Hit Man - Brian Hughes [77]
Eight thousand fans ventured to the Las Vegas Hilton to see if Hearns could win his fifth world championship in style. Instead they watched an underwhelming display in which he seemed to visibly age in the ring. He looked closer to sixty when Kinchen almost finished him off at the end of the fourth round. He was cruising and in control of the fight when the Californian suddenly sprang from his inactivity and landed a right hand. Without any warning, Hearns’ legs seemed to betray him and turned to jelly, causing him to drunkenly stagger to his right, directly into line with Kinchen’s barrage of punches which propelled him against the ropes and then onto the canvas apron. Tommy clutched the ropes. He barely beat Mills Lane’s count, just managing to rise unsteadily at nine as he grabbed the referee in order to steady himself. “I thought his career was over,” revealed Prentiss Byrd, Emanuel Steward’s chief assistant. “His whole career went through my mind.” Steward violated boxing rules by leaping onto the ring apron to implore his protégé to hold onto Kinchen and allow himself time to recover. He later said, “I thought that it was a repeat of the Iran Barkley fight.”
Mills Lane was on the verge of stopping the fight as Hearns struggled to keep upright in the face of Kinchen’s ferocious attack. When Kinchen rushed in to finish him, Hearns grabbed his rampaging foe around the shoulders and held on for dear life. When referee Lane tried to separate them, Hearns groped at him and used him to steady himself again. This stopped Kinchen from landing the finishing blows when the Detroiter appeared all but out. “I held onto him like he was my woman,” said Hearns. “I had to survive that round. Mills Lane would have had to be Hercules to break us sooner.” Amazingly, he used every ounce of his determination, energy and will-power to carry him through the final eight rounds against a renewed and reinvigorated fighter who fought ferociously every step of the way. “I was not going to let this slip away. I had come too far to let it slip away. Whatever it took to win this fight, I was going to give it my all,” said Hearns afterwards.
Hearns won the decision by the narrowest of margins, with judge Larry Rozadilla awarding the nod to Kinchen whilst Bill Graham and Cindy Barton both voted in favour of Hearns. Observers were quick to bury Hearns’s reputation as a fighter. The popular ringside consensus was that the Iran Barkley knockout had signposted that Hearns’s best days were behind him and the listless display against Kinchen had confirmed that they were out of sight. As he walked away from the ring, Hearns’s right eye was swollen shut, his right hand was swathed in ice bandages and his joints throbbed from the punishment he had absorbed. He turned to Emanuel Steward and said, “I never, ever want to feel like this again.”
Yet when Ray Leonard beat Donny Lalonde to join Hearns as a five-time world champion, it was clear that the path to their rematch was now open.
15 LEONARD, PART TWO
IN THE WEEKS following the disappointing James Kinchen encounter, the sports pages were full of reports suggesting a historic second meeting between Hearns and Ray Leonard. Emanuel Steward did nothing to dampen the speculation. He claimed that both fighters had reached a verbal agreement for the rematch even before the Barkley fight. “There are no other major fights on the horizon and we figure that Tommy and Ray will make almost triple the money they made for their first fight in 1981,” he said, citing the influence of pay-per-view as a major factor.
The showdown was set for Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, on 12 June 1989. Yet Hearns had a hard time believing that it was finally reality. “Tommy never believed it would happen,” Steward later told Boxing Illustrated. “It was a funny type of psychological thing. The fight was finally here, the one he had waited eight years for, but he still wasn’t sure.”
Hearns also harboured hidden but deep doubts about his own durability. He had heard and read so many stories