My View from the Corner

by Angelo Dundee

  And so the rounds went, Leonard using his piston-like, four-inch-longer left to perfection to pile up points, almost as if in response to my constant screams of "the left, Ray, the left," but continually missing with overhand rights to Benitez's bobbing head. Benitez was throwing fewer punches, but making Ray miss and moving inside to counter with his right. Every now and then Leonard would fire off one of his patented flurries, but Benitez would either block most of the punches or slip them. The only thing I had to tell him in the corner was "Keep it up," and that what he was doing was "beautiful." Only before the twelfth round did I feel a need to say, "Don't go to sleep on me now," as Benitez began to mount a comeback.

  Fighting a three-dimensional fight—punching with accuracy, moving aggressively, and blocking effectively—Ray had opened up a wide lead through fourteen rounds. But, as he sat in the corner before the fifteenth, you could see him looking across the ring at Benitez, his eyes reading, "Oh my God, he's still standing." At the bell for the final round, with my "let it all hang out" call to arms ringing in his ears, Ray rushed out, determined to remedy that piece of unfinished business. Throwing quick-fire punches, Ray fell on Benitez, alternating his attack to the head and body. But Benitez continued to counter with his right over the top of Ray's left. Flurry followed flurry as the two put on a furious final finish. Then, with less than fifteen seconds to go in the fight, Ray caught Benitez in a neutral corner with a left jab-hook and Benitez went down. Up quickly, Benitez, with a smile on his face, this time more hurt than embarrassed, took the mandatory eight-count. Ray was on him immediately, pummeling him with rights and lefts. And with six seconds left in the fight, referee Carlos Padilla—with the ring death of Willie Classen the previous week on his mind—stepped in and stopped the fight to prevent further damage to Benitez. Benitez seemed not to mind the stoppage. The only person in the arena who did was a bettor who had wagered $150,000 that the fight would "go" the distance, six seconds more.

  But if one bettor was unhappy with the outcome, he might have been the only one who was. For, as Ray catapulted to the top of the ring ropes to celebrate winning the welterweight championship in what he called his "best performance," the crowd of 4,000-plus crammed into the Pavilion at Caesars Palace roared their appreciation for Ray. And they roared for Wilfred Benitez as well, who, after the fight, said, "Now I know I have boxer like me ... a good champ."

  FIFTEEN

  Duran: "No Mas?" No Way, No Say

  Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.

  Sugar Ray Leonard's first title defense came some four months later against former British and European welterweight titlist Davey "Boy" Green. To those in the press who asked, "What's a Davey 'Boy' Green?" I answered, "He looks like an American fighter ... crawls all over you. He's got real long arms and impressive upper-body strength." What I didn't tell them was that he only had a fair jab and held his hands so far apart he was open for a left hook.

  And that's exactly what happened in the fourth as Ray, at the end of a left-right-left combination, hit Green with what he called "the hardest blow I've ever thrown," a left hook from hell that resounded with the noise of an explosion that would have felled five or six bystanders and that laid Green endwise. Referee Arthur Mercante only counted six over his fallen body and then waved it all over. He could have counted to six hundred 'cause it took Green that long to recover, finally wobbling to his feet after a few Leonard-induced minutes of sleep.

  But if that was the hardest blow I had ever seen, the hardest blow I never saw happened just moments later. All I remember was that I was walking between two security guards with nobody in front of me on my way to the press conference one moment and the next I was lying on the floor, face-down, my glasses knocked off, totally discombobulated.

  What happened? I asked myself through my haze. All I could figure out through the fog was that someone had coldcocked me with a sucker punch from behind. As I was lifted off the ground by cotrainer Dave Jacobs and carried to a nearby room, two policemen came up and asked me if I wanted to "lock him up." Him? Who the hell was him? In my vagueness all I could come up with was that they wanted to lock up half a set of hand towels.

  As I lay there in a muddled state trying my damnedest to make some sense out of the bizarre episode, I became aware of the familiar voices of those in the Leonard camp. From the fragments of discussions I could make out, it seems that an assistant trainer named Pepe Correa had become upset at something or other I had either said or done and cowardly swatted me in the back of the head. To this day I still don't know what it was all about. Just a wannabe trainer who had trained Ray back in his amateur days and was now jealous of my position in his camp? What could have compelled him to pull a lily-livered act like that? What was he afraid of? That if he had dared to try to hit me from the front I might have slipped the punch and clocked him with a good counter?

  I have always been on good terms with other trainers, going all the way back to the time when I used to sit with the likes of Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, Charlie Goldman, Freddie Brown, and the rest of the old-old crowd at gatherings I used to call "Last Suppers" at the tavern known as The Neutral when I first came to New York. Through the years I was always close with other members of the training fraternity, even those I worked against. One of those was Gil Clancy. When I had the young Cassius Clay fighting against Gil's fighter, Alex Miteff, in Louisville, the night before the fight Gil invited me out to dinner. The club he was supposedly taking me to was way out of town, over the state line somewhere in Indiana. As we kept driving and driving—going through towns so quickly I almost thought their names were "Resume Speed"—Gil kept joking that he was kidnapping me and was going to keep me locked up until after the fight. Gil swears that every time he mentioned the word kidnapping, I would moan. But I don't remember that now, only the anxiety of not being in my fighter's corner the next night. Finally, after what seemed like a day or two, we arrived at the club, which was really a roadhouse, and the joke was on me. We had a great time. And, oh, for the record, he brought me back to Louisville where the next night Cassius won by a knockout.

  Another time, when I was down in Nassau with Muhammad Ali for his final fight against Trevor Berbick, I brought along a plastic surgeon just in case. Well, Muhammad didn't need him, but Tommy Hearns, who was fighting on the undercard against Ernie Singletary, certainly did, having suffered some nasty cuts despite winning his fight. Afterward I took Tommy along with his trainer, Emanuel Steward, to Ali's dressing room to have Dr. Julian Groff, the surgeon I had brought down from Miami, treat him, which he did by putting in 101 stitches to secure Tommy's cut. As Emanuel said, "Angelo didn't have to offer his services of his own private guy, but that's the way he was."

  It was just the way I was taught from the beginning, that you have to look out for other trainers, for the trainers who might be in the opposite corner today might be working in the same corner with you tomorrow. But I never had to look behind me for a trainer working in the same corner. Which is why I was so puzzled by what had happened.

  While I tried mightily to collect my thoughts, publicist Charlie Brotman came into the room. The press wanted to know what had happened. One reporter said I was hit by a member of the Leonard entourage I was arguing with; another said a trainer in Leonard's corner had coldcocked me in the face. Charlie asked how best to handle the situation, what he should tell the media.

  At this magic moment in time, Sugar Ray was already a brand name, his winning record and equally winning smile and charm having won over Madison Avenue. And the advertisers had come pounding at his door, using him in 7-Up commercials and as the endorser for a line of sporting goods equipment with others lined up as well. But if there's one thing Madison Avenue cannot tolerate it's controversy—and here something about daredevil Evel Knievel having hit his promoter with a baseball bat was mentioned. So lawyer Mike Trainer, as caretaker-in-chief of Leonard's good name, in an effort to cover up the incident and protect Ray
's image, told Brotman, "I don't want to get our team involved. Tell them that one of the fans hit him and ran," pointing the finger at some anonymous schmo.

  Great! There I was lying on a table in the middle of the room in a semiconscious state, and they were discussing how to treat the situation. Not me, just the situation. Maybe it was better for all concerned that they went into damage control, otherwise there would have been more damage. For, at that moment, two friends of my son, Jimmy, having witnessed the incident, were prowling the arena looking to "Get Pepe"—and not to shake hands with him either. Lucky for him they never found him.

  Somehow, someway I was loaded onto a plane, although I don't remember either getting on or off the plane. And when I landed in Miami, Ferdie Pacheco picked me up and took me to the hospital for a CAT can. Fortunately for me, as Dizzy Dean had said many years before after being hit in the head by a baseball and taking a CAT scan to see what, if any, damage had been done, my CAT scan "showed nothing."

  To this day that incident still rankles me. First it was Mike Trainer who had stabbed me in the back, and then it was Pepe Correa who had cold-cocked me from the back. I was beginning to think that nobody in the Leonard camp had my back.

  But I had no time to look behind me for Pepe Correa. I had to look ahead to Ray's next fight, against Roberto Duran. To understand how this fight came about is a study in the mysteries of the rules of those sanctioning bodies that control boxing, the alphabet-soup organizations, with about as much chance of understanding them as cracking the Da Vinci code.

  Let me explain how the Roberto Duran fight came to be, and if you understand, please explain it back to me so I will. Seems, at least according to the rules of the World Boxing Council (or WBC, which, as Teddy Atlas says, stands for "We Be Collecting"), when Ray defeated Benitez he assumed Benitez's responsibility to fight the number one contender, better known as "the mandatory challenger." At the time of signing for the Benitez fight, the number one contender for the welterweight title was Carlos Palomino. But somewhere between Ray signing to fight Benitez and beating Benitez, Palomino had lost to former lightweight champion Roberto Duran, who, by some conjuring by WBC president-for-life José Sulaiman, was immediately catapulted into the mandatory contender position. It was pointed out to Sulaiman that Duran had not, as dictated by the WBC rules, been the number one contender for a year and, therefore, could not be deemed the mandatory contender. In response, Sulaiman, making up one of those on-the-spur-of-the-moment rules, called a Leonard-Duran fight "a significant fight," which made it Ray's mandatory. Now, while Sulaiman was busy pulling rules out of his hat, or some other place, negotiations were going on with the WBA welterweight champion, Pipino Cuevas. However, those negotiations had broken down under the weight of boxing—not to mention national—politics as officials of the Panamanian government pressured the WBA president, who, not incidentally, was also Panamanian, to make Leonard fight the hero of Panama, Roberto Duran, or be stripped of his title. Then, having achieved his objective, Sulaiman came up with another seat-of-his-pants rule, giving Ray permission to have one title defense before his mandatory, that against Davey "Boy" Green. Got all that? Hell, you have to rub lemon juice on the WBC rulebook to be able to read its rules.

  And so Roberto Duran it was. Duran was a fierce competitor, one who fought with street cujones, breathing fire and contempt for anyone who dared cross his path. His style was that of an assassin, constantly coming forward and employing three weapons—his left, his right, and his head. He attacked with the singular desire to destroy his adversary, sometimes going into a left-handed stance, all the better to get inside. And, with teeth biting into his mouthpiece in a half-sneer/half-smile, he buried his head into his opponent's chest and took him apart with body shots. Lightweight champion for nearly seven years and winner of seventy of his seventy-one fights, the man called Manos de Piedra ("Hands of Stone") had fifty-five KOs, sending most of his victims to boxing's home for the bewildered. (Watching one of his victims, Ray Lampkin, being scrapped off the canvas and carted away to the hospital on a stretcher, through clenched teeth Duran told his interviewer, "Next time I 'keel' him.") To him, it was less "the Noble Art of Self-Defense" than "the Manly Art of Modified Murder."

  And yet, with the notable exception of Esteban De Jesús, Duran had never met anyone of Ray's caliber. During his six-plus years as lightweight champion, he had defended his title twelve times against mediocre competition, inasmuch as there were fewer top-notch fighters in the division than at any time in the division's history. Against the likes of ordinary fighters like Vilomar Fernandez and Lou Bizarro, Duran had looked so-so, both opponents almost going the distance. And the slick Saoul Mamby had given him hell. Moreover, while dominant as a lightweight, he was under-whelming as a welterweight, having gone the distance in three of his five fights at 147 pounds.

  The fight seemed to shape up as a classic boxer-puncher matchup, sort of a second edition of the first Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight. But to me it was Leonard who was Liston, the puncher, not Duran. Ray's jab was a lot like—don't laugh, this is no typo—Sonny Liston's. He knocked people down with it. Duran's fifty-five KOs had come against smaller men, all of whom he had outmuscled. The reason Duran had problems with tall guys was because he couldn't use his head against them. His head was definitely a weapon. I knew he could use it and use it well, having seen him work on the speed bag, throwing his punches, left hand, head, right hand in rapid rhythm. He used it as a pivot in the clinches. Maybe I should have asked the officials to put a glove on it.

  Ray's faster hands and angled movements as well as his cool and calm ring generalship were more than equal to Roberto's projected heat. With a 2½-inch height advantage and a 3-inch reach advantage, everything favored Ray—even the odds at 9–5.

  Deconstructing the films of Duran's fights, you could see that he was a heel-to-toe guy. He took two steps to get to you. So the idea was not to give him those two steps, not to move too far away because the more distance you gave Duran, the more effective he was. What you can't do in the face of Duran's aggression is run from it because then he picks up momentum, so my guy wasn't going to run from him.

  Stylistically, Duran gave you great movement of the body, as he slipped from side to side. He wouldn't come straight in. He'd try to feint you, many times just waving with his hand. And if he missed you with an overhand right, he'd turn southpaw and come back with a left hook to the body. Duran also had a unique way of throwing his right hand, left hook, and left knee all at the same time. Ray was going to move side to side, and he was going to go to the body. Nobody ever hit Duran in his weak spot where he's soft, but Ray was going to nail him. He would stop him in his tracks with that jab. My guy had so much talent they hadn't seen yet. I had seen Duran when he worked out at the 5th Street Gym, and my fighter, Doug Vaillant, had banged him around pretty good. So, if Doug could do it, Ray could, too. There was no question in my mind that Ray was going to knock Duran out.

  Montreal, a city of old-world charm with streets named Rue Ste. Catherine and Rue Notre-Dame, horse-drawn carriages, and restaurants, many of which were Italian, lining the sidewalks, was the site of what they were already calling "The Fight of the Decade," only six months into the 1980s. It was also the place of Ray's greatest triumph, where he had won Olympic gold four years before, in the very ring in which he would fight Duran.

  With hundreds of miles of streets, Montreal is also one of the great walking cities on the North American continent. And so it was that one lovely June evening Ray, yours truly, and our wives, Juanita and Helen, were taking our customary after-dinner walk, leisurely unwinding and looking into shop windows and chatting, when who should we run into but Roberto Duran and his entourage.

  Now I have always thought Roberto could have been as popular as Muhammad Ali if he had learned to speak English. But, except on rare occasions, like the time someone asked him what would have happened if he had ever fought Ali and he replied in his characteristic macho manner, "I would have beat
the 'sheet' out of him," he hadn't. But this time he wasn't using English to communicate his thoughts. Instead of merely acknowledging us with a nod or a wave, Roberto launched into a series of hand gestures indicating what he was going to do to Ray—hit him in the head, the balls, anywhere. Then, cursing in two languages, he hollered he would "keel" Ray, among other insults. Normally nothing fazes Ray who manages to stay as cool as the proverbial cucumber no matter what. But enraged at Duran's obscene gestures and taunts, Ray wanted to fight him right then and there.

  That would be the beginning of Duran's campaign of psychological warfare. It would continue throughout the buildup to the fight as Roberto continued to cast aspersions on Ray's manhood (saying he would make him "fight like a man") and on his abilities (calling him a "clown"), and it reached its climax at the weigh-in. In a scene reminiscent of the one in Cinderella Man where Max Baer tells James J. Braddock what he's going to do to Braddock's wife after he destroys him, Roberto, in a more X-rated version, shouted at Juanita, "after fight you and me ..." and then, with all the subtlety of a community bedpan, turned back to Ray and in Spanish screamed, "I'm going to screw your wife ... she's a puta." And for bad measure accompanied his taunt with a couple of crude pelvic thrusts in her direction. That did it! He had pushed Ray's hot button. Ray went berserk and had to be forcibly held back as he tried to get at Duran.

  After the weigh-in, Duran, with his typical swagger, crowed to the press, "Where I come from, in the ghetto, those that blink, blow ... and Leonard, he was blinking." Meanwhile, back in our dressing room, the normally composed Leonard came as close as I've ever seen to losing it. I realized that Duran had really done a number on him and that our carefully laid-out plans were out the window as Ray went on and on about how he was going to avenge Duran's insults—of how he was going to prove he was the better man by beating Duran at his own game.