And just as the tide had turned once in the fight within a fight, it was turning again, this time in Tommy's favor as he continued to flick out that long left of his, with very few rights thrown in for good measure. In fact, there were so few rights thrown during Rounds Ten, Eleven, and Twelve, you could count them on your right thumb—with the exception of a beautiful one-two by Tommy that landed flush on Ray's whiskers in the eleventh. But again, Ray barely blinked. The fans began to stir a little impatiently at the low-contact rounds, some of the high rollers even clapping and whistling for more action. It wasn't so much that Ray was lifting his foot off the pedal as Tommy was changing the pace of the fight and the momentum with his newfound tactics.
By the end of Round Twelve Tommy's fans had worked themselves into a frenzy with Hearns himself leading their vocal chorus in chants of "Tom-mee ... Tom-mee." It didn't take a brain surgeon to see that the moment had gotten away from us, that there were no more Sundays, no more tomorrows, and no title at the end of road. Something had to be done. Now there are certain rules for trainers in corners: there's no time for hand-wringing; and no time to get preachy. You've got to give your fighter stripped-to-the-bone advice, just as Manny Seamon had given Joe Louis in the second Jersey Joe Walcott fight when he told him simply, "You've got to knock him out" and Louis, heeding his advice, did. So, in order to get Ray to turn it up a notch I told him, "Nine minutes ... you're blowing it, son. You've got to pick up your tempo. Don't fight at his tempo. If you don't pick up your tempo, you're going to blow it."
Granted, it wasn't a battle cry that would wake the echoes, but it paid immediate dividends as Ray, knowing it was "all or nothing," leaped off his stool as if it were incandescent and raced out to do battle. First he landed a left hook, snuck in over Hearns's low-held right. Then Ray followed with three more left hooks to the head. Under siege, Hearns tried mightily to hold off the swarming Leonard, but couldn't, his efforts having about as much effect as a deck chair blowing off the Queen Elizabeth II. Unsure of how to clinch, never having had to, Hearns threw a right in the direction of Ray, but Ray beat him to the punch, jarring him off balance. Another left by Ray, still another, and a third, and suddenly Tommy was careening around the ring, his legs spaghetti-like, having given out from his two-a-day roadwork and the twelve grueling rounds.
Ray was atop Tommy now, throwing flurry after flurry, every punch in his arsenal in rather generous servings. Finally, after too many punches to be counted—twenty-one by one count and "enough" as writer Vic Ziegel noted—Tommy, in his best imitation of an accordion, gently folded through the red, white, and blue ropes. Referee Davey Pearl watched as Tommy slowly sank through the ropes and called his exit from the ring a push rather than a knockdown. It was as much of a knockdown as I had even seen, and I was now up on the ring apron yelling at poor Davey, "Count ... count, dammit. It's a knockdown." As Hearns slowly regained his feet, Ray was on him again, raking him with yet another volley of punches. Again Hearns went down, this time not so much falling through the ropes as getting entangled in them, and this time Pearl called it a knockdown. As Pearl tolled the count, Tommy tried to haul himself up to his full 6'1" height, giving the impression of a balloon slowly inflating. Finally, at the count of nine Hearns made it to his feet just as the bell ending the thirteenth sounded.
There seemed to be no doubt as to the outcome now. At least not in the minds of the 23,615 fans. Nor in Ray's mind. He jumped off his stool for the fourteenth round and went right at the damaged piece of goods once thought to be invincible, throwing everything in his arsenal. Hearns tried to avoid the incoming fire by twisting his body back and forth from a right-handed stance to that of a southpaw. It was all to no avail as Ray kept throwing lefts to the body that made the exhausted Hearns wince and rights to the head that made him blink. Then Ray caught him with his haymaker—call it his "Suzy-Q" or his "Maryanne" or whatever you want, but a haymaker pure and simple—landing a straight right to the chops, which he followed by throwing up his hands in his traditional victory signal. However, Tommy didn't fall, instead sliding backward along the ropes, his legs barely holding him up. Ray wouldn't let him off the hook now. After waving for referee Pearl to stop the fight, mimicking a move he had seen Muhammad Ali make, Ray stalked the now all-but-defenseless Hearns to the ropes, strafing him with right uppercuts, left hooks, and hard rights. Still Hearns wouldn't go down. But even if Hearns hadn't had enough, Pearl had. He pulled Leonard away from the beaten Hearns as all Tommy could do was look in his direction as if to ask, "Wha' happened?"
It was all over. Ray had won in a comeback so late it usually would be noted by an asterisk placed on train schedules for late trains. He had won "The Showdown" and was now the unified welterweight champion of the world. Lesser mortals couldn't have done it, but then again Ray Leonard was no lesser mortal.
As I stood there watching all the well-wishers jump into the ring to share in Ray's victory celebration, I thought to myself that for someone who had been told he had "no credibility" and that he hadn't been doing his job, I must have been doing something right.
I recall a little ditty we used to chant back in my youth about a character known as "On-again-off-again-Finnegan." I know there was some sort of verse that used to go with the name, but I've forgotten that, recalling just the name, "On-again-off-again-Finnegan." Anyhow, the next seven years of Sugar Ray's career after the Hearns fight reminded me of that guy, on again and off again.
The "on" portion of Ray's post-Hearns career began just five months afterward with a defense of his newly unified welterweight crown against Bruce Finch. Three rounds and out. Next up on his dance card was a scheduled defense in May 1982 against Roger Stafford. However, one week before the Stafford fight, Ray began experiencing blurred vision, flashes of light, and floating dots—the same kind of "floaters" he had suffered after his fight against Marcos Geraldo three years earlier and again after being hit in the eye with an elbow by a sparring partner before the Hearns fight.
Using the pretext of visiting his wife and mother on Mother's Day, Ray left training camp and returned to Baltimore to see one of the best retinal surgeons in the country, Dr. Ronald Michels of Johns Hopkins University. Examining the same eye that had been damaged in his fight with Hearns, Dr. Michels told Ray that his blurriness could be traced to a loss of peripheral vision in his left eye and that he needed surgery to correct his partially detached retina—and the sooner the better to ensure complete recovery. Obviously there would be no fight against Roger Stafford. Nor any other fight—including a potential blockbuster rumored to be on the drawing board against middleweight champ Marvin Hagler—until Dr. Michels had given Ray a clean bill of health.
Six months after the operation and with Dr. Michels's go-ahead to resume his career, Ray hosted a massive gala, fittingly held in the same Baltimore Civic Center where his pro career had started. However, instead of it being the "coming out" party all had expected, Ray announced that "it wasn't worth risking my sight" to continue his career. Then, turning to Hagler, who was in attendance expecting Ray to announce a fight with him, he said, "Unfortunately, it will never happen." And with that Ray retired. Again.
But the name Sugar Ray Leonard and the word retirement didn't go together, not even belonging in the same sentence. I mean here was a kid who loved the ring, loved the action, loved the challenge—or, as he freely admitted, "I miss it. I love to fight." And he was going to retire, at the age of twenty-six, in the prime of his career, turn out the lights, close the door, and walk away from it all?
Come on! Some writer once said "short retirements urge sweet returns," and I fully expected Sugar Ray to make that sweet return sooner or later.
And so it came as no surprise when, after two years of inactivity, I got a call telling me that Ray had yielded to the siren call of the ring and was coming back. Now it was my job to find a suitable opponent for him from the list of eligible candidates submitted by Ray. Out of those I selected Kevin Howard, a fighter of some distinction but, more im
portant, a fighter schooled in those tough Philadelphia blood pits that were more zoos than gyms and where they held wars, not sparring sessions. Howard's straight-ahead style coupled with his toughness would provide Ray with a true test of his skills in his first comeback fight.
The fight, a tune-up over the welterweight limit, originally scheduled for Worcester Centrum in Massachusetts for February 1984, had to be postponed when Ray had to have some additional nonsurgical retinal repairs done, this time to his right eye. The fight was rescheduled for May. The Centrum was crowded to capacity—and among those 10,000 fans anxious to watch Ray's comeback was one more-than-interested spectator, Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Licking his lips at the prospect of meeting Ray somewhere down the line, Hagler was heard to exclaim, "I can hardly wait."
Ray had opted for thumbless gloves, concerned about potential damage to his eye. Now I'm not a big fan of thumbless gloves. In fact, I think they stink. The original ones were too bulbous and the later editions were, too. But more important, the newfangled gloves affect such boxing niceties as spinning an opponent, grabbing him, or clutching him. I mean where would Willie Pep—who one time complained about them by saying, "How can you pull your trunks up with thumbless gloves?"—have been with thumbless gloves? Nevertheless, Ray liked them, so thumbless gloves it was.
But thumbless gloves weren't going to help him in there. Especially in the early rounds when he looked apprehensive, out of synch, and rusty. One ringside reporter described Ray looking "as if he were fighting underwater" while another said he was "exceedingly mortal." And then in the fourth, for the first time in his career, he was knocked to the floor as Howard came over with a straight right—Boom!—over Ray's lazily held left. Up quickly, Ray stood there, taking the mandatory eight-count with an embarrassed grin on his face. Now there's one thing about boxing that's not true about any other sport. When you're embarrassed or humiliated there's no place to hide, no dugout, no bench, you're just there, standing all but naked, except for your trunks, for everyone to see. Sort of like a fly in coffee, the focal point of attention but hardly enjoying it. When he returned to his corner at the end of the fourth he knew his comeback had been a mistake, that it was all over, saying, "I can't go on humiliating myself."
And although Ray would come back to stop Howard in the ninth, within seconds of returning to the dressing room he announced, "It's just not there.... I retire for good."
The boxing world and Marvelous Marvin Hagler would have to wait another three years before boxing's Finnegan was "on" again.
By now Ray had retired so many times his picture was next to the word retirement in Webster's tome. And when he said he was retiring again after the Howard fight, I said, "Amen," thinking maybe this was it, his final-final retirement.
But he was still at that intersection where he had something to prove, an intersection he acknowledged after the Hearns fight when he said, "History is what drives me. I don't want to be remembered as just another champion. I want to be remembered as one of the greatest fighters of all time."
Above all else Ray was a pride fighter as much as a prizefighter, and he harbored ambitions to be included on that small island called "all-time greatness" with the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali. He somehow felt he hadn't yet attained that exceptional status that would gain him inclusion—something more was needed to put a flourish on his career.
The man who said "I like to fight" was hardly resigned to the life of leisure and of being a celebrity. He hungered for something more, a challenge. It was in his boxing DNA. And what better challenge than the man who stood astride the middleweight division, the man who now called himself Marvelous Marvin Hagler?
As Ray played should-I-or-shouldn't-I with thoughts of coming back to challenge Hagler, two incidents pushed him to his ultimate decision. The first occurred after the Hagler–Roberto Duran fight, won by Hagler in the closing rounds. After the fight, Ray's one-time fistic foe came over and in broken English Duran told Ray, "Box him. You can beat him." The second incident happened two years later when Ray, seated ringside, watched John "The Beast" Mugabi, a slugger and hardly a Nureyev in boxing trunks, actually outbox a listless Hagler. Turning to his seatmate, actor Michael J. Fox, Ray said, "Mike, I can beat this guy." Fox, echoing the thoughts of skeptical boxing fans everywhere, pooh-pooh'd him, saying, "Yeah, sure ... have another beer!"
But Ray's mind was already made up. He needed just one more piece to the puzzle to confirm what he sensed. And so, in sort of a fact-finding mission, he invited Hagler down to Maryland for the opening of a restaurant he was part owner of. Sitting at a table drinking champagne, the two discussed (what else?) boxing—and Marvin's future. Ray broached the subject by asking, "So, Marvin, who are you fighting next?" Perhaps affected by the brew of the night, Marvin answered, "Ray, I'm just not as motivated anymore and I'm starting to cut real easy."
That did it! A week after their meeting I got a call from Ray telling me he had to do it, he had that itch again. He wanted to fight Hagler. I said "Amen" to that, too.
Usually all I need is three weeks in camp. Hey, I'm no sweat wiper. My job is to put myself into the body of my fighter in order to study his opponent and figure out how he's going to offset that guy, how he' s going to beat the sucker. That means sitting at home for hours going out of my mind analyzing and reanalyzing tapes, breaking them down frame by frame and studying the sonuvagun my fighter is going to be fighting until I come up with that slap-to-the-head "eureka" moment that tells me I've found a way to win. Then I build a better mousetrap to do it.
Never one to duck a challenge, this time it looked like Ray had pulled the short straw in selecting one of the most fearsome fighters in the whole of boxing, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, made all the more menacing by his evil-looking shaven bullet head. Hagler, the current middleweight champion for the better part of six years, had gone undefeated for eleven and had won his last thirty-seven fights. In the process, he had acquired the label of "invincible." Even his name was troublesome, tending as it did to obscure a full appreciation of his talents, sounding less terrifying than the hard-hat fighter who spat on his hands, rolled up his sleeves, and put in a good day's work at what he called "his office," that area inside the ring.
Hagler came by the name "Marvelous" somewhat dishonestly, having dubbed himself on the shoulders with his own gloves, giving himself the adjective meaning "awe-inspiring," almost as if with that name he could make it so. He insisted on being introduced as "Marvelous" Marvin before every fight. But when he demanded the name be used before his title fight with Caveman Lee, one of the ABC-TV directors overseeing the fight snapped, "If he wants to be announced as 'Marvelous Marvin,' let him change his name." And so, in less time than it took him to score a 67-second knockout of Lee, Hagler hied himself down to the Newark, New Jersey, registrar's office to officially change his name to Marvelous Marvin, without any quote marks surrounding the adjective.
Whether it was Marvelous Marvin or just plain ol' Marvin, or, as he called himself, a "bad dude," Hagler presented problems. His style was uniquely his own. A natural right-hander, Hagler fought left-handed, all the better to position his power hand, his right, closer to his opponent. Fighting in a straight line, his hands and his feet alternated with splendid timing and changes of pace as he crossed over from his left to his right side and back again with all the precision of a Hollywood production number, never losing a beat. And he could alternate his offense as well, interchanging his finesse for power and boring into his opponent with a bewildering variety of punches thrown from both sides of the plate.
Southpaws can give you all kinds of hell, their left-handed stance making their natural skills all the more baffling to their orthodox right-handed opponents. They come at you from a different direction with a different balance, a different flow, and a different blend of punches. And you've got to fight them differently. There was a fighter many years ago named Knockout Brown who not only was a southpaw but cross-eyed to boot. After he fought lightweight ch
ampion Ad Wolgast, an exasperated Wolgast was ready to swear off southpaws, mumbling something to the effect of: "How in the hell are you gonna fight him when you think he's looking out the window, but he's looking at you and hitting you from all angles?"
Back in the 1950s I had a southpaw kid named Andy Arel who gave the legendary Willie Pep fits with a cap F. And even though Pep won a close battle, I learned several things then that would now give Ray the edge and enable him to lick Hagler. You see, Pep used to circle, but you don't make circles with a southpaw. If you circle, you give a southpaw momentum. You've got to be first with everything you do, throwing him off his rhythm.
But Marvin was a completely different cat. He was a right-hander masquerading as a southpaw. Having done my homework by sending a kid over to get his autograph and watching Hagler sign it right-handed, I knew. It was that "aha" moment I had been looking for, the moment when I had to turn logic on its head and change all the standard rules about fighting a southpaw. For Hagler's strength, as I now saw it, was not in his left, but in his right. You had to respect that right hand, the hand he starched Tommy Hearns with, not so much his left, his supposed power hand.
Because every fight was different, requiring different plans and different strategies, I had to look at Hagler differently, not as a normal southpaw but as a turnaround southpaw. Now normally when you move away from a southpaw, you move to your left, away from your opponent's left hand. But with the naturally right-handed Hagler fighting southpaw, human algebra told me it was just the reverse—you had to move away from his right hand, moving right as Duran did in his fight with Marvin, and nail him with a right hand.
Studying films of Hagler's previous fights—especially those against Duran and Juan Rodan, both of whom had given Hagler trouble—I saw little things, things poker players would call "tells." For instance, Marvin was what I called a two-stepper, a hopper who had a sort of Lawrence Welk a-one-and-a-two-step cadence—he took a step or two before throwing a punch. And once thrown off his rhythm he would be a sucker for a right-hand counter. Moreover, when he threw a double jab he slid to his right, so Ray would have to slide to his right so as not to be there for Hagler to hit.
My View from the Corner Page 33
