Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [100]
Boxing provides the ultimate stage for pre-event hype because the public can hear every word. It is intense and in-your-face and the boxer can’t back down. In other sports it is often performed on the field out of earshot. In boxing, the press conferences allow the frustrations, whether real or contrived, to surface. When Leonard had his masculinity challenged, he felt the need to respond. Ignoring it would be akin to being labeled a punk. His problem was that he couldn’t release the emotions; they followed him to the opening bell. Duran needed hate to brew in his corner, while Leonard exuded calm awareness. Duran turned his opponents into voodoo dolls before fights. Leonard could be ruthless and arrogant but preferred calculation.
“I had seen Duran on a number of occasions, and I was in Las Vegas … and I think it was the Esteban DeJesus fight,” remembers Leonard. “At the time I was a professional fighter. I was sitting behind Jackie Gleason, who I loved because I loved The Honeymooners. I told him that I wanted to fight [Duran]. Gleason turned around and said, ‘Son, do yourself a favor and don’t even think about it because he will kill you.’ I stopped watching The Honeymooners. He burst my bubble man.”
Duran promised war. He had knocked down a horse with a single right hand. How do you hurt a man so possessed? Sugar Ray thought he had an answer. With his christian names taken from one of the world’s greatest entertainers, Ray Charles, and his nickname from the greatest-ever boxer, Sugar Ray Robinson, he was to many the savior of the sport. That didn’t always make him popular. “Ray Charles Leonard was a prodigy, and no one in boxing really likes a prodigy,” wrote one biographer. “For most old-timers, who were made to pay their dues by even older-timers, approval for young fighters is bestowed reluctantly and in inverse proportion to the amount of punishment they’ve taken. In this ultimate school of hard knocks, all natural talent is suspect.”
Despite the belief in some quarters that he had had it easy, growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina, wasn’t exactly the high life. According to Leonard, everything the family had “we shared.” As one of seven children born to Cicero and Getha, he moved to Washington, D.C., when he was four and his mother, a nursing assistant, and father, who worked in a produce market, put in long hours. “There was a feeling of inferiority from not having anything,” Leonard told the New York Times in 1979. “There were never clothes to wear or money for things as simple as school field trips. Even lunch money was a problem.”
When Leonard won the gold medal in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal with a victory over Cuba’s Andres Aldama, he seemed destined for riches in every aspect of his life. His publicity campaign heralded what was to come with boxer Oscar De La Hoya and Michael Jordan in basketball and he displayed an even temperament and good manners. In 1979, Leonard took a magnificent boxer in Wilfred Benitez and stopped him with six seconds remaining in the fifteenth round. The young fighter proved that he could bang with the world’s best.
Leonard was on the verge of superstardom. He learned from the Benitez bout that it took more than just great physical attributes to be and beat the best. “It required psychological warfare and mental stability,” he said. “It required more heart than you can ever imagine … I mean when the going gets tough and your lungs are burning, when your arms are tired and they feel like weights, you push for that hidden reservoir of strength. That’s when I realized it was far more than being physical or having raw talent.”
In 1980, at twenty-nine years old, Duran was taking on the biggest draw since Ali. To Duran, every fight was a one-dollar brawl in Chorrillo. Fighting was survival. Boxing was his only option, while Leonard could have been a success in anything. The truth about Leonard’s childhood didn’t matter