Hit Man - Brian Hughes [38]
Rumour-mongers speculated that Hearns had struggled to make the weight. He had certainly spent time in the sauna just two nights before the fight, a move which would have left him drained. Another whisper was that Hearns was required to do roadwork twice a day in order to shed the excess weight. Sports Illustrated’s boxing correspondent, Pat Putnam, mused, “The boxing grapevine knew that by the morning of the fight, Thomas Hearns had spent much of the previous two days steaming down. At the weigh-in, when Hearns tipped the scales at one hundred and forty-five pounds, a full two pounds lighter than what was required, he shot a glare in Steward’s direction. The glare seemed to ask, ‘What in hell did you let my weight get so low for?’”
There was strong criticism of the Kronk team, notably Steward, who refused to face the press until six days after he returned to Detroit. He held a press conference in the city’s Ponchatrain Hotel and the reporters sneered that it had taken him so long to respond because he was busy rehearsing his excuses. Steward began by saying, “I already know what your questions are so I’ll just start by issuing a statement that will answer a lot of your questions.” He talked about a rematch after three comeback fights and said he had already discussed this with Mike Trainer. Although he had spent a lot of time telling reporters before the fight that Leonard would get increasingly tense, he conceded that it had been Hearns who had made this mistake and “got so involved, worrying about the people back in Detroit, that he wasn’t himself in those last two days.” He described Hearns’s training programme as “the best I ever saw,” but he did admit, “I felt maybe a pound more in weight would have helped.” He refused to be drawn on the rumours about steaming down but instead cited a number of other excuses, including the spurious assessment that “Tommy’s biorhythms weren’t right.” He then delivered his final statement and left, saying, “God works in mysterious ways. It just wasn’t meant for us to win that night.”
Some years later, Steward would offer a series of excuses for the defeat to the New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson, which Anderson published in his book Ringmasters; Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art in 1991. He said he had lost control of the training camp, allowing Hearns too much leeway. For example, Hearns had defied a Steward edict not to indulge in friendly softball games in the afternoons at his Sugar Loaf training resort. He also sparred two days before the fight despite having been expressly told not to, and didn’t eat properly the day before the fight, according to Steward. Hearns then came in too light at 145 pounds and, as a result, lacked the strength and energy to resist Leonard’s punches as the bout wore on. “People said, ‘Look what Ray Leonard did – ain’t that great?’ But we lost that fight in our own damn camp,” said Steward. Hearns’s views were not recorded.
ON 5 DECEMBER 1981, the Detroit Free Press featured an in-depth interview with Kronk stalwart Hilmer Kenty, who had not fought since losing his World Boxing Association lightweight title to Sean O’Grady in April. Since then, Kenty had undergone delicate surgery to repair a torn retina in his left eye and had received the all-clear to resume his boxing career. He was in full training for his comeback, due within the following two months. He also explained that he had severed his connections with long-time trainer Emanuel Steward and the Kronk.
Kenty’s departure was the first major break from the tightly knit group of sixty amateur and professional fighters assembled by Steward. In a thinly veiled attack, Kenty said that his departure was due to “financial arrangements and the amount of time which Emanuel could spend with me.” He recalled, “In the week of my title fight with O’Grady in Atlantic City, Emanuel had to go back to Detroit for three days in order to look after other Kronk fighters who were also boxing in a tournament.” He also offered