Hit Man - Brian Hughes [78]
Steward also took Hearns to see a medical specialist to test his legs to see if they were weak and if they could be strengthened. They found that Hearns’s legs did not have strong muscles in the right places for the movements of boxing, so the doctor developed a special exercise bike to correct these faults. On the days when Hearns didn’t run, he rode the bike at the gym after training.
At the same time, Prentiss Byrd took Hearns to a dentist in Philadelphia to examine his jaw in order to design the optimal mouthpiece. “Like most fighters who have been boxing for a long time, Tommy’s jaw had actually shifted on the left side and there was a gap which made it very vulnerable when he was hit with right hands,” said Steward. “And so Dr Williams devised a particular mouthpiece, designed to push up on the jaw and balance out the pressure so that it could be absorbed throughout his entire jaw and never again be localised in any one spot. If he were to get hit there, it would balance out and he could come back.” One further panacea that Hearns refused, however, was some potentially contentious medicine for his longstanding sinus problem, which restricted his breathing. Not wanting to fall foul of a postfight dope test, he refused the medication his management offered and instead drank a herbal tea called Breathe Easy four times a day.
Whether the benefits of the bike, the mouthpiece and the tea were real or psychological, they seemed to work. On the morning of Tuesday, 13 June 1989, Hearns gave his final press conference two days before he was scheduled to fulfil a dream that he had pursued for eight years to meet Leonard, the thirty-three-year-old nemesis who had haunted his thoughts ever since his fourteenth-round loss in 1981. Hearns declared that he was happier, more content and confident than he had been about any of his fights in the past three years. He assured the throng of journalists that his training sessions had gone “exceptionally well,” and claimed that he felt physically, mentally and emotionally ready to slay his demons. “I couldn’t be better,” he said.
Two hours after returning to his hotel, his idyll was cruelly shattered when Hearns received a phone call from his mother, Lois, to tell him that his younger brother, Henry, had been charged with first-degree murder (according to Emanuel Steward in Ringmasters, he was told the news by a friend of the family and then broke the news to Hearns and his mother Lois in their hotel room). Henry had shot his girlfriend in the head at Thomas’s Southfield mansion. A man of less mental strength might have, but Hearns had learned to compartmentalise his feelings before a fight, to block out distractions and focus on the ring. “It was something I had to put aside,” he later said. “My family means a great deal to me. But that day, it meant more to me to get in there and defeat Ray Leonard because I know for a fact that my family and my little brother wanted me to stay there and take care of business.”
Emanuel Steward faced the multitudes of press that suddenly descended back on the doorstep and refused to make any comment about the charges. He admitted that the events had not helped his charge but revealed, “Thomas took the news pretty well, everything considered. He’s a strong-minded individual, he’s very controlled and he has got tunnel vision about this fight with Leonard.” He suggested that caution would be the best option until further details emerged. “We don’t know much more about what happened than we knew a couple