Hit Man - Brian Hughes [45]
His rapid rise at such a young age seemed to curtail Benitez’s maturity. Gregorio was the dominant force in his life and would whack his son hard across the face during a training session or fight if he thought he was not performing to his high expectations. This led to impulsive and erratic behaviour from Benitez, who would threaten to retire from boxing altogether after unsatisfactory displays, such as his draw with Harold Weston. It was this part of his nature that seemed to stop him being embraced in popularity by boxing fans. He was acknowledged as technically perhaps the finest boxer in recent years – including Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali – and was admired for winning his third world championship before the age of twenty-four. But Benitez wanted the respect he felt he had earned. He was now managed by Jim Jacobs, who had helped negotiate the million-dollar purses for the fights against Leonard and Duran, and Benitez had outlined his new ambition was to win four world titles. He viewed his match against Hearns as the most direct route to Marvin Hagler, the undisputed middleweight champion.
Benitez was a notorious trash-talker, and during one of the pre-fight press conferences he sneered, “I want to beat Hearns really badly. In fact, I hope he dies out there. That will be better for him.” Apart from the inflammatory nature of his comments, it was an especially insensitive remark, as it came just two weeks after Korean lightweight Duk Koo Kim had died following his bout with American Ray Mancini. The public furore was predictably intense but at his next meeting with the press, ten days later, Benitez chose to repeat his crass statement rather than apologise for it. Sitting in the bowels of the Superdome with a towel covering his dyed red hair, he dismissed Hearns, claiming that he had only seen one round of him on film, and assured the outraged reporters that he meant to carry out his threat.
“Wilfred, are you sorry you said that you hoped that Hearns died in the ring?” asked one.
“No,” he said. “That’s boxing.”
Hearns declared that beating Wilfred Benitez was more important than beating Ray Leonard because he didn’t want to taste the bitter pill of defeat again. He admitted that he had seriously considered quitting boxing several times, although it wasn’t the loss to Leonard that had caused these doubts but the increasing frustration in trying to resume his career. He said, “Every time a fight has been arranged and then cancelled it has brought back the same reaction, which is to think, ‘To hell with it!’” He was eager to clarify the situation surrounding the collapse of the fight with Hagler as well: “I know a lot of people blame me for that fight never coming off. The thing is, I waited all day in a New York office for Hagler to come and sign the contracts. We were both going to make less money than was initially promised but I was there to sign. He never showed up.” He reasoned that if he could defeat Benitez, his status within the boxing world would be restored and he wouldn’t experience the frustration of not getting regular fights. “Rated fighters will always fight a champion. They believe that they might get lucky. If you haven’t got a title, they haven’t got a reason to fight you.”
He turned his attention to Benitez and expressed his bemusement at the violent threats that the Puerto Rican had made. “It is only when I’m not there that he says these things,” Hearns said. “He claims to be a friend of mine but he’s afraid to speak his real feelings when I’m around.” He repeated his earlier claims that he rarely watched fights on television but argued that the help he offered when training his Kronk teammates had given him a keen insight into the strengths of other fighters. “Benitez is much classier than Leonard,” he said. “In lots of ways, he can be more difficult