Four Kings Page 4

  The day after this encounter Hagler showed up at a Brockton gym operated by Vinnie Vecchione. (More than two decades later Vecchione would have his moment of nationwide fame when he rescued his heavyweight, Peter McNeeley, from Mike Tyson in Tyson’s get-out-of-jail fight.) Hagler sat down and quietly watched the boxers go through their paces. He came back for several evenings in a row, and never said a word to anyone. Nobody said a word to him, either.

  “The funny thing was, Wigfall was a fighter in that gym,” said Angie Carlino, who would later become Marvelous Marvin’s personal photographer and confidant. “Marvin didn’t even know that at the time. He sat there and watched for a week, and I guess he didn’t like the way Vinnie operated. You’ve got to remember, Marvin was a very shy kid.”

  The next day he walked across a parking lot and climbed the stairs to the Petronelli Brothers’ Gym.

  Though born and raised in the shoe-factory town Rocky Marciano called home, Goody Petronelli had departed Brockton at an early age and served twenty years in the United States Navy, where he compiled a 23-2-1 record as an amateur welterweight and later coached the boxing team at the Great Lakes Naval Air Station. By the time he was discharged in 1969 he had risen to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy’s Medical Corps, a background that he would utilize in establishing himself as a cut man par excellence.

  “I’ve got stuff in this bag,” he once told me, “that’ll stop a bullet hole.”

  Lifelong friends of Marciano, Goody and his brother Pat had arranged to go into partnership with the retired heavyweight champion in a Brockton boxing gym. On August 31, 1969, Goody had driven halfway across the country, discharge papers in hand, when he heard on the car radio that Rocky had been killed in a plane crash.

  Pooling their resources and underwriting the enterprise with a construction company they operated by day, the Petronellis opened the doors to the planned gym anyway.

  When the new arrival shuffled into the gym and looked around for a place to sit, there was no indication that the fortunes of three men were about to be changed.

  On his first night Hagler once again watched in silence. On the second, Goody walked over and asked with a smile, “Hey, kid, do you want to learn how to fight? ”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” said Marvin. Goody told him to come back the next night and bring along his gear.

  Gear? All he had was a pair of cutoff jeans and some tennis shoes.

  “When a new kid comes to the gym I sit him down and give him a list of the pros and cons,” said Goody. “I explain that if he does well it will teach him self-respect and make him a better person, but I warn him that there’s nothing easy about it. He’ll have to work hard and get up in the morning to do road work. It will cut down on his social life. And no matter how good he might be, he’s going to get hit, and he’s not going to like it.”

  “When I asked him if he still wanted to do it, he said ‘Yeah. And one day I’m going to be the champion of the world.’”

  Goody thought the kid didn’t know what he was talking about. He laughed and put his arm around Hagler.

  “That’s great, son,” he said, “when you’re the champion, I’ll be your trainer.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, the new boy came back the next night, and the night after that.

  “Most of them don’t,” said the trainer.

  “It didn’t take long to realize that he was progressing faster than most of the other kids,” said Goody. “I asked him why and he told me he’d been practicing.

  “‘Practicing? How? ’ I asked him. He told me when he went home at night he practiced throwing the combinations he’d learned in front of a mirror.”

  “I met Marvin a couple of months after he started going to the gym,” recalled Carlino. “I was down at the Fargo Building in Brockton, where they used to do amateur fights, and Pat Petronelli says, ‘Hey, Angie, you want to take a picture of this kid? ’

  “‘Who is he? ’ I asked, and Pat said ‘He’s Short Stuff Hagler.’

  “I took a few pictures, but I had to show him how to hold his hands to pose,” said Carlino. “He had on a pair of gray gym shorts, and he was still wearing sneakers. He was completely green.”

  On July 12, 1967, Newark had erupted in a riot that gripped the city for the better part of a week. Thirteen-year-old Marvin Hagler had initially watched with fascination as looters scurried about on the street below, but after a bullet crashed through the window, his mother, Ida Mae Lang, ordered her six children to crawl on the floor when they had to go from room to room lest they expose themselves to the gunfire. For days the family were prisoners in their tenement flat.

  Anna Jones, the social worker attending the public housing project where Hagler’s family lived, was the mother of the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka.

  Then known as LeRoi Jones, Baraka was himself arrested (though acquitted two years later) on gun charges during the 1967 episode he prefers to describe as “the Rebellion.” In Baraka’s recollection, it took over a year before his mother was able to help Mae Lang relocate her family to Brockton, where she had relatives.

  “They finally tore those projects down a couple of years ago,” said Baraka. “Until they did, you could still see the bullet holes in the walls of the buildings.”

  Brockton itself was a city in some decline, but people weren’t shooting each other on the streets−at least not on a regular basis.

  Back in the Newark projects, Hagler’s contact with members of the Caucasian race had been limited almost exclusively to policemen. He had by his own acknowledgement been a loner in Newark, and now in Brockton, where he knew no one, he felt even more alone.

  “It took a long time before he could relax in the presence of white people,” said Goody Petronelli. “I wouldn’t call him suspicious, but Marvin was always wary. He is to this day, as a matter of fact. He really has to know someone to trust them, but eventually he came to trust me and Pat. We all grew in that relationship together.”

  In two and a half years Hagler would come to dominate New England amateur middleweights, but Petronelli wasn’t sure what he had until 1973, when Hagler followed his near miss against Dale Grant in the Golden Gloves final with a clean sweep in the national AAU championships.

  Although “Stuff” (abbreviated from the original “Short Stuff” ) would remain his gym name, somewhere along the line a scribe described him as “Marvelous” Marvin. Hagler liked the sound of that and adopted it as his nom de ring, although both television announcers and newspaper-men seemed reluctant to use it. (“The New York Times was willing to call Leonard ‘Sugar Ray,’ but they wouldn’t let me put the ‘Marvelous’ in front of ‘Marvin,’” recalled Katz.) It would be some years later that he went to court and had his name legally changed from Marvin Nathaniel to Marvelous Marvin Hagler.

  By ’73 Hagler had fathered a young son and entered into what would be a short-lived marriage; both factors contributed to his decision to jump straight to the pro ranks.

  Naturally right-handed, Hagler had favored a southpaw stance. Since he seemed more comfortable that way, Goody had left him alone, but eventually he began working him as a righthander in the gym. Hagler boxed as a southpaw in winning the AAUs, but he turned around and fought from an orthodox stance when he knocked out Terry Ryan a week later.

  Goody Petronelli and Hagler’s first promoter, Sam Silverman, had initially reasoned that since many managers were reluctant to pit their fighters against southpaws, it might be easier to book fights for a right-handed Hagler, but after just three outings Silverman advised Petronelli, “Turn him back to southpaw. He’s more devastating that way.”

  Although he would be listed as a southpaw for the rest of his career, Hagler had become virtually ambidextrous. He could, and often did, befuddle opponents by switching from one to the other in the middle of a round.

  In his fourth pro outing, Hagler got the fight for which he had originally gone to the gym.

  Dornell Wigfall was 8-0 when the two m
et in Brockton in October of 1973. Although he was rocked by at least one punch from his former tor-mentor, Hagler exacted revenge by winning a solid decision that toppled his old nemesis from the ranks of the unbeaten. (When they met in a rematch two years later, Hagler would knock Wigfall out in six.)

  Hagler began to shave his head while he was still an amateur. The original notion was strictly utilitarian−it had occurred to him that it might cause a foe’s gloves to slide off his head−but the combination of the shiny head and goatee also provided a vaguely Mephistophelian cast, and the suspicion is that Marvin rather liked the reaction that produced when an opponent sized him up for the first time.

  The look, though it would later become popular among athletes of all stripe, was still somewhat novel in the mid-1970s. As he was making his way toward the ring for one of those early fights, Hagler overheard a couple of punters making a friendly wager on the outcome.

  “Okay,” one of them told his seatmate, “I’ll take the black Kojak.”

  Although he was dominating local opposition, Hagler might as well have been fighting in a vacuum for all the attention he was getting.

  “Never mind what happened in the amateurs, they had trouble getting his name in the papers until he became world champion,” recalled Angie Carlino.

  “The Petronellis were greenhorns when it came to publicity, but Sam [Silverman] had his own guy, Bill Ebel. The papers never sent photographers to the fights, so I’d take the pictures, take them home and develop them, then deliver one to the Herald, one to the Globe, and leave the rest with Ebel at Sam’s office on Canal Street. He’d put captions on them and send them out to the suburban papers,” said Carlino. “If we were lucky and it was a slow news day they might use one.

  “And in those days, Brockton was even worse,” added the photographer. “The Petronellis’ gym was right next to the Brockton Enterprise, and when he ran shows down there, Sam would hold a press conference at the Genova Café, which was literally across the street from the paper. The Enterprise wouldn’t send anybody across the fucking street to cover it. The Enterprise still didn’t consider Marvin a Brocktonian. To them he was still a kid from Newark.”

  During those early years Hagler was sometimes overshadowed by a fighter from his own gym. Pat Petronelli’s son Tony was initially considered the more promising of the two, and at one point owned the USBA light-welterweight title. Tony’s career took a wrong turn in 1976, when he was so soundly whipped in a world title fight against Wilfredo Benitez that he flunked a brain scan before his next outing. Although he passed a subsequent EEG and was cleared to fight again, he never regained his earlier form. Tony boxed sporadically over the next few years before retiring with a 41-4-1 record.

  In August of 1974, Hagler met Sugar Ray Seales in what was billed as a marquee matchup of what had been the country’s top amateur middle-weights of the two preceding years. The 1972 Olympic champion was by then 21-0 as a pro. Hagler was 14-0, but had yet to fight outside New England. Not only was the bout televised, it took place at a television station, in a ring erected in a studio at Boston’s WNAC-TV.

  Before an audience of invited guests, Hagler prevailed by decision to hand Seales his first loss. A rematch was arranged for November, this time in Seales’ hometown, at the Seattle Coliseum. One judge, Clay Nixon, scored the fight 98-96 for Hagler, 4-2-4 in rounds, but was overruled by two compatriots, Frank Pignataro and William Kidd, who returned identical 99-99 scorecards. That a professional boxing judge would score eight out of ten rounds even was improbable enough, but that two of them would do it in the same fight was absolutely flabbergasting.

  The draw represented the first semblance of a blemish on Hagler’s record, but it didn’t make the big fights any easier to come by. In 1975 Silverman matched him against another unbeaten middleweight, 29-0 Johnny “Mad Dog” Baldwin, secretly half-hoping that a loss might make it easier to move Hagler. Once again, Hagler won by decision.

  As 1976 dawned, Hagler had been fighting as a pro for nearly three years. His record was 25-0-1, but no one outside the boxing game knew his name. Those inside it, on the other hand, were inclined to give him a wide berth.

  As Roberto Duran’s trainer Ray Arcel was fond of saying, “Tough times make monkeys eat red peppers.”

  Still in his twenties, J. Russell Peltz was the director of boxing at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a venue that would shortly become familiar to American moviegoers as the scene of Rocky Balboa’s battle with Apollo Creed. With former champ Joe Frazier on the downside of his career, Philadelphia didn’t harbor any real-life heavyweight Rockys, but the mis-named City of Brotherly Love was a hotbed of middleweight contenders. Bennie Briscoe, Willie “The Worm” Monroe, Bobby “Boogaloo” Watts, and Eugene “Cyclone” Hart, any one of whom might have won a title two decades later, performed regularly on the enormously successful shows Peltz was running at the Spectrum.

  “We had all these middleweights, and we needed guys for them to fight,” said Peltz. “My recollection is that Sam Silverman approached me, because I wouldn’t have gone looking for a lefthander.”

  “We knew if we were going anywhere we had to fight ‘the iron,’” said Goody Petronelli, “so we went to Philadelphia.”

  For a purse of $2,000, Hagler was matched against Watts in January of 1976. He arrived in Philly early and trained at Joe Frazier’s gym. The former heavyweight champion was impressed by what he saw, but warned Hagler, “You’ve got three things going against you: You’re black. You’re left-handed. And you’re good.”

  At a pre-fight press conference Hagler, undoubtedly at Silverman’s urging, uncharacteristically attempted to beat his own drum by reciting a poem describing what he would do with Watts.

  Although Hagler appeared to dominate the fight, referee Hank Cisco called it even, and worse, both judges scored it for Watts. It was a hometown decision so egregious that Peltz was embarrassed. On his way to the dressing room to console Hagler he ran into Silverman sitting forlornly outside.

  “Sam, I’m sorry,” Peltz told the old promoter.

  “Ah, I been around forever,” Silverman replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m used to it.”

  “Later that night Allen Flexer, the president of the Spectrum, came to my office,” recalled Peltz. “He asked me ‘How can they do this? ’”

  “Welcome to Philadelphia, Marvin Hagler!” read the headline in the next morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer. In the Daily News, columnist Stan Hochman spoofed Hagler’s pre-fight verse with his own poetic view of the verdict:

  Marvelous Marvin, a fighter from Brockton

  Came to the Spectrum and barely got socked on

  Boogaloo Watts up he did carve

  But guess what happened to Marvelous Marv?

  “It might not have been the worst decision of all time,” said Peltz of Hagler’s first career loss, “but it was a pretty bad one.”

  Two months later Hagler returned to the Spectrum, this time to fight Willie “The Worm” Monroe. Monroe was 32-3-1. Sixteen months earlier he had lost a decision to Watts.

  “Monroe was originally supposed to have fought another Massachusetts middleweight, Vinnie Curto, that night,” said Peltz. “Even then Curto was notoriously unreliable, and we had a feeling he might not show up, so I’d been in contact with the Petronellis.”

  Somebody had to take a fall for the Watts debacle, and it had been Sam Silverman. Hagler’s promoter had been thrown overboard, and Pat Petronelli was now doing the negotiating. Two weeks before the March 9 date he sent Peltz a telegram agreeing to a $2,000 guarantee against a percentage of the gate to fight Monroe.

  “I still have the telegram, because Pat and Goody later claimed they’d taken the fight on a few days’ notice and Hagler wasn’t ready,” said Peltz. “That just wasn’t true.

  “Monroe didn’t mind fighting Hagler, because against Boogaloo he hadn’t been exactly devastating,” added Peltz. “Marvin had just plugged away and outworked Watts.”

  A blizzard
enveloped Philadelphia that night, effectively killing the gate. The diehard, mostly black fans from North Philly still came down on the subway, but the suburban crowd that regularly patronized the Spectrum shows couldn’t reach the venue. The announced attendance was 3,200. Hagler received his guarantee, but that was all.

  “In my mind, that remains the only fight Marvin Hagler ever lost,” said Peltz. “Monroe had the best fight of his career. Willie just had one of those nights every fighter dreams about.”

  Although it would be reported in Boston as another hometown larceny, most agreed that Monroe did enough to win. Even Hagler seemed unsure.

  “How did Watts ever beat Monroe? ” he wondered in the dressing room.

  “I have a few things to learn,” added Marvin. “But I have a feeling Willie already knows them.”

  Before the Petronellis returned to Brockton, they met with Peltz. Having jettisoned Silverman, they needed someone to help them move Hagler. Peltz was young, energetic, and knew his way around the boxing nether-world. If he would throw in with them, Pat and Goody offered to cut him in on a piece of the action.

  Peltz declined. Thirty years later he still slaps himself in the head when he remembers his next sentence: “If you can’t beat guys from Philly, what am I going to do with you? ”

  Hagler’s next trip to Philadelphia has been described as the crossroads fight in his career. It was. He had lost to Watts and he had lost to Monroe, and if he’d lost to Cyclone Hart as well, Marvin Hagler might have been reduced to an Opponent.

  “If he couldn’t beat Gene Hart he would have been an Opponent,” said Peltz. “If he’d lost to Hart, we couldn’t have used him again.”

  Hart’s record was a modest 30-6-1, but a year earlier he had out-pointed Ray Seales on what would be the last card staged by the legendary Philadelphia promoter Herman Taylor, and in his next outing had battled Briscoe to a draw.