Hit Man - Brian Hughes [95]
Junior Earl Butler was a fully-fledged heavyweight from Phoenix, Arizona, who had recently slimmed down to cruiserweight to meet Michael Nunn in a fight he lost on points. Three months later, he faced Hearns in a ten-round bout at The Palace, Auburn Hills. Hearns turned from his promoting duties to discuss the fight and said that, despite losses to Nunn and to NABF cruiserweight champ Edgerton Marcus, Butler was a confident fighter who could give him trouble. “I know in my own mind though that I won’t let that happen,” Hearns smiled. “You guys are going to see the Thomas Hearns of the eighties.”
Hearns also exchanged insults via the media with Roy Jones Jr., regarded by many as the best pound-for-pound fighter then active and someone he would have loved to cross swords with. “If he had come along in the eighties,” said Hearns, “he’d have been chewed up and spit out by Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran. He definitely was another notch in my belt.” The twenty-six-year-old Jones, who was due to defend his own super-middleweight title, responded, “If he [Hearns] had come along in the nineties, he’d have been slaughtered.”
Plagued by trouble with his fists for much of his career, Hearns looked as if he was continuing to suffer the effects during his contest with the bullish Butler, as he scrapped and battled his way through ten rounds to record a unanimous points victory. Hearns had already put his foe onto the canvas on three separate occasions when, in round six, he stepped forward and delivered a three-punch combination of right-left-left hook. The combo rocked Butler but, before he could press home his advantage, Hearns flinched and then beat a retreat. He had hurt his hand again and would win the rest of the contest by boxing off the back foot and keeping Butler on the end of his jab.
Afterwards, he chose to pay tribute to his durable opponent and claimed that he couldn’t understand what had kept Butler upright because he had hit him harder than he had ever landed before. The media was unimpressed, with the Chicago Sun-Times describing Hearns as “long past his best days in the ring.” More significantly for the Detroit man, his proposed series of knockout tournaments was placed in jeopardy by the disappointingly low crowd of just five thousand who came to support the initiative.
A further blow came in December when USA Network, the cable company that had vowed to show Hearns’s contests, pulled the plug on his next proposed fight, in January 1996. In a withering report, the hard-hitting New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick wrote, “Last week, we reported that the bosses at USA Network were losing their minds because they had agreed to allow thirty-six-year-old Tommy Hearns, who is gradually losing his mind, to fight on USA on the 23rd January. Whilst it is too late for Hearns, USA’s insanity proved temporary. On Wednesday, the cable network’s new VP for production, Gordon Beck, announced that USA had reached a sane and charitable decision. The Hearns bout, which would have been his second in four months on their network, has been cancelled.” He concluded his article with the blunt assessment, “Tommy Hearns has taken far more than one too many punches and USA no longer wishes to be party to his diminished capacity.”
OPPORTUNITIES FOR THOMAS Hearns were growing scarce. The view that he should follow the lead of his peers, Sugar Ray and Marvelous Marvin, and enjoy the fruits of his labour