Four Kings

  Four Kings

  Also by George Kimball

  Only Skin Deep

  Sunday ’s Fools:

  Stomped, Tromped, Kicked and Chewed in the NFL (with Tom Beer)

  Chairman of the Boards (with Eamonn Coghlan)

  American at Large

  George Kimball

  Four Kings

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

  McBooks Press, Inc.

  www.mcbooks.com

  Ithaca, NY

  Published by McBooks Press, Inc. 2008

  Copyright © 2008 George Kimball

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover and interior design by Panda Musgrove.

  Cover photographs used under license of Sports Illustrated:

  Walter Iooss Jr. (Leonard), Manny Millan (Hagler, Duran), Peter Read Miller (Hearns)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kimball, George, 1943-

  Four kings : Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran, and the last great era of boxing / by George Kimball.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59013-162-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Leonard, Sugar Ray, 1956– 2. Hearns, Thomas. 3. Hagler, Marvin, 1954– 4.

  Duran, Roberto, 1951– 5. Boxers (Sports)−United States−Biography. 6. Boxing−

  United States−History. 7. Boxing matches−United States−History. I. Title.

  GV1131.K55 2008

  796.830922−dc22

  [B]

  2008013825

  All McBooks Press publications can be ordered by calling toll-free 1-888-BOOKS11 (1-888-266-5711). Please call to request a free catalog.

  Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com.

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To Marge, Darcy, and Teddy, whose love, patience,

  understanding, and encouragement sustained me in difficult times.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by Pete Hamill ix

  Preface xi

  Chapter 1 In the Beginning . . . 3

  Chapter 2 Le Face-à-Face Historique, Duran–Leonard I 62

  Chapter 3 Stone vs. Sugar, Duran–Leonard II 87

  Chapter 4 Stone vs. Sugar, Hearns–Leonard I 122

  Chapter 5 Toughing It Out, Duran–Hagler 144

  Chapter 6 Malice at the Palace, Duran–Hearns 170

  Chapter 7 The Fight, Hagler–Hearns 184

  Chapter 8 The Super Fight, Hagler–Leonard 205

  Chapter 9 The War, Hearns–Leonard II 245

  Chapter 10 Uno Mas, Duran–Leonard III 268

  Chapter 11 Après Le Déluge 283

  Afterword and Acknowledgments 301

  Appendix Ring Records of the Four Kings

  Sugar Ray Leonard 307

  Marvelous Marvin Hagler 310

  Thomas Hearns 313

  Roberto Duran 317

  Bibliography 322

  Index 325

  Pete Hamill

  Foreword

  The young might not believe it now, but there was once a time when men who engaged in the most violent of sports were also artists.

  As prizefighters, they had simple, primitive goals: above all, to win, preferably by rendering their opponents unconscious. Their hands were gloved, but they wore no protective helmets, no masks. Boxing was always a tightly focused drama of one man against another man. It was, at its worst, a crude blood sport. But occasionally, a few men would appear who possessed rare skills: power, elegance (in the best sense of that word), intelligence, guile, and courage. Above all, courage, which they called “heart.” The fighters’ own definition of “heart” also included the ability to endure pain while moving through it to victory.

  When more than one man emerged with these qualities, fans and writers began to whisper about a Golden Age. If the men who made violence into art were all about the same size and weight, and the outcome of the matches was never certain, they spoke more loudly. This book is about the last Golden Age of boxing. That is, it is about a time when the matches themselves transcended the squalor of the business side of the sport, and focused only on the men who fought.

  If the young have any doubts about this era of pugilistic marvels, they must read George Kimball. So must people with white in their hair who remember it in their own blurry way. Kimball will tell all of them about the men named Duran and Leonard and Hagler and Hearns. He will evoke the rascals, too, the hustling spear carriers at the show. He will make the electricity return to packed arenas. But he will speak about heart, too, and fear. They should listen to him carefully because Kimball is a superb witness. He was there. He was there in the training camps. He was there for every minute of every round of every fight. He was there in the dressing rooms of the losers. Listen to the tale. It’s about a Golden Age. Perhaps even the last such age in the poor battered sport that Kimball, and a lot of the rest of us, once cherished more than all others. But it was not a myth. It was as real as a cut over a brow, as real as a hook to the jaw, as real as all great art.

  Pete Hamill

  New York

  Preface

  By the late 1970s boxing had lapsed into a moribund state. Interest in the sport, which traditionally revolved around the heavyweight division, was on the wane. Muhammad Ali, who had beaten Leon Spinks in 1978 to win the heavyweight title for the third time, had announced his retirement and would never again be a champion. In early 1980, the WBC heavyweight title belonged to a former Ali sparring partner, Larry Holmes, the WBA version to the even more obscure John Tate and Mike Weaver.

  Beginning in 1980 the sport was resuscitated by a riveting series of bouts involving an improbably dissimilar quartet who would all eventually fight as middleweights. Between them, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran would fight one another nine times over the decade. Like Ali and Joe Frazier, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, they brought out the best in each other, producing unprecedented multimillion-dollar gates along the way.

  Through fortuitous coincidence, Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran matured into greatness in an era in which other sports seemingly conspired to back away and allow boxing to approach the prominence it had enjoyed in the days before baseball and football overtook it in the public consciousness: Major League Baseball experienced debilitating strikes in 1980, 1981, and 1982; the NFL underwent a 57-day strike in 1982 that wiped out much of the regular season, and a lockout in 1987 that led to many games being played with scab, or “replacement” players; and both the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games were marred by significant boycotts.

  Nor did it hurt that the rivalry among the four took place in a domestic climate of relative tranquility: The last American troops withdrew from Vietnam five years before Leonard fought Duran to inaugurate the series in 1980. The last of the bouts between them, Duran-Leonard III in 1989, occurred 13 months before the first Gulf War commenced.

  Each of the nine bouts between the four men was memorable in its own way, and at least two of them−Hearns-Leonard I in 1981 and Hagler-Hearns in 1985−are commonly included on any list of the greatest fights of all time, while the controversial outcome of another, the 1987 Hagler-Leonard fight, remains the subject of spirited barroom debates to this day.

  Among them these fascinating Four Kings of the ring won sixteen recognized world titles. In 1989, the date of the last meeting between them (Duran-Leonard III in Las Vegas), the aggregate record of
the quartet was 229-15-4. Eight of those losses (and two of the draws) had come in fights against one another.

  Put another way, as of December 7, 1989, their records, excluding their fights against each other, were 33-0 (Leonard), 46-1 (Hearns), 60-2-2 (Hagler), and 84-4 (Duran). Each of the four beat at least one of the others, and each of them lost to at least one of the others. Theirs is a shared legacy, and like John, Paul, George, and Ringo, their names are destined to be forever linked.

  Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran were fighters. They didn’t set out to save boxing from itself in the post-Ali era.

  But they did.

  And we may never see their like again.

  Four Kings

  Chapter 1

  In the Beginning . . .

  On May 7, 1973, what may have been the finest collection of American amateur boxers assembled under one roof in a non-Olympic year convened at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston for the National AAU Championships.

  Most of the Olympians who had represented the U.S. at the star-crossed Munich Games a year earlier−including Sugar Ray Seales, the lone American gold medalist−had joined the professional ranks. A new and promising group of boxers (though few could have guessed just how promising) had moved up through the ranks to replace them.

  The field of 324 included nine future world champions. Four of the boxers who would win a record five gold medals in Montreal three years hence were in attendance, three of them as participants, but just one of them, featherweight Howard Davis, Jr., would prevail in Boston. Davis beat LeRoy Veasley, the All-Service champion, in the 125-pound final.

  Another Montreal gold-medalist-in-waiting, sixteen-year-old Ray Charles Leonard, who had yet to begin calling himself “Sugar Ray,” defeated two of his future professional opponents, Bruce Finch and Pete Ranzany, on his way to the light-welterweight final, where he was outpointed by yet another boxer he would defeat professionally, Randy Shields.

  Leon Spinks was knocked out by D.C. Barker in the light-heavyweight final. His younger brother Michael had been eliminated in the regionals of the 165-pound class, but he had accompanied “Neon Leon” to Boston. Both Spinks brothers would win Olympic gold three years later, and both would eventually become heavyweight champion of the world.

  Another future world champion, eighteen-year-old Aaron Pryor, won the lightweight championship, while Marvin Camel, J.B. Williamson, and Arturo Frias, who would all capture world titles at a professional level, were eliminated in earlier rounds in their divisions.

  Other participants included Roberto Elizondo, who would twice challenge for the lightweight title; Wayne Hedgepeth, who would later become a world-class referee in New Jersey; and Tommy Brooks, who would train many world champions, including, briefly, both Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield.

  Brooks, the future son-in-law of Hall of Fame–trainer Lou Duva, experienced one of the more humiliating moments of the week when his trainer, former light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, expressed his displeasure over Tommy’s performance in his middleweight semifinal against Terry Dobbs by angrily slapping him in full view of the spectators as he sat on the stool between rounds.

  The unquestioned star of the week was not one of the future Olympians, but a nineteen-year-old apprentice machinist from nearby Brockton. Marvin Nathaniel Hagler won all four of his bouts, two of them by knockout, and upset Dobbs, the twenty-four-year-old U.S. Marine Corps champion, in the 165-pound final.

  Although Hagler was the lone New Englander to win a national title at the Hynes, the Boston newspapers barely acknowledged his presence that week until the night he beat Dobbs and was voted the Outstanding Boxer of the tournament. In one report on a preliminary round bout, a Boston paper called him “Nagler.”

  The local press had collectively hitched its star to what appeared to be a better story for the local angle. Robert C. Newton had boxed for the Naval Academy in his college days. Upon graduation from Annapolis, he had been commissioned an officer, and had spent the next four years in the service, three of them aboard a destroyer, the U.S.S. Finch, off the coast of Vietnam. Upon his discharge he had enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard and resumed his amateur boxing career. Newton was a few weeks away from receiving his Master’s degree from the Ivy League school when he defeated future world champion Hilmer Kenty in the first round of the AAU tournament.

  Bobby Newton won two more bouts that week, but the bandwagon ground to a halt when he lost to Pryor in the 132-pound final. Boston reporters turned, with seeming reluctance, to Hagler to fill their notebooks.

  In provincial New England boxing circles Hagler was considered an outsider. He had moved to Brockton from New Jersey just three years earlier, and had been boxing for only two years. He represented an obscure gym operated by brothers Guarino (Goody) and Pasquale (Pat) Petronelli, who had been in business only since 1969, and when he reported for duty at the Hynes he was sporting a shaved head, a look that had yet to become fashionable.

  Throw in the menacing scowl he had already adopted for those occasions when he was focused on the business of fighting, and it helps explain why sportswriters took one look that week and ran the other way−at least until they could no longer ignore him. Even after he won, the account of his triumph in the following morning’s Boston Herald American described Hagler as “a Newark-born middleweight.”

  In the final round of the championship bout, Hagler knocked Dobbs down twice, and the Marine took another standing eight-count.

  “The ref saved Dobbs,” Hagler would recall later.

  A few months earlier, Hagler had reached the 156-pound final of the National Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell before losing to Dale Grant of Seattle, Ray Seales’ half-brother. The two might have met again in Boston, but fate intervened when Reinaldo Oliveira, who had qualified as the New England representative at 165, declared his intention to turn pro and was thus disqualified from participating. Hagler, who had made the team at 156, was allowed to move up to 165. There was no New England representative in the 156-pound division, and Grant, as expected, breezed through the field to win.

  “I’d actually thought Marvin was too small for 156, and I couldn’t believe it when he entered at 165 and won,” recalled Emanuel Steward. In the 1980s Steward would win multiple Trainer of the Year awards, but in 1973 he was still in the early stages of building an amateur powerhouse at an inner-city Detroit gym called the Kronk Recreation Center. “And Marvin fought a lot of seasoned guys in that tournament.”

  “Marvin hurt everybody he fought in this tournament,” Sam Silverman, then the pre-eminent Boston boxing promoter, told reporters. “He was easily the best puncher in the whole show.”

  • • •

  Hagler was named the tournament’s Outstanding Boxer. Having won forty-two of his forty-five amateur bouts, he might have been considered the brightest prospect of all as a future Olympian, but the night he accepted his trophy from Boston Mayor Kevin White, Hagler announced that it had been his last amateur bout. “You can’t take a trophy and turn it into a bag of groceries,” he said.

  “Win or lose, I was turning pro,” Marvin would recall years later.

  Six days after the completion of the AAU Championships, he knocked out Terry Ryan in the second round of a fight at Brockton High School for the first of what would ultimately be sixty-two professional wins.

  Marvin Hagler’s take-home pay for the Terry Ryan fight was $40.

  Four years later, an Olympic medal in hand, Sugar Ray Leonard would earn $40,000 for his professional debut. By then, Hagler had fought thirty-three pro bouts and might have earned $40,000 all told, but he had done it the hard way.

  Eleven months earlier, on June 26, 1972, a crowd of 18,821−more than had watched any lightweight fight in history−had packed Madison Square Garden to see the estimable Scots champion from Edinburgh, Ken Buchanan, defend his World Boxing Association title against a scrappy Panamanian named Roberto Duran.

  Duran had turned twenty-one a week earlier and was but a few years r
emoved from life as a street urchin in his homeland, but he wasn’t a complete stranger to New York audiences. When Buchanan defended his title against Ismael Laguna the previous September, Duran had knocked out Puerto Rican journeyman Benny Huertas in the first round of a supporting bout on the card.

  “Duran blazed out of his corner and finished Huertas in about a minute,” Vic Ziegel would recall in Inside Sports eight years later. “He was awesome. But I couldn’t help noticing that he neglected to shower after the fight. ‘Duran hardly worked up a sweat,’ I wrote, ‘and a good thing, too, because he didn’t bother to shower.’ Duran, Ziegel found out years later, hated the line.

  The title fight was Duran’s first U.S. main event, the first time all eyes would be trained on him, and he left an indelible impression.

  • • •

  The champion, who brought a 43-1 record to the fight, weighed in at 133 1/ 2 , a quarter-pound more than Duran, who was undefeated at 28-0. Duran, comfortably ahead by margins of 9-2-1, 9-3, and 8-3-1 on the scorecards after twelve rounds, was going to win the fight anyway, but the outcome turned on an almost grotesque display of savagery.

  Late in the thirteenth, the two were wrapped up in an exchange so spirited that neither seemed to hear the bell. Referee Johnny LoBianco tried to grab Duran from behind to pull him away, but as he did, the Panamanian unloaded an uppercut that came up from the floor and caught Buchanan squarely in the groin, beneath his protective cup.

  Buchanan writhed in agony on the canvas, and eventually staggered back to his stool. There, he was visited by both the ringside physician and LoBianco, who eventually waved his arms, signaling that the fight was over.

  Although 18,000 pairs of eyes had seen the low blow, LoBianco apparently did not. Under the rules, Buchanan could have been granted five minutes to recover from a punch below the belt. The referee also had it in his power to penalize Duran for the infraction, or even to award the fight to Buchanan on a foul.