Hit Man - Brian Hughes [82]
This article prompted a welter of press calls for Hearns to bow out gracefully from the sport. They grew stronger when Ron Katz, the matchmaker for Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, revealed that Hearns had been having problems making the 168-pound super-middleweight limit and could be seriously weakened before facing Olajide. Hearns dismissed this as matchmaker’s froth and hype and maintained that he was never more than just three pounds above the limit. Still, the furore over his physical decline would not abate. At a press conference, he had mistakenly dubbed the Taj Mahal casino, where the fight was scheduled to take place, as the Mirage, the new gambling palace in Las Vegas. It was later suggested that this slip of the tongue was down to Hearns’s mischief rather than a sign of his mental fragility. Before he had agreed to fight Olajide, Stephen Gwynn, the owner of the Mirage, had dangled the carrot of a $10 million fight against Michael Nunn before him. This offer was withdrawn after Nunn scraped a tediously dull win over Marlon Starling. Hearns was annoyed that he was now only getting $1.5 million dollars for his efforts.
Liverpool-born and Vancouver-raised, Michael Olajide was five years younger than Hearns and boasted a record of twenty-seven wins in thirty-one outings, including two points victories over Curtis Parker and James “Hard Rock” Green, a pair of respected top ten operators. He had lost a decision to former Kronk fighter Frank Tate in a tilt for the vacant IBF middleweight title and had been knocked out inside five rounds by Iran Barkley. The latter loss sparked a bitter split with his trainer-father and he had come under the wings of veteran trainers Angelo Dundee and Hector Rocca, who revitalised his career and propelled him back to sixth in the world rankings. Olajide, who possessed the good looks of a male model, claimed that the canny Dundee had not only re-taught him rudiments like how to effectively block and slip punches but had also had a significant impact on more cerebral matters. “He’s more like a psychiatrist; he has worked on my head,” he said.
At the final pre-fight press conference, Dundee predicted that Hearns would get more trouble than he had hoped for and warned the press to accept Olajide’s rating as a four-to-one underdog at their peril. The man who had guided the careers of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and many other champions explained that they had prepared plans to upset and disrupt Hearns from building any kind of rhythm in their twelve-round championship fight. Hearns sat quietly alongside his challenger, smiling at the customary predictions, before reflecting, “Everyone in boxing might be a ‘little star’ but I am like a five hundred watt light compared to Olajide.” Hearns refuted the press speculation about his allegedly deteriorating condition and warned his critics that they needed him more than he needed them. “Boxing needs me more than ever before because it is lacking superstars. There is no Mike Tyson walking around as the undefeated world heavyweight champion [he had been beaten by Buster Douglas in February] and the public are fed up of Ray Leonard coming to fight when he decides he wants to before he performs badly anyway. Besides me, there is no one else in boxing to excite people.”
On the beautiful spring evening