Hit Man - Brian Hughes [34]
Both fighters arrived at the packed Caesars Palace Pavilion an hour before fight time and gave some final media comments. Leonard predicted, “I’ll be moving as much as the little white ball on the roulette wheels at the casino. Thomas Hearns is going to fall before the tenth round. He will still be seeing my fists go pop-pop-pop in his dreams for weeks to come.” Hearns replied, “Everybody talks about how great a boxer Ray Leonard is, especially Ray Leonard himself. He is going down for the count in the fifth round and when he wakes up on September 17, he will still be wondering what hit him.”
BEFORE THE RING entrances began, the 24,083 sell-out crowd in the makeshift arena were introduced to the ringside celebrities, a sporting and Hollywood Who’s Who. Bill Cosby, Dean Martin, David Brenner, Jack Nicholson, Muhammad Ali, Cher, Burt Reynolds, Richard Pryor and John McEnroe all received generous applause. Many tens of thousands more were watching live on closed circuit TV in arenas from New York to New Orleans, Seattle to Los Angeles. In all, the fight was aired at 298 locations in the United States and Canada and in more than one million homes on pay TV. The tension was reaching fever-pitch when Hearns, wearing a dressing gown with the words “Winner Take All” plastered across his shoulders, entered the ring. Hearns clapped Leonard’s introduction, but then stalked him across the ring and fixed him with a baleful glare. Angelo Dundee responded by moaning to the referee about the amount of grease on Hearns, but was ignored. By the time the American national anthem had been sung by Lou Rawls, the temperature in the ring topped one hundred degrees.
Leonard was first out of his corner to score with a short left to the ribcage. Hearns’s response was immediate: he fired back a straight left jab to Leonard’s body and then used the momentum to come forward and catch him with another left to the face, followed by a right cross. A left hook then connected on the chin of Leonard and the noise level in the arena escalated. The Detroit man was instigating the action from the centre of the ring with Leonard keeping outside and looking for openings to launch sporadic attacks. He snaked out a left jab which connected with Hearns’s temple but received an immediate counter to the kidneys. Hearns’s younger brother, Billy, maintained a stream of invective throughout the action. “Stand up and fight, you chicken!” was one of his politer refrains. At the sound of the bell, Leonard feigned injury whilst smiling but Hearns copied his brother and responded with insults and sneers.
During the minute-long respite, Steward reminded his charge to use the advantage of his seventy-eight-inch reach, which was longer than all but four previous heavyweight champions, to the ultimate. The second round assumed much of the same rhythm as the first, with Leonard moving in a circle and trying to stay away from Hearns, who continued to score with left jabs to the nose and body. When another left caught Leonard flush in the face, it seemed to stir him to action and he retaliated with a left cross to the body. Despite this, the Detroit man enjoyed the most notable success when a stinging right cross knocked Leonard’s head backwards. This undulating pace was maintained for the following two rounds, with the Hearns jab followed by the straight right cross, honed to perfection in the Kronk gym, having a significant effect. Leonard still managed to look classy without scoring much and slipped most of the bigger punches coming his way. He always looked dangerous on the counter-attack but he sustained a swelling under his left eye in the fifth round.
Perhaps spurred by the threat to his vision, the sixth round heralded a sustained effort from Leonard