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

by George Kimball

  Steward, Walter Smith, and Prentiss Byrd comprised the brain trust in the Hearns camp. Byrd, Steward’s aide-de-camp, was a former minor leaguer in the Chicago White Sox’ system, Smith a retired automotive worker. The colorful fourth figure in the Kronk corner was Don Thibodeaux, a Detroit artist and sculptor with long red hair and an even longer beard, which reached nearly to his navel.

  Thibodeaux was successful in his day job−he had once sold a piece (a bust of Muhammad Ali) for $40,000−but found himself inexorably drawn to the Sweet Science and Steward’s steamy, inner-city gym.

  Mickey Goodwin, the Kronk middleweight who had been the main event performer on the early Detroit cards on which Hearns boxed, recalled a night when Thibodeaux was working his corner. At the Seconds Out! command, Thibodeaux had bent over and shoved Goodwin’s mouthpiece back in−and a large mouthful of beard along with it.

  “You ever try to get hair out of your mouth with boxing gloves on? ” asked Goodwin.

  As September 16 dawned, Hagler said, “I’m sure both of them woke up this morning just wishing this fight was over.”

  “The day before the fight I wanted to check Tommy’s weight, but he just shooed me away and said, ‘I’m fine,’” recalled Steward. “Then when we got to the scales the next day Tommy was 145. I thought I could see Ray Leonard’s jaw drop. Everybody seemed shocked.

  “I was worried right then and there−and with good reason, it turned out,” said Steward. “Half a tank of gas might get you where you’re going, but I don’t care what kind of car you’ve got, if you don’t have enough in the tank for a long trip, you’re not going to go all the way.”

  A lengthy undercard that began under the hot afternoon sun played out as darkness fell across the desert: Tony Ayala, Jr., a young junior-middle-weight prospect promoted by the Duvas, went to 10-0 with a first-round knockout of Jose Rendiz. Heavyweight Tony Tucker, then trained by Steward, stopped Harvey Steichen in three, and Marvis Frazier scored a fourth-round TKO over Guy Casale. In the co-feature, another future world champion, lightweight Edwin Rosario, outpointed James Martinez.

  The early prelims had been fought before a smattering of witnesses, but as twilight turned to evening an audience that would eventually reach 23,306 began to file into the makeshift stadium−Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Jack Nicholson, Cher Bono and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Karl Malden, Bo Derek and John McEnroe among them.

  Fans gawked as present and former champions from Larry Holmes to Joe Frazier to Jake LaMotta took their places in the stands. The biggest ovation was reserved for a late arrival, Muhammad Ali, who just a few months later would engage in his final bout, in the Bahamas. The great man whose nom de guerre Leonard had appropriated, Sugar Ray Robinson, was also ushered to a ringside seat.

  By nightfall the temperature, which had reached a high of 96 degrees that autumn afternoon, had subsided, but under the glare of the lights from the canopy above it was still almost 100.

  Both participants entered the ring in shimmering white satin robes. Leonard had won a coin toss to determine the order of procession, so Hearns was the first to arrive. The words “WINNER TAKES ALL” were emblazoned across the back of his robe. Leonard’s said, simply, “DELIVERANCE.”

  “Before the fight started, Tony Ayala, who had won on the undercard, was running up to the ring and calling out Leonard,” recalled Katz. “It occurred to me then that you never heard anyone calling out Hearns. Nobody wanted to fight a 6-foot, 1-inch welterweight with the power to destroy Pipino Cuevas [and, later, Roberto Duran] inside two rounds.”

  When Leonard was introduced, Hearns banged his gloves together in mock applause, and then, a menacing scowl on his face, followed Ray across the ring to his corner. This bit of gamesmanship was countered by Dundee, who complained to Pearl about what he considered an excessive amount of Vaseline smeared across the Hit Man’s face.

  “Just before the start, I was standing up in my seat and I turned to Joe Flaherty and said, ‘Let’s have a fight!’” remembered Katz. “I had no idea who was going to win.”

  Dundee and Morton worked Leonard’s corner, where they were augmented by Ollie Dunlap and, at least initially, Ray’s brother Roger.

  Moments after the opening bell, Bob Arum materialized beside the ring apron, shouting, “Stop the fight!”

  Arum wasn’t even the promoter of The Showdown, but he had arranged the pay-per-view distribution. He had just been informed that due to a glitch in the cable system, thousands of homes in California were receiving the signal for free. He somehow had it in his mind that Pearl should stop Leonard and Hearns from boxing until the technical difficulties could be overcome, but the referee ignored him.

  What unfolded that night turned out to be a symphony in five distinct movements.

  The first, comprising the opening five rounds, was a protracted overture in which both combatants performed brilliantly, but pretty much as advertised. While Leonard dazzled with his speed, he seemed wary enough of Hearns’ punching power that he wasn’t about to mix it up, and Tommy, for his part, used his reach advantage to poke away at Leonard with jabs when he came near enough.

  As the first round drew to a close, Roger Leonard excitedly shouted something to his brother. Distracted, Ray looked away as Hearns punched him just after the bell. Pearl jumped between the fighters, but as Leonard stumbled back to his corner Janks Morton shouted down from the ring, “Kenny, get Roger out of the corner!”

  Kenny Leonard, already wearing a white satin cornerman’s jacket, was thus handed a battlefield promotion, and replaced his brother in the corner for the balance of the fight.

  Leonard’s corner had told him to keep Hearns moving counterclockwise. Most of Hearns’ victims, fearing his long reach and superior jab, had allowed him to box in his comfort zone, which was going to his left, and in denying Hearns the jab had exposed themselves to an even more fearsome weapon, his right hand.

  Leonard spent much of the early going darting around the ring as if he had an invisible jet pack mounted on his back. Backward, forward, sideways, he darted from corner to corner, rope to rope, presenting a tantalizing target only to whoosh out of range as Hearns closed. When Tommy landed, it was usually with a glancing blow, and when Leonard scored, he escaped before the Hit Man could exact retribution.

  Leonard bent forward from the waist, presenting an even smaller target, but if Hearns was frustrated by the awkward angles at which he was forced to attack he didn’t let on. Behind his jab, he continued to walk Leonard down, and the expression on his face was that of a man who knew that sooner or later he was going to catch up with his quarry. Periodically he seemed to smile disdainfully, the ring lights exaggerating the expression by illuminating the flash of his mouthpiece.

  In the third round, the two stopped and briefly went toe-to-toe. Neither man emerged with a clear advantage from this spirited exchange, and after it Leonard seemed to remember where he was and whom he was fighting and got back on his bicycle again. By the end of the round a telltale welt had begun to form under his left eye.

  Whether it was the exacerbated residue of Odell Hadley’s elbow three weeks earlier, the result of a Hearns punch or (more likely) some combination of the two remains the subject of some debate a quarter-century later.

  Dunlap and Julius (Juice) Gatling, Leonard’s equipment man, maintain that it was the former, but Emanuel Steward remains convinced that the puffy eye was the result of Hearns’ attack.

  “Sometimes a fighter will get cut in training and it will open up during the fight, but I never saw any evidence of swelling on Ray’s face beforehand,” said Steward.

  Throughout the night, Dundee applied his secret weapon, an Endswell, to Leonard’s swollen eye. Although it is now standard equipment in most trainers’ bags, in 1981 the contraption seemed a space-age invention. Essentially a miniature flatiron (“Like something you might find in a doll-house,” noted Pat Putnam), the device was stored in an ice bucket, whence it was retrieved between rounds and pre
ssed against the boxer’s face to reduce swelling.

  On several occasions Pearl had to move in and separate the fighters after the bell, and at one point Leonard, reprising a playground gesture from the second Duran fight, wound up his right as if to throw a bolo punch and instead threw a left. Hearns responded by sticking out his mouthpiece in derision.

  It wasn’t surprising that Hearns was ahead with the fight already one-third over. What was surprising was that he had gained that advantage by outboxing Leonard.

  Their mutual respect was such that neither man was willing to go on the attack, and the result was that in this early going Hearns maintained control with his jab and superior wingspan. From a technical standpoint it was enthralling to watch it unfold, but some of the spectators grew restive.

  “There were pockets of booing during the opening five rounds,” said Katz. “Few boxing fans would cheer the Fischer-Spassky chess matches.”

  “For the first five rounds the 6’1” Hearns was in command, stinging Leonard with his jab and keeping his shorter opponent at bay with his vaunted seventy-eight inch reach,” Schulian described this initial interlude. Unable to fight at his preferred distance, Leonard found himself operating at the end of Hearns’ jab and, noted Schulian, “he paid in pain.”

  The momentum abruptly shifted in the sixth, when Leonard spotted a moment of complacency and seized the advantage: Hearns dropped his right for a split second, and Leonard pounced on the opening to land a vicious left hook to the body that drove Tommy back into the ropes. Steward would later describe it to Putnam as the punch from which Hearns never recovered.

  His killer instinct ignited, Leonard treated Hearns’ midsection like a speed bag, tattooing him with a barrage of punches to an unprotected body. When Hearns dropped his elbows to protect his ribcage, Leonard merely readjusted his sights and shifted the attack to the head.

  Despite the terrible pummeling, Hearns somehow stayed on his feet, and when the bell rang to end the round Leonard seemed to smirk and asked him, “You all right? ”

  The seventh was once again all Leonard, and Hearns absorbed such a beating that Steward considered rescuing his man by throwing in the towel. Hearns fought the entire round going backward, but survived it. Leonard, as a coda to the round, finished it by landing three successive left hooks.

  Although Hearns didn’t go down, he was legless and all but out on his feet for much of the sixth and seventh. All three judges scored the rounds for Leonard, but not one of them scored either a 10-8 round, as did many scribes at ringside.

  “I was ready to stop the fight,” said Steward, “and if Ray had landed one more solid punch I would have, but Tommy was avoiding them−barely. Then, much to my surprise, Tommy went back to boxing and eventually took control again.”

  By the eighth the roles had reversed: Leonard had become the stalker, trying to walk Hearns down for the big punch that would end it all, and the Hit Man had mounted the bicycle, still dancing away but now firing jabs to cover his retreat.

  It seemed as good a time as any for an intermission, and, as if by mutual consent, both fighters took the ninth off.

  Downshifting, said Dundee, “was my idea. I was afraid Ray was going to pop a cork in there.”

  Hearns needed no encouragement to take a breather, but was so wary from the battering he had taken in the middle rounds that it was midway through the tenth−when he was alerted by the restive booing and whistling of the crowd−that he began to assimilate the fact that he was no longer under attack.

  Leonard had been presenting awkward angles all night, but now there was a new twist to his posture. His head tilted at an odd angle, swiveled around to compensate for a rapidly decreasing field of vision. If he faced Hearns dead-on, he couldn’t see the right coming.

  But even as he reasserted himself over the eleventh and twelfth rounds, Hearns withheld the weapon that was supposed to be the ultimate deterrent. Although he was dominating Leonard once again, conventional wisdom had it that this fight would turn on Leonard’s ability to absorb Hearns’ big right hand. But Tommy never threw the haymaker.

  “He kept moving off to the side, so I couldn’t hit him with the full force of the punch,” Hearns would later explain. “I still haven’t hit him with my best shot. Why didn’t I try to land more right hands? Basically, because I don’t throw a punch if I know it’s not going to land.”

  As the twelfth ended Hearns seemed firmly in control, and had won over much of the crowd. They were chanting, “Tommy! Tommy!” and Hearns acknowledged their newfound allegiance by waving his arms like a cheerleader as he returned to his corner.

  Across the ring, Dundee toweled off Leonard’s face and attempted to communicate the urgency of the situation.

  “You’re blowing it, son,” he shouted at Leonard. “You’re blowing it!”

  Dundee couldn’t have known it, but his opposite number was even more worried. Steward’s fighter had assumed control of the fight, but he had paid a price.

  “At the end of the twelfth Tommy came back waving to the crowd, but I was still worried,” Steward said. “I knew Ray always, always, always finished up strong. Even in the first fight with Duran he’d come on those last three rounds and beat the hell out of Duran. He was always physically strong.

  “I was talking to Tommy and all of a sudden his head slumped down. He was out of gas. I knew right then it was over.”

  Moreover, Hearns was now in uncharted waters. He had never before fought a thirteenth round.

  By now Leonard’s left eye had ballooned so grotesquely that you half expected Dundee to produce a razor, à la Burgess Meredith in Rocky, and provide relief by slicing open the hematoma.

  “At that point the eye was so badly swollen that somewhere between half and three-quarters of my vision was impaired,” Leonard would recall. “He was starting to get through with some jabs and some rights because I couldn’t see. That’s why I wanted to end it quickly. I just pulled it up from my guts.”

  Early in the thirteenth, Hearns stumbled as Leonard shoved him, and then unaccountably dropped his hands again. Spotting the opening, Leonard fired a hard right-hand lead to the head, followed by a left hook that wobbled Hearns in his tracks.

  Leonard, smelling blood in the water, abandoned all pretense of elegance. He landed an uppercut and then unleashed an uninterrupted fusillade of at least two dozen rapid-fire punches that drove Hearns across the ring, through the ropes, and onto the apron.

  Pearl did not rule it a knockdown, and as Hearns teetered precariously on the apron, one of the judges reached up and steadied his back to keep him from falling over the edge.

  “Pearl said he had been pushed,” wrote the Boxing Bard of Scotland, Hugh McIlvanney. “All of us had better hope we never encounter such pushing in a bus queue.”

  “Get up!” the referee inexplicably ordered Hearns. (Pearl would later explain that he had meant to say, “ Can you get up? ” )

  Hearns was helped to his feet, but appeared lost. If ever a situation demanded that a boxer in trouble tie up his opponent, this was it, but at this moment Hearns looked as if he’d never heard the word “clinch.”

  He probably hadn’t. Prior to the Leonard fight, Steward had boasted that “you never see a clinch in the Kronk Gym,” as if it had been a point of honor. The events of that evening resulted in a revision of that philosophy.

  “In his whole career Tommy had never had to clinch,” said Steward. “Later on, once he learned how to do it, he became an expert at it−think about the fights with [James] Kinchen and [Juan] Roldan. But in the Leonard fight he never even thought about it, because he didn’t know how.”

  Left to his own devices, Leonard resumed right where he had left off, battering Hearns with a series of punches that once again knocked him through the ropes. Looking dazed and cross-eyed, Hearns was left draped, half-sitting, across the bottom strand.

  “Off the rope!” ordered Pearl.

  “Mmm,” Hearns groaned, woozily shaking his head.

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sp; Pearl, belatedly, began to count. Hearns extracted himself by the time he reached four, but he barely survived the round.

  As the fighters returned to their corners, Dundee was on his feet, shouting at Pearl, “It should have been two knockdowns!”

  In the corner, Dundee warned Leonard that he still might be behind on points.

  “I really didn’t think he was, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give him a little needle,” the trainer said later. But as it turned out, his worst-case assessment was right on the mark.

  Hearns might have led on the scorecards, but he was utterly spent. Leonard came charging out of the corner like a sprinter from his blocks to greet him with a left hook.

  In the first minute of the round, he sent Hearns reeling with a savage right to the head, and followed up with four or five more punches that knocked Hearns all the way across the ring.

  Leonard chased Hearns down in a neutral corner and then trapped him there, landing three rapid-fire hooks to the head of an utterly defenseless Hearns. Pearl stopped the fight at 1:45 of the round, and Ray Charles Leonard was the undisputed welterweight champion of the world.

  Hearns briefly, though unconvincingly, protested the stoppage before stumbling into the arms of his cornermen. Smiling through his mouthpiece, Leonard raised both gloves in the air as the crowd roared its approval of what had been a thrilling performance by both men.

  “I knew where I was at all times,” Hearns would later recall those final four and a half minutes of fighting. “I wasn’t dizzy or nothing. It just seemed like every time he hit me with a combination I hadn’t got myself back together yet before he hit me again.

  “It was in my mind to try to hang on and last the fight, even after I was hurt,” admitted Hearns. “I thought I was in control of myself, but the referee didn’t. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  All three ringside judges had Hearns in front at the time of the stoppage −Minker by four at 125-121, Tabat by three (125-122), and Ford by two (124-122).