Hit Man - Brian Hughes [25]
Shields was experienced enough to know what he had to do, and honest enough to admit what he was up against. “I’m going to go through all the styles I know,” he said. “If one style doesn’t work, I’ll try another. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. If that doesn’t work, something else. If that doesn’t work, then I’m in trouble.” In the Hearns camp, Emanuel Steward promised there would be none of the showboating apparent in the Primera fight. “From now on,” he said ominously, “it’s gong to be all business.”
The fight was staged in Phoenix’s Memorial Coliseum, in front of a live crowd of six and a half thousand as well as an international television audience via ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Hearns started at his usual brisk pace, employing a fast, stinging left jab mixed with combinations of rapid-fire two-handed punches. A clash of heads caused a slight cut over his right eye, but it was patched up by cutman Don Thibodeaux and didn’t bother him. Early in the second round, an ugly welt began to appear below Shields’ left eye. Hearns targeted this injury whilst building up a comfortable lead on points. In the fourth, he hammered Shields across the ring but the challenger could take a punch and stayed on his feet, even hitting back with a good left hook. Hearns acknowledged his guts at the end of the round by tapping gloves with Shields.
The champion stumbled over in round five but it was ruled a slip, and he continued to box well within himself while racking up a seemingly insurmountable lead. In the ninth round, a low chant started at the back of the hall and soon hummed throughout the whole Coliseum: “Randy! Randy! Randy!” The crowd seemed to realise that Shields had no chance of beating the champion but they acknowledged his immense courage. He stared at Hearns through bloodied eyes, his back was scorched red from rope burns and he had started to raise his right arm above his head, not as a gesture of superiority but an attempt to alleviate what was later claimed as bursitis of the shoulder. The chanting was taken as an affront by Hearns and he increased the ferocity of his attack, again targeting the damaged eye.
This increase in the tempo of the attacks led Dr. C.D. Lake, the ringside physician, to closely inspect what was now a deep cut over Shields’s left eye, but he ruled that the fight could continue. By the end of the twelfth round, however, Shields could no longer see how many fingers the doctor was holding up in front of him. Sonny Shields’s paternal compassion finally overtook his boxing concerns and he threw in the towel to end the fight. The three judges showed Hearns in front by a wide margin, with scores of 120-109, 119-111 and 119-110.
Some criticised Hearns for a lacklustre showing. “I tried boxing him, and it worked for a while,” said the champion. “Then I tried to muscle him, and that worked for a little while. Finally I tried to go up and down when his eye started to close, to make him look in two directions. Each style I tried worked for a while, and then he was able to adjust. He made it difficult for me to get to him.” Sonny Shields suggested that Hearns had been over-confident, and claimed that the day before the fight he had played tennis in the boiling sun and hadn’t arrived at the Coliseum until forty-five minutes before the fight was scheduled to start. Other critics expressed their disappointment that the Hit Man hadn’t exploded his famed bombs and flattened Shields. Some questioned the legitimacy of his supposed ferocious knockout power and many argued that when he fought Sugar Ray Leonard, he would be exposed. “Before this fight,” said promoter Bob Arum, “I thought Hearns certainly would beat Leonard. But now I see a very close fight.” Arum’s aide, Jerry Kearney, a long-time boxing writer, went further: “I think Leonard’s going to beat him.”
Emanuel Steward sprang to his charge’s defence. He maintained