As the entourages of victor and vanquished spilled into the ring and nearly 24,000 high-rollers, celebrities, and boxing aficionados began file out of the stadium in the direction the casino’s gaming tables, the sky lit up with a gaudy and expensive fireworks display Caesars Palace had commissioned for the occasion.

It was September 16, 1981, and the fight advertised as “The Showdown” had more than lived up to its advance billing. For almost 14 rounds of nonstop action, Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns had gone back and forth, each getting a nose in front only to be overtaken by the other. It had been a thrilling war of give-and-take, ebb-and-flow, and when it was over only one man was left standing.

But, the beaten Hearns would say, accurately, once it was over. “We put on a great show for them. If you never see another fight, but you saw this one, that would be enough.”

Twenty-six years later it remains high on anyone’s list of the great boxing matchups of all time. We are left to ponder what might have happened had Leonard and Hearns met, not in their primes and not amid the glitter of Las Vegas, but three years earlier, in a grimy New England mob town.

In August of 1978, Angelo Dundee was out of the country, on a cruise with his wife Helen, and was thus unreachable by telephone when ABC called to offer Leonard a television fight against a young welterweight from Detroit named Thomas Hearns.

The bout would take place at the Providence Civic Center in September. The $100,000 purse, which would come from the six-fight, $1 million extension Leonard had signed with the network, sounded right,   so Leonard’s people provisionally accepted the offer.  The contract would be formally signed at a press conference the following week.

Hearns was not an entirely unknown quantity in the boxing world. He had accumulated a 155-8 record in an amateur career that sometimes overlapped, but did not quite coincide with Leonard’s. In 1976 he had gotten to the Golden Gloves lightweight final, where he lost to Aaron Pryor. (Pryor would in turn lose to Leonard’s Montreal teammate and fellow gold medalist Howard Davis at the Olympic Trials.)
 
A year later Hearns won both the Gloves and AAU titles at light welterweight before turning pro in November of 1977.

By August of ‘78 Hearns had been fighting professionally for just ten months. His record was already 11-0, but he had fought just once outside Michigan and never on national television. Trainer, Doyle, and ABC could be forgiven if they were unimpressed with his credentials, but Dundee knew better.
 
At 11:30 pm the night before the press conference had been scheduled in Providence, promoter Dan Doyle was at the summer basketball camp he ran in Westminster (Conn.) when he got an urgent call from Dundee, who had just returned from the cruise and gotten the message.

“We can’t take this fight,” said Dundee. “We’re not fighting Hearns.”

“Why?” asked Doyle.

“Ray isn’t ready for Hearns,” Dundee told him. “Not now, but in a year or two he will be. And by the time he is, this fight is going to be worth much, much more than we’re talking about now.”

“Based on the terms of his managerial contract with Ray, Angelo had the right to veto the opponent,” said Doyle, now the Executive Director of the Institute for International Sport in Kingston, Rhode Island. “At first, some others in the Leonard camp weren’t happy about the decision.”

Instead of Hearns, Leonard fought Floyd Mayweather on the Providence show, and knocked him down twice in the eighth round before the fight was stopped in the tenth. Mayweather was the first Top Ten contender Leonard had faced. When the TV fight against Leonard evaporated, Hearns took a fight with his first ranked opponent, and on Sept. 7, two nights before Leonard fought Mayweather, the Hit Man knocked out Bruce Finch in three rounds in Detroit.

“Then in October of that year a group of us went to see Hearns fight Pedro Rojas in Detroit,” recalled Doyle. “Those of us who had been opposed to Angelo’s position realized that we’d been wrong. A Leonard-Hearns fight, when it happened, was going to be worth a lot of money.”

The $100,000 Leonard would have been paid for fighting Hearns in 1978 equaled what he received for beating Floyd Mayweather. Hearns’ end would have come to $12,500. Three years later their respective guarantees were $8 million and $5 million, and each would earn still millions more against what turned out to be a $36 million gross.

Capitalizing on his engaging smile, boyish good looks, a flashy boxing style and an Olympic Gold Medal, Leonard had signed a lucrative television contract that paid him $40,000 for his first professional fight – a 6-round decision over Luis Vega on Feb. 5, 1977, at the Baltimore Civic Center.
     
Hearns wasn’t even the main event fighter when he made his pro debut nine months later. His second-round KO of Jerome Hill on Nov. 25, 1977 received second billing to Kronk teammate Mickey Goodwin’s first-round knockout of Willie Williams at the Olympia in Detroit. Leonard, in fact, was an eyewitness. As a favor to Emanuel Steward, the Olympic hero had flown to Motown to help beat the drums for the fight.

After years of running a highly successful amateur boxing program out of a steamy inner-city Motown gym, Emanuel Steward was taking his first baby steps in the professional game, along with several of his fighters, including Hearns.

Goodwin, who made his pro debut on the same card as Hearns, would continue as the headliner for most of that year. He knocked out his opponent in the first round of each of his first four fights, and would score ten first-round KOs (and two KO2s) in his first 17 fights.

Hearns was also mowing down the opposition, knocking out each of his first 17 opponents, with all but one of the fights taking place in Michigan.

Leonard, on the other hand, had been content to go the distance in each of his first two pro fights, and by the time he met Hearns in 1981, eight of his opponents had survived to hear the final bell.

The core of the trusted cadre surrounding Leonard also came from his amateur gym, the Palmer Park Recreation Center, where he had boxed from Day One: Dave Jacobs and Janks Morton had been the volunteer boxing coaches there and would remain in the corner together for the boxer’s first 28 pro fights. Ollie Dunlap, Team Leonard’s “Chief of Staff,” was a former Michigan State running back who had been the Director of the Rec Center.

Michael G. Trainer, a successful Bethesda attorney, was initially brought aboard to handle the legal and financial aspects of Leonard’s career. Although Trainer had no experience in boxing, Janks Morton, who played on the Wildwood Manor Exxon softball team for which the lawyer pitched (and, later, managed), vouched for his honesty and intelligence.

Few, particularly Mike Trainer himself, could have guessed that for the next decade he would be one of the most influential figures in the sport.

The final piece to the puzzle, Angelo Dundee, was initially approached by Washington publicist Charlie Brotman and retained – for a 15% cut of Leonard’s purses – with title of “manager.” Although Dundee, who had risen to fame as the trainer of Muhammad Ali, would be the chief second in the corner and would ‘polish off’ his training in the weeks before a fight, Leonard felt it important for symbolic reasons that Jacobs, who had laced on the first pair of gloves he had ever worn, retain the official title of “trainer.”

Dundee had not been the only candidate for the job, but the others essentially took themselves out of the running -- Eddie Futch by insisting that Ray would have to move to Philadelphia, where he then trained his boxers, and Gil Clancy, by demanding the titles of both manager and trainer.

SRL wound up following the lead of the original management group overseeing the career of the young Cassius Clay by aligning itself with Dundee. When Angelo accepted the role, it was on the condition that he would have complete approval over the young fighter’s roster of opponents.

Dundee would prepare Leonard for fights, while the day-to-day work would be shared by Jacobs and Morton. Trainer would handle the contractual matters, and Dunlap would be in charge of scheduling and logistics.

Once it became clear that Ray Leonard was going to turn pro instead of going to college, Don King weighed in with what was on paper by far the largest offer, a guaranteed $200,000, but after reading the fine print Trainer realized that its terms would virtually turn Leonard into an indentured servant and rejected it.

Trainer, by his own estimate, knew next to nothing about boxing when he agreed to oversee Leonard’s affairs, but he undertook a diligent study of the business aspects of the sport, and came away convinced that there was a better way to do it.

“Why should what the fighter earns be dependent on what the promoter will pay him?” asked Trainer. “Why don’t we just put on the fights ourselves and hire a promoter?”

Following another lead from Ali’s early career, Trainer rounded up 21 Maryland businessmen, most of them members of his and Morton’s softball team, who put up $1000 apiece on the understanding that their investment in Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc. would pay an annual return of 8%. As it turned out, the seed money was never needed. It was repaid from the $40,000 ABC paid Leonard for his pro debut a few months later.

“The difference between our arrangement and Ali’s was that Ray still owned 100 per cent of himself,” said Trainer. “From a business standpoint it wasn’t the shrewdest investment these guys ever made, but they were mainly in it for the fun – it was kind of like having your own team to root for in the NCAA tournament. By the time we bought them out each of them made $80 for their thousand-dollar stakes. Fortunately, none of them were really doing it for the money. They just wanted to help Ray get started.”

Instead of going the traditional route, Team Leonard hired Daniel E. Doyle, Jr. to be its promoter of record. A successful college basketball coach (at Trinity) who had dabbled in many aspects of the sporting world, Doyle took out a promoter’s license in several states.   Trainer – or more accurately, Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc. – paid him a flat fee.

Even when Leonard moved on to fighting bigger names who were under contract to the likes of King and Bob Arum, the arrangement kept him free of entangling alliances. When Leonard won the welterweight title from Wilfred Benitez in 1979, Arum promoted the show, but retained no options. And when Ray met Roberto Duran in Montreal the following June, Trainer brought boxing’s two arch-enemies together, admonishing King and Arum “you guys are just going to have to get along.”
 
But Trainer himself had negotiated the fight contract.

“When I learned that all Duran was looking for was a $1 million guarantee, I said ‘We can do that,’ Trainer remembered. “Our deal was based on a percentage. The split of the purses from the Montreal fight wound up being something like 10 to 1. It was almost embarrassing.”

The arrangement also allowed Leonard to emerge whole from the rematch in New Orleans that fall. Recognizing that high overhead costs had turned Leonard-Duran II into a box-office dog, King, who had promotional options as a result of Duran’s victory in Montreal, sold off 90 per cent of the promotion to the Hyatt Corporation, whose point man was a hotel executive named Neil Gunn.

“Neil Gunn was an awfully nice fellow, and we did our best to help him out, but they had vastly overpaid for that fight,” said Trainer. “They took a beating.”

Duran wasn’t the only one to say ‘No Mas!’ that night. Hyatt never promoted another boxing event.
 
Although his introduction to the professional game had been less auspicious than Leonard’s, by 1980 Hearns attracted the attention of boxing insiders, if not the public at large. In August of that year – in between Leonard’s loss to Duran in Montreal and his reclamation of the WBC title in New Orleans that November – Hearns had stopped the Mexican champion, Pipino Cuevas, in the second round to win the WBA welterweight title.

Later that year Hearns – posing as a “Hit Man,” wearing a gangsterish zoot-suit and a machine gun tucked under his arm – was featured on the cover of The Ring magazine.

And if the public wasn’t already clamoring for a Leonard-Hearns fight, Tommy further whetted interest when he showed up at a Leonard press conference and flung a rubber chicken in Ray’s lap.

“When we finally made our deal with the Hearns camp, we did things the way I’d always felt a big fight should be done,” recalled Trainer. “We did all our negotiating with the Hearns camp and with Caesars Palace first. Then we went out and hired somebody to act as the promoter.”

Officially, the promotion was staged by a four-way consortium of Doyle, Shelly Finkel, and Dan and Kathy Duva, who headed up Main Events, whose prior experience, for the most part, had come in the promotion of small club-fight shows in New Jersey.

“Shelly had kind of been the intermediary,” said Trainer. “He helped work things out with Hearns’ people, and he was close to the Duvas. We basically hired them to put on the promotion, and it pretty much put Main Events on the map.”

Doyle, as a reward for his loyalty and past services, was listed as a co-promoter, but, said the erstwhile basketball coach, “My real job was to raise the capital for the fight, and handle the New England pay-per-view sale. Dan, Kathy and Shelly handled a variety of tasks, and they did a terrific job.† Bob Arum was later brought on board to help with the overseas markets and to coordinate the pay-per-view distribution.”

Once the match was made, Caesars knew that Leonard-Hearns would be the biggest boxing event it had ever hosted. Although both participants had fought at the casino before, it had been within the cozy confines of the tin-walled Sports Pavilion. For this fight, the hotel constructed a temporary stadium that rose up from what was normally a parking lot. Immediately after the fight it would be dismantled to make way for the Caesars Grand Prix, but for this one-time use, capacity would be nearly 25,000. The top ticket price was set at what then was an unheard-of $500.

With hotel rooms at the host casino jammed with high-rolling customers, most of the press contingent was relegated to the Marina, a fly-by-night motel up the strip which would eventually be bulldozed to make room for the present-day MGM Grand.

“How bad is the Marina?” a scribe grumbled. “When I checked in, the bellhop asked me if I knew where he could find any girls.”

Although few realized it at the time, The Showdown was briefly imperiled three weeks before the fight. At his training camp in Phoenix, one of Leonard’s sparring partners, a then-unbeaten young California middleweight named Odell Hadley, caught Sugar Ray with an errant elbow beneath the left eye. Although he wasn’t cut, the shiner was bad enough that it was initially feared that a postponement might be necessary. After a few days, the swelling subsided. Members of the training camp were sworn to secrecy, and Leonard resumed his preparations.

An even more serious training injury occurred in the other camp, but fortunately it wasn’t to Hearns. In a sparring session less than ten days before the fight, the Hit Man served notice that he was getting his game face on when he broke Marlon Starling’s jaw.

Starling, who would later become a two-time welterweight champion, was to have headlined the live card accompanying the closed-circuit telecast at the Hartford Civic Center. Instead of replacing his bout, local promoters advertised that they would show video clips of the sparring session in which Hearns injured Starling.

Ironically, each competitor prepped for The Showdown against a sparring partner named Odell. Hearns was also sparring with Odell Leonard, who promoters around the country had been pitching as a “cousin” of the Olympic champion. Odell, who would fight Marvin Hagler’s brother Robbie Sims on the Boston Garden live show September 16, made no attempt to correct the alleged family ties, but once he went over the hill and joined the enemy, the Leonard camp quickly outed him.

“His name is Odell Davis and he’s from North Carolina,” said Janks Morton. “He changed his name after the 1976 Olympics.”

“He’s not my cousin,” said Roger Leonard. “If he were my cousin, do you think he’d be helping the guy who’s going to fight my brother?”

This would be a fight which would also confirm what those closest to him already knew about Ray Charles Leonard: That beneath the million-dollar smile and the pretty-boy veneer lurked a boxer with the heart of a serial killer.

"People who think he's a nice guy don't know how nice he is,” said Dundee. “And people who think he's a tough fighter don't know how tough a fighter he is. He's a nicer guy and a tougher fighter than people realize."

Emanuel Steward enthusiastically concurs with that assessment.

“One of Ray’s greatest attributes was that he was such a strong finisher. He could always close the show,” said Steward. “Even in the first Duran fight he was the guy coming on over the last few rounds. When people looked at that baby face and small-boned structure they didn’t realize how strong and physical he was, but Sugar Ray Leonard could be a total animal in the ring.”

The Showdown would affirm boxing’s first undisputed welterweight champion since Jose Napoles, but although Leonard held the WBC title and Hearns the WBA belt, neither championship was even mentioned in the contract. Both organizations belatedly agreed to sanction the bout, but when their representatives arrived in Vegas, instead of getting the red-carpet treatment the tinpot boxing dictators from Mexico and Venezuela found they had to stand in the same credential line as everybody else.

When they complained about waiting to have their photos taken, it was presumably to say “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.” 

“Why do they bother taking these guys’ pictures?” wondered Bert Sugar. “They could get them right off the post office wall.”

In September of 1981 Leonard actually owned two world titles. The previous June he and Hearns had laid the groundwork for The Showdown by sharing a bill at the Astrodome in Houston, where Hearns defended his WBA welterweight championship, stopping Pablo Baez in four, while Leonard TKO’d Ayub Kalule in nine to win the WBA junior middleweight title.

The most memorable pre-fight moment in Houston came after publicist Irving Rudd trotted out what was supposed to be an authentic African witch doctor, ostensibly to boost the chances of the Ugandan-born Kalule by casting a spell on Leonard.

It was a cheap publicity stunt that appealed to the basest stereotypes, and at least one African-American on hand was prepared to denounce it as such. Outside the hotel Rock Newman – later the manager and promoter of Riddick Bowe, but then a Washington-area sports radio personality – staged an impromptu press conference to decry the “witch doctor” gimmick and all that it implied.

Newman was wearing white trousers and a white dashiki, and as he stood there berating the ‘witch doctor’ and railing against the racial overtones implicit in the gag, he was suddenly set upon by a flock of angry crows, who without warning swooped in from the sky and attacked Rock with such ferocity that he was forced to flee in terror.

Score one for the witch doctor.

(Native Texans later explained that everyone in Houston knew better than to wear white in the summer, because the color was known to piss off the local crows.)

Leonard, in any case, was allowed to hang onto both belts through the summer. Granted dispensation by the sanctioning bodies, he had until ten days after the Hearns fight to decide which one he would keep.

Sharing the spotlight with Hearns in Houston had brought about Leonard’s first day-to-day interaction with the Hit Man. Leonard’s impression?

“They ought to lobotomize Hearns, just to see if there’s a brain in there,” he said, unkindly.

The mean-spirited remark was widely circulated, and would be frequently revived in the runup to the September fight. Like Muhammad Ali’s description of Joe Frazier as “ignorant” and “a gorilla” ten years earlier, it would serve as bulletin-board material for the opposing camp.

After Leonard lost to Duran in June of 1980, Dave Jacobs had so strongly opposed the idea of a rematch that he threatened to quit, and did, when Trainer and Dundee signed the contract for Leonard to meet Duran again in New Orleans that fall.

Although the ‘No Mas!’ fight would prove them right and him wrong, the breach was complete, and having completely severed his ties with the Leonard camp, Jacobs volunteered his services to the enemy. Ray’s old amateur coach materialized in Las Vegas a member of Hearns’ entourage.

Although Steward welcomed his input, it is questionable how much advance intelligence Jacobs actually contributed. He walked around Caesars in a Kronk Boxing Team jacket and held court for the press, but on fight night Jacobs was not in Hearns’ corner.

“I’d known Dave Jacobs for several years,” said Steward. “The night of the 1973 Gloves final, Ray was supposed to fight Hilmer Kenty (who would, ironically, later become a Kronk fighter and Steward’s first world champion) in the 132-pound final, and he was having trouble making weight.

“Dave came to me for advice and I suggested locking him in the bathroom with all the hot water running, sealing off the doors with towels and having him shadow-box. It worked like a steam bath, and Ray lost the weight. We’d been friends ever since. He was part of our camp for the Leonard fight, but he didn’t ever give us advice about how Tommy should fight Leonard.

“He didn’t have to. I knew Ray Leonard as well as anyone,” said Steward. “I’d seen him most of his amateur career, I’d coached him on several international amateur teams, and he’d come to the Kronk to prepare for the 1976 Eastern Regionals before the Olympics.  There wasn’t anything (Jacobs) could have told me about Ray that I didn’t already know.”

Jacobs’ defection to the Hearns camp was nonetheless a disappointment, “because at one time he and Ray had been very close,” said Trainer, “but the important thing to remember is that Ray didn’t fire him. Ray fired a lot of people over the years, but Dave Jacobs quit.” 

Even though he was technically a member of the Hearns entourage in Vegas, Leonard’s old mentor clearly had mixed feelings. Two days before The Showdown he told the Chicago Sun-Times’ John Schulian “If they called this fight off, I’d be the happiest man in the world.”

The Nevada State Athletic Commission had assigned the triumvirate of Duane Ford, Chuck Minker, and Lou Tabat to be the judges. 63 year-old Davey Pearl, a fund-raiser for UNLV, was named the referee.

At the pre-fight rules meeting, Dundee asked Pearl to be vigilant in monitoring certain Hearns tactics he’d picked up watching films of the Hit Man’s earlier fights.

“Watch how many punches Hearns misses and then hits the guy with his backhand,” said Leonard’s trainer. “Or how many times he’ll miss with a jab, then hold the guy with his left hand behind the head and throw a right. I warned the commission about these things at the rules meeting.

“They’ll be watching for it,” said Dundee, “but so will my guy. When Hearns does that, he’s off balance, and Ray will catch him with left hands.”

The Showdown loomed a classic boxer-puncher matchup, then, and both participants appeared to subscribe to that view.
     
“My right hand could make this the easiest fight I’ve ever had,” said Hearns. “It’s very possible this fight can end very, very quickly.  No more than three rounds.”

“Hearns makes mistakes,” countered Leonard. “He tries to knock out everybody with one punch. I use my mind. Maybe Tommy would  too – if he had one.”

“Emanuel Steward is no dummy,” said another interested observer, Marvelous Marvin Hagler. “I expect Hearns will try to take Leonard out early, and I’m sure he’ll be the aggressor. Of course when that bell rings you never know what might happen. Hearns might not fight the way he’s supposed to. But I think he will.”

Hagler would not be an eyewitness to The Showdown. The middleweight champion was sequestered at his training camp in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, preparing to defend his title against Mustafa Hamsho in Chicago a few weeks later.

Neither Leonard nor Hearns had ever fought as a 160-pounder, but even in 1981 it was apparent that both loomed as potential Hagler opponents.

Marvelous Marvin was doing double-duty the week of the Leonard-Hearns showdown, “covering” the fight as a guest columnist for the Boston Herald. Before I’d left for Vegas I’d sat down with Marvin for his analysis, and in the days leading up to the bout we spoke each day by telephone.

“The first Duran fight was his toughest test so far, but his fight against Hearns will be even tougher,” Hagler had predicted. “To neutralize Hearns’ reach advantage, Leonard is going to have to stay either inside him or outside him. My guess is that he’ll stay outside and box and make Tommy come to him. Leonard is a very good counterpuncher.”

“The way Hearns carries his left hand so low looks dangerous, but it really isn’t,” added Marvelous Marvin. “Not if he keeps the proper distance. There’s a safe distance and an unsafe distance, and Hearns is awfully quick. If Leonard tries to come inside that left, well, there’s a saying in boxing that if he’s close enough to hit you, he’s close enough for you to hit him. That’s especially true with those long arms Tommy has.”

It had not gone unnoticed that Hearns had demonstrated a proclivity for running out of gas in longer fights.  In addition to the questions about Hearns’ punching power versus Leonard’s boxing abilities, the matter of The Hit Man’s stamina was also called into question.

“Only two of Hearns’ fights have ever gone the distance, and his longest fight ever was when he went 13 rounds in beating Randy Shields,” noted Hagler. “But Randy Shields is the sort of fighter who could make a firing squad look bad.”

But when Hearns was asked about the possibility of the fight lasting into the later rounds, he seemed confident.

“I might be tired, but Ray better not underestimate me,” he warned. “Tired, I’m still able to break ribs and break jaws.”

At a breakfast with the press a few days before the fight, Hearns was asked about the mind games Leonard seemed to be playing.

“If he’s trying to psyche me out,” said Hearns. “He’s not doing a very good job of it.”

The widespread assumption was that the judges would bend over backwards for Leonard and that Hearns almost had to score a knockout to win. One of the wire services, in fact, polled out-of-town boxing writers on the matter, and of 70 prognosticators queried, only one picked Hearns by decision.

Even Emanuel Steward seemed to share the view that the judges would be disposed toward Leonard.

“If the fight goes 15 rounds and it goes to a decision it will be, uh, interesting,” said Hearns’ manager/trainer.

The bettors apparently subscribed to the opinion: wagering that the fight would end by knockout was an odds-on, 2-5 proposition.

Interestingly, Leonard had been posted as a narrow favorite when the fight first went up on the board, and remained so until two nights before the fight, when so much Motown money came rolling that Hearns became a 7-5 favorite.

Having made their cases for the conventional wisdom, Hagler and both trainers allowed themselves some wiggle room by conceding that the fight just might not unfold the way everyone expected.

“Leonard knows he can’t run all night,” said Hagler. “He’ll have to give them a show, but I figure he’ll try not to mix it up early, hoping that Hearns will get tired and sloppy in the later going.

“But you never know,” mused Marvin. “Leonard might try to punch with Hearns. He’s showed a tendency to do that in some of his more recent fights, especially the last one, against Kalule. If he does that, I think it will be a mistake.”

“People forget that Tommy wasn’t always a puncher,” Steward reminded you. “In his whole amateur career he hardly ever knocked anybody out. He was a boxer then, and he’s a boxer now.

“My guy is gonna back him up,” vowed Dundee, although few expected that to happen.

“One of them will be a loser and the other one is doomed,” said Hagler. “because the winner gets me.”

Steward, Walter Smith, and Prentiss Byrd comprised the brain trust in the Hearns camp, while the colorful fourth figure in the Kronk corner was Don Thibodeaux, a Detroit artist and sculptor with long red hair and an even longer beard, which reached nearly to his navel.

Thibodeaux was successful in his day job – he had once sold a piece (a bust of Muhammad Ali) for $40,000 – but found himself inexorably drawn to the Sweet Science and Steward’s steamy, inner-city gym.

Mickey Goodwin, the Kronk middleweight who had been the main event performer on the early Detroit cards on which Hearns boxed, recalled a night when Thibodeaux was working his corner.

At the “Seconds Out!”  command, Thibodeaux had bent over and shoved Goodwin’s mouthpiece back in – a large mouthful of beard along with it.

 “You ever try to get hair out of your mouth with boxing gloves on?” asked Goodwin.
 
As September 16th dawned, Hagler said “I’m sure both of them woke up this morning just wishing this fight was over.

The weigh-in produced a minor surprise when the stringbean Hearns came in at 146 – a pound heavier than the more muscular Leonard.

A lengthy undercard that began under the hot afternoon sun played out as darkness fell across the desert: Tony Ayala Jr., a young junior middleweight prospect promoted by the Duvas, went to 10-0 with a first-round knockout of Jose Rendiz. Heavyweight Tony Tucker, then trained by Steward, stopped Harvey Steichen in three, and Marvis Frazier scored a fourth-round TKO over Guy Casale. In the co-feature, another future world champion, Edwin Rosario, outpointed James Martinez.

The early prelims had been fought before a smattering of witnesses, but as twilight turned to evening an audience that would eventually reach 23,306 began to file into the makeshift stadium -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and George Carlin, Bill Cosby and Jack Nicholson, Cher and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Karl Malden, Bo Derek, and John McEnroe among them.

Fans gawked as present and former champions from Larry Holmes to Joe Frazier to Jake LaMotta took their places in the stands. The biggest ovation was reserved for a late arrival, Muhammad Ali, who just a few months later would engage in his final bout in the Bahamas. The great man whose Nom de Guerre Leonard had appropriated, Sugar Ray Robinson, was also ushered to a ringside seat.

By nightfall the temperature, which had reached a high of 96 degrees that autumn afternoon, had subsided, but under the glare of the lights from the canopy above it was still almost 100.

Both participants entered the ring in shimmering white satin robes. Leonard had won a coin toss to determine the order of procession, so Hearns was the first to arrive. The words “WINNER TAKES ALL” were emblazoned across the back of his robe. Leonard’s said, simply, “DELIVERANCE.”

When Leonard was introduced, Hearns banged his gloves together in mock applause, and then, a menacing scowl on his face, followed Ray across the ring to his corner. This bit of gamesmanship was countered by Dundee, who complained to Pearl about what he considered an excessive amount of Vaseline smeared across the Hit Man’s face.

Dundee and Morton worked Leonard’s corner, where they were augmented by Ollie Dunlap and, at least initially, Ray’s brother Roger.

Moments after the opening bell, Bob Arum materialized beside the ring apron, shouting “Stop the fight!”

Arum wasn’t even the promoter of The Showdown, but he had arranged the pay-per-view distribution. He had just been informed that due to a glitch in the cable system thousands of homes in California were receiving the signal for free. He somehow had it in his mind that Pearl should stop Leonard and Hearns from boxing until the technical difficulties could be overcome, but the referee ignored him.

What unfolded that night turned out to be a symphony in five distinct movements.

The first, comprising the opening five rounds, was a protracted overture in which both combatants performed brilliantly, but pretty much as advertised. While Leonard dazzled with his speed, he seemed wary enough of Hearns’ punching power that he wasn’t about to mix it up, and Tommy, for his part, was able to use his reach advantage to poke away at Leonard with jabs when he came near enough.
 
As the first round drew to a close, Roger Leonard excitedly shouted something to his brother. His attention distracted, Ray looked away as Hearns punched him just after the bell. Pearl jumped between the fighters, but as Leonard stumbled back to his corner Janks Morton shouted down from the ring: “Kenny, get Roger out of the corner!”

Kenny Leonard, already wearing a white satin cornerman’s jacket, was thus handed a battlefield promotion, and replaced his brother in the corner for the balance of the fight.

Leonard spent much of the early going darting around the ring as if he had an invisible jet-pack mounted on his back. Backward, forward, sideways, he darted to and fro from corner to corner, rope to rope, presenting a tantalizing target only to whoosh his way out of range as Hearns closed. When Tommy landed, it was usually with a glancing blow, and when Leonard scored, he escaped before the Hit Man could exact retribution.

Leonard bent forward from the waist, presenting an even smaller target, but if Hearns was frustrated by the awkward angles at which he was forced to attack he didn’t let on. Behind his jab, he continued to walk Leonard down, and the confident expression on his face was that of a man who knew that sooner or later he was going to catch up with his quarry. Periodically he seemed to smile disdainfully, the ring lights exaggerating the expression by illuminating the flash of his mouthpiece.

In the third round, the two stopped and briefly went toe-to-toe. Neither man emerged with a clear advantage from this spirited exchange, and after it Leonard seemed to remember where he was and whom he was fighting and got back on his bicycle again. By the end of the round the telltale signs of a welt had begun to form under his left eye.

Whether it was the exacerbated residue of Odell Hadley’s elbow three weeks earlier, the result of a Hearns punch, or (more likely) some combination of the two remained the subject of some debate a quarter century later.

Dunlap and Julius (Juice) Gatling, Leonard’s equipment man, are convinced it was the former, but Emanuel Steward remains convinced that the puffy eye was the result of Hearns’ attack.

“Sometimes a fighter will get cut in training and it will open up during the fight, but I never saw any evidence of swelling on Ray’s face beforehand,” said Steward.

On several occasions Pearl had to move in and separate the fighters after the bell, and at one point Leonard, reprising a playground gesture from the second Duran fight, wound up his right as if to throw a bolo punch and instead threw a left. Hearns responded by sticking out his mouthpiece in derision.

It wasn’t surprising that Hearns was ahead with the fight already one-third over. What was surprising was that he had gained that advantage by outboxing Leonard.

“For the first five rounds the 6’1” Hearns was in command, stinging Leonard with his jab and keeping his shorter opponent at bay with his vaunted seventy-eight inch reach,” wrote Schulian of this initial interlude. “Unable to get outside where he wanted to operate, Leonard had to fight outside, and he paid in pain.”

The momentum abruptly shifted in the sixth when Leonard spotted a moment of complacency and seized the advantage: Hearns dropped his right for a split-second, and Leonard pounced on the opening to land a vicious left hook that drove Tommy back into the ropes.

His killer instinct ignited, Leonard treated Hearns’ midsection like a speed bag, tattooing him with a barrage of punches to an unprotected body.
When Hearns dropped his elbows to protect his ribcage, Leonard merely readjusted his sights and shifted the attack to the head.

Despite taking a terrible pummeling, Hearns somehow stayed on his feet, and when the bell rung to end the round Leonard seemed to smirk and asked him “You all right?”

The seventh was once again all Leonard, and Hearns absorbed such a beating that Steward considered rescuing his man by throwing in the towel.  Hearns fought the entire round going backward, but managed to survive it. Leonard, as a coda to the round, finished it by landing three successive left hooks.

“I was ready to stop the fight,” said Steward, “and if Ray had landed one more solid punch I would have, but Tommy was avoiding them – barely. Then, much to my surprise, Tommy went back to boxing and eventually took control again.”

By the eighth the roles had completely reversed: Leonard had become the stalker, trying to walk Hearns down for the big punch that would end it all, and the Hit Man had mounted the bicycle, still dancing away but now firing jabs to cover his retreat.

It seemed as good a time as any for an intermission, and, as if by mutual consent, both fighters took the ninth off.

Downshifting, said Dundee, “was my idea. I was afraid Ray was going to pop a cork in there.”

Hearns needed no encouragement to take a breather, but was so wary from the battering he had taken in the middle rounds that it was midway through the tenth – when he was alerted by the restive booing and whistling of the crowd – that he began to assimilate the fact that he was no longer under attack.

Leonard had been presenting awkward angles all night, but now there was a new twist to his posture. His head tilted at an odd angle, swiveled around to compensate for a rapidly decreasing field of vision. If he faced Hearns dead-on, he couldn’t see the right coming.

But even as he reasserted himself over the 11th and 12th rounds, Hearns withheld the weapon that was supposed to be the ultimate deterrent. Although he was dominating Leonard once again, conventional wisdom had it that this fight would turn on Leonard’s ability to absorb Hearns’ big right hand. But Tommy never threw the haymaker.

“He kept moving off to the side, so I couldn’t hit him with the full force of the punch,” Hearns would later explain. “I still haven’t hit him with my best shot. Why didn’t I try to land more right hands? Basically, because I don’t throw a punch if I know it’s not going to land.”

As the 12th ended Hearns seemed firmly in control, and had won over much of the crowd. They were chanting “Tommy! Tommy!”, and Hearns acknowledged their newfound allegiance by waving his arms like a cheerleader as he returned to his corner.

Across the ring, Dundee toweled off Leonard’s face and attempted to communicate the urgency of the situation.

“You’re blowing it, son,” he shouted at Leonard. “You’re blowing it!”

Dundee couldn’t have known it, but his opposite number was even more worried than he was. Steward’s fighter had assumed control of the fight, but he had paid a price.

"I was talking to Tommy and all of a sudden his head slumped down," Steward recalled. "He was out of gas. I knew right then it was over."

Moreover, Hearns was in completely uncharted waters. He had never before fought a 13th round.

By now Leonard’s left eye nearly had so grotesquely ballooned that you half expected Dundee to produce a razor, a la Burgess Meredith in “Rocky,” and provide relief by slicing open the hematoma.

“At that point the eye was so badly swollen that somewhere between half and three quarters of my vision was impaired,” Leonard would recall the bout’s final stage. “He was starting to get through with some jabs and some rights because I couldn’t see. That’s why I wanted to end it quickly. I just pulled it up from my guts.”

Early in the 13th, Hearns stumbled as Leonard shoved him, and then unaccountably dropped his hands again. Spotting the opening, Leonard fired a hard right-hand lead to the head, followed by a left hook that wobbled Hearns in his tracks.
 
Leonard, smelling blood in the water, abandoned all pretense of elegance. He landed an uppercut and then unleashed a fusillade of rapid-fire punches that drove Hearns across the ring, through the ropes, and onto the apron.

Pearl did not rule it a knockdown, and as Hearns teetered precariously on the apron, one of the judges reached up and steadied his back to keep him from falling over the edge.

“Pearl said he had been pushed,” wrote the Boxing Bard of Scotland, Hugh McIlvanney. “All of us had better hope we never encounter such pushing in a bus queue.”

Hearns was helped to his feet, but appeared lost. If ever a situation demanded that a boxer in trouble tie up his opponent, this was it, but at this moment Hearns looked like he’d never heard the word ‘clinch.’

“In his whole career he’d never had to clinch,” said Steward. “Later on, once Tommy learned how to clinch, he became an expert at it – think about the fights with (James) Kinchen and (Juan) Roldan. But in the Leonard fight he never even thought about it, because he didn’t know how.”

Left to his own devices, then, Leonard resumed right where he had left off, battering Hearns with a series of punches that once again knocked him through the ropes. Looking dazed and cross-eyed, Hearns was left draped, half-sitting, across the bottom strand.

 “”Off the rope!” ordered Pearl.

“Mmm,” Hearns groaned, woozily shaking his head.

Pearl, belatedly, began to count. Hearns extracted himself by the time he reached four, but he barely survived the round.

As the fighters returned to their corners, Dundee was on his feet, shouting at Pearl “It should have been two knockdowns!”

In the corner, Dundee warned Leonard that he still might be behind on points.

”I really didn’t think he was, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give him a little needle,” the trainer said later, but as it turned out, his worst-case assessment was right on the mark.

Hearns might have led on the scorecards, but he was an utterly spent fighter. Leonard came charging out of the corner like a sprinter from his blocks to greet Hearns with a left hook.

In the first minute of the round, he sent Hearns reeling with a savage right to the head, and followed up with four or five more punches that knocked Hearns all the way across the ring.

Leonard chased Hearns down in a neutral corner and then trapped him there, landing three rapid-fire hooks to the head of an utterly defenseless Hearns. Pearl stopped the fight at 1:45 of the round, and Ray Charles Leonard was the undisputed welterweight champion of the world.

Hearns briefly, though unconvincingly, protested the stoppage before stumbling into the arms of his cornermen. Smiling through his mouthpiece, Leonard raised both gloves in the air as the crowd roared its approval of what had been a thrilling performance by both men.

“I knew where I was at all times,” Hearns would later recall the final four and a half minutes of fighting. “I wasn’t dizzy or nothing. It just seemed like every time he hit me with a combination I hadn’t got myself back together yet before he hit me again.”

All three ringside judges had Hearns in front at the time of the stoppage – Minker  by four at 125-121, Ford (124-122) and Tabat (125-123) two apiece.

The judges were roundly excoriated by, among others, Hughie McIlvanney, who cited “a lack of perception and common sense afflicting the three.”

McIlvanney reserved a particular place of dishonor for the late Chuck Minker, whom he described as “good old Chuck, who should not be allowed out without a guide dog.”

“I’m not saying Ray should be treated like Muhammad Ali. I’m not saying he should get everything that’s close,” moaned an astonished Mike Trainer when the scoring was revealed. “But Jesus, give him a fair shake. If you look at those scorecards, it’ll turn your stomach!”

The judges’ scorecards were indeed a surprise to most ringsiders (“As far as I was concerned,” wrote
British scribe Frank Keating, “each of them was as daffy as Don King’s barber”), but Hearns claimed afterward “I thought I was ahead.”

“It was in my mind to try to hang on and last the fight,” even after I was hurt,” said Hearns. “I thought I was in control of myself, but the referee didn’t. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Our own scorecard had the fight dead level going into the 14th, meaning that we’d have had Leonard ahead by at least two points with a round to go if Pearl hadn’t stopped the fight.

“I have no qualms about the referee’s decision,” said Emanuel Steward. “He did what he thought was right.

“I saw Thomas Hearns hurt, and I never saw that before,” added Steward, apparently as mesmerized by what had taken place as the rest of us. “I saw Ray Leonard outboxed, and I never saw that before, either.”

When they appeared together at a postfight news conference that night, Leonard and Hearns sounded downright affectionate. Ray even apologized “for some of the things I said about Tommy – like that he didn’t have any brains.

 "There was room for only one of us,” said Leonard. “We both stood our ground. In my book, we both are still champions. He's a superior athlete."

Added Hearns: "I gave my best. I just made a couple of mistakes, and you can't afford to make mistakes against a fighter of Ray's caliber."

When Leonard ruefully noted that Hearns had landed “some really solid shots,” somebody asked him if he’d ever been in trouble.”

“I knew I was in trouble,” replied Leonard, “the moment I signed the contract for this fight.”

The all-night gamblers were still out in force the next morning when Hearns and Leonard made their separate ways through the casino to meet with the press. Hearns wore a gold Kronk warmup suit, while Leonard was dressed in white trousers and shirt, a white yachting cap perched atop his head. Both wore sunglasses to mask the evidence of the carnage of the previous evening.

As the two sat side by side, one scribe was moved to note that the pair of them looked like the aftermath of “a bad night on Gilligan’s Island.”

There was little discussion of a rematch. Leonard, noting that he had the option of defending either the undisputed welterweight title or his WBA 154-pound championship, seemed disposed to the former, and pointedly invited junior welter champion Aaron Pryor, who he accused of talking too much, to move up and challenge him.

Although an obvious big fight loomed against Hagler, Leonard didn’t sound eager to have it happen anytime soon.

“I think I’ll be a middleweight in a year or two,” said Leonard. “I figure the longer I wait, the older Hagler will get.”

What about Hearns and Hagler, then?

Leonard didn’t even wait for Hearns to answer.

“Tommy can have him,” he smiled.

Leonard and Hearns eventually did engage in a rematch, but it was eight years and 21 pounds later. Both men were well beyond their primes, but if they had slipped, they had done so in virtual lockstep and were as evenly matched as ever. Although Hearns floored him twice, Leonard retained his WBC super middleweight title with a controversial draw in that 1989 second fight. 

Although it didn’t approach their first meeting from an aesthetic standpoint, Leonard-Hearns II produced a live gate of $8.6 million, more than the $5.823 million that churned through the turnstiles for The Showdown.

Most non-judges felt that the Hit Man should have won the second fight, but the big winners were neither Leonard or Hearns, but the members of the Caesars cleaning crew responsible for collecting the trash the following morning.

Thousands of patrons who had bet on Leonard or Hearns failed to realize that they had earned a push, and tossed their tickets away.

The sweepers made a fortune. 

M

Send questions and comments to: gkimball@boxingtalk.com