they did a terrific job. Bob Arum was later brought on board to help with the overseas markets and to coordinate the pay-per-view distribution.”

  Once the match was made, Caesars knew that Hearns-Leonard would be the biggest boxing event it had ever hosted. Although both participants had fought at the casino before, it had been within the cozy confines of the tin-walled Sports Pavilion. For this fight, the hotel constructed a temporary stadium that rose up from what was normally a parking lot. Immediately after the fight it would be dismantled to make way for the Caesars Grand Prix, but for this one-time use, capacity would be nearly 24,000. The top ticket price was set at what was then considered a very pricey $500.

  With hotel rooms at the host casino jammed with high-rolling customers, most of the press contingent was relegated to the Marina, a fly-by-night motel up the Strip that would eventually be bulldozed to make room for the present-day MGM Grand.