Hit Man - Brian Hughes [64]
Reaction from the press benches was less charitable. “This was one of those days that Hearns should have weighed in, gone to his hotel room in Caesars, laid down, and never bothered to get up and head outside for the fight later that day,” said KO magazine, referring to Hearns as “the Detroit pussycat.”
Hearns was now tentatively scheduled to challenge Marvin Hagler in November, but Ray Leonard spoiled the party by declaring that he wanted to fight Hagler and was not prepared to wait, even though he had been inactive for more than two years. Leonard had retired from the sport due to an eye injury in 1982. He returned for a single, unimpressive fight in 1984, then promptly retired again. But now he said he wanted one more big fight, against Hagler. Hagler and his trainers, Pat and Goody Petronelli, played it coy, keeping both Leonard and Hearns in suspense. Hagler even hinted strongly at retirement himself. But in boxing, money shouts, and Leonard was the money tree. Emanuel Steward could see which way the wind was blowing, and he didn’t like it. “If [Hagler] goes ahead and fights Leonard, he’s missing a big opportunity,” he said, angry and frustrated. His fighter’s big rematch was slipping away. “A Hagler–Leonard fight would be a fraud. It would be another Larry Holmes–Muhammad Ali show – a hoax to the public.” Hearns also tried to bait both men, suggesting they were afraid of him and bitterly joking that he would like to send them to the Wizard of Oz for some new hearts. But there was nothing he could do.
HEARNS NEEDED A quick return to the ring and on 17 October, the day before his twenty-eighth birthday, he was scheduled to end a two-and-a-half-year absence from his hometown to meet a twenty-five-year-old Doug DeWitt in the Cobo Arena. The press were united in their conviction that Hearns needed to deliver an impressive performance and make up for the lacklustre showing four months earlier when he strolled through a victory over Mark Medal.
Doug DeWitt was born in Youngstown, Ohio, but had located to Yonkers, New York, to begin his professional career at the age of eighteen. He had fought thirty-three times, with twenty-seven victories and three draws, and was third in the world rankings. Just three months earlier, he had lost a points decision to Hearns’s stablemate Milton McCrory. Noted for his iron jaw, he vowed that he would frustrate Hearns by adopting a dangerous fight strategy. “If I can make him throw his big punches in the first three rounds and avoid them,” he said, “I will come back in the fourth and fifth rounds and make a war of it. That is my shot.” He questioned Hearns’s lack of stamina and believed that his superior conditioning and durability would allow him to emerge victorious after twelve rounds. “I figure that Tommy’s got good ability to take a punch but when some people get hit on the chin, their legs go and then it becomes a matter of stamina. Hearns has been hit plenty but only Hagler knocked him out cold, and even then I think that Tommy gave up.”
DeWitt was as good as his word. He took Hearns’s best shots without flinching and at times managed to drag him down into an old-fashioned street brawl. The champion’s best opportunity to end it came in the third round when he landed a booming right cross and followed it up with a burst of two-handed punching, but the bell and fight referee Tommy Watson intervened to prevent the knockout that the 6,000 spectators had come to see. In round six, Hearns suffered a cut over his eye when DeWitt drove him into a corner and their heads collided in a clinch. Blood began to spill down Hearns