A Naked Singularity: A Novel (93 page)

Hearns’s scary victory and Leonard’s latest retirement made the next big fight an obvious one. After posting two more knockout victories each, Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas “Hitman” Hearns fought on April 15, 1985. It was one of the greatest, most violent fights in boxing history and it lasted only three rounds.

The first round, which usually involves little action and is almost always characterized by a cautious feeling out process, was especially extreme. Hagler, perhaps still stinging from criticism that he was too passive against Duran and probably also realizing that, despite his considerable boxing skills, he could not outbox from a distance the man who had outboxed Leonard and Benitez, came out intent on creating the kind of war that would negate Hearns’s height and reach advantage. Hearns reacted to Hagler’s aggressive bombs in the only manner befitting his greatness. He didn’t hold Hagler or move away in the hopes of weathering the early storm until he could follow his gameplan that called for sticking and moving. No, he planted his feet and unleashed hell right back on Hagler. One of the very greatest offensive fighters ever let loose with everything at his disposal in service of attempted murder.

The first savage right cross went practically
through
Hagler’s hairless pate. The same punch that had iced so many, that had paralyzed Cuevas and Duran, now tested one of history’s greatest shock-absorbing chins. Hagler was hurt like never before or since but he didn’t go down. The force of the punch went through to his legs and straightened them but he took it and covered up. He recovered and started throwing again prompting a still more furious response from Hearns and so on. They traded punches like in no first round ever seen and somewhere in there Hagler adjusted to the inhuman power of Hearns, Hearns broke his right hand on Hagler’s head, and Hagler’s punches started to increasingly affect Hearns. At the end of the round the crowd seemed to be in a state of delirious exhaustion.

In the second round, Hearns began to box from the outside at his corner’s urging but now his legs didn’t look so great and despite guarded success in that round the option of doing that for an entire fight seemed irretrievably lost. In the third, Hearns cut Hagler above the eye, an angry cut that the ref had the ring doctor look at. A desperate Hagler, fearful that the fight would be stopped on cuts, began waging full-scale war again. Shortly thereafter he landed a looping right that wasn’t particularly vicious but that functioned like the final drop of water that causes a flood. Hearns’s legs were now completely gone. He stumbled across the ring with Hagler in pursuit. The ensuing punches from Hagler were really window dressing and Hearns slumped to the canvas giving Hagler his greatest victory and leaving Hearns to rebuild from another devastating defeat.

Blood streaming down his face, his heavily-muscled arms raised, Hagler looked invincibly evil. Leonard gave no indication that he would end his latest retirement. But the following year, when Hagler again looked beatable in defending his title with an eleventh-round knockout of John “The Beast” Mugabi, Leonard announced he would again unretire for the purpose of fighting Hagler, this time without any tune-up fights beforehand. The boxing world would finally get the fight it had longed for.

On April 6, 1987, the fight took place in Las Vegas. Both in their thirties, neither fighter was what he once was and the fight, though highly dramatic, was truthfully only a slightly-above-average affair. Hagler started slowly, showing his age and giving away a lot of early rounds. Then Leonard tired and Hagler came on strong. In the end, Leonard received a disputed decision. Hagler sought an immediate rematch but about a month after the fight Leonard announced he was again retiring. Seeing that the Leonard rematch would never happen, Hagler retired as well and never fought again. He was rich and healthy and wherever he goes today someone tells him he won the fight, that he was robbed. The retirement of Leonard, who had shown little interest in defending any of his newly-won middleweight titles, created multiple championship vacancies in that storied division. One of the vacancies was filled when, in October of 1987, Hearns smoked the Argentinian Juan Roldan to take one of the middleweight titles and become the first boxer to win titles in four different weight classes. Leonard then announced he was ending his latest retirement with the goal of winning his fourth and fifth titles; no one really mentioned the eye anymore. He accomplished his goal on November 7, 1988, when he knocked out someone named Donnie Lalonde to somehow simultaneously win titles in both the super-middleweight and light-heavyweight divisions, bringing his career total to five. (The thing with the titles was becoming more ridiculous with each passing day as seemingly every other second a new weight class was created complete with about thirteen different organizations ready to declare their “champion.”)

In the meantime Hearns was slipping fast. Defending his middleweight title against Iran Barkley on June 6, 1988, he was of course dominating when suddenly, in the third round, he got hit with a wild right hand that left him out on his feet and barely upright; upright, that is, until Barkley landed another right that finished the job, knocking Hearns down and out. When in his next fight he again visited the canvas in posting an unimpressive decision victory over James Kinchen, the consensus was that the shopworn Hearns was truly finished. On the bright side, Sugar Ray was, not coincidentally, finally willing to give Hearns that rematch he had ached for for so long. The fight was scheduled for June 12, 1989, and Leonard was the heavy favorite.

Roberto Duran meanwhile had fought no one of note following his loss to Hearns, winning seven fights but also losing a decision to someone named Robbie Sims. Yet so electric was the Duran name that he nevertheless received a title shot against the new champion Iran Barkley. Duran was thirty-seven, hadn’t fought a significant fight in five years, and was fighting a strong middleweight in his prime who was coming off an impressive knockout victory over an all-time great. Naturally Duran dominated Barkley, dropping him in the eleventh round and winning his fourth title by decision.

When Leonard/Hearns II took place four months later it was billed as The War. From the very start it became apparent that Hearns wasn’t the only one who had lost a lot as Leonard looked slow and hesitant to pull the trigger on his punches. That said, both men appeared to be at similar stages in their deterioration making for an exciting evenly-matched fight. But whereas their first fight eight years earlier had featured consummate skill, this one was more about two great men unwilling to surrender their ghosts. Hearns in particular—after admitting he was so haunted by the 1981 defeat that he thought more about Leonard than his woman—fought like he would rather die than lose again. He also fought better than he had in years, twice dropping Leonard with rights and generally controlling the fight throughout despite ultimately settling for a controversial draw in what was a scintillating, dramatic,
great
fight that featured ringside commentator Marvelous Marvin Hagler openly rooting for “Tommy.”

That should’ve been it really if there was any kind of warm rhythm to these things. Instead Leonard and Duran inexplicably mixed it up a third time on December 7, 1989, a mere nine years after the infamous
no mas
fight. The predictably tepid fight went to Leonard and a few weeks later the boxing decade these five men had dominated came to a close. Except for Hagler, they would all fight in the nineties but never against each other and never with anything like the former hoopla attaching.

On the decided periphery of all this interstitial fistic mayhem that characterized the mid-to-late-eighties stood Wilfred Benitez. Five months after losing to Hearns, Benitez fought Tony Cerda. Cerda was not a bad little fighter and an expert at kissing his cousin, having fought to a draw in four of his last five bouts. Benitez won an easy ten-round decision. It was his forty-eighth professional fight of which he had lost only two and each of those to a fellow great. There was no shame in that. He was twenty-four and still a premier fighter.

But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look
through
you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction. And sometimes, especially in Boxing, even a twenty-four-year-old can become an old man overnight.

Benitez next fought Mustafa Hamsho. Hamsho was a capable fighter, as evidenced by the trouble he had given Hagler two years earlier before being stopped in the eleventh on cuts, but Benitez had every reason to be confident he would post a meaningful win that would reinstall him at the forefront of his sport. Instead Benitez lost a clear decision, his first unjustifiable loss. (Just how unjustifiable became clear a year later when Hagler stopped Hamsho in the third in a rematch granted to Hamsho primarily on the strength of his victory over Benitez.
That
was what all-time greats did to people like Hamsho.) Now Wilfred’s career needed repairing but Duran had shown that you could suffer a bad loss and still come back to later post big wins for big money. After all, Benitez reasoned, Hamsho was better than fucking Kirkland Laing. So after posting a decision victory against a nondescript opponent in February of 1984, Benitez signed to fight Davey Moore, the same opponent Duran had used to rocket himself back to stardom.

Only now the reasons for the Hamsho loss started to maybe slowly reveal themselves. In the gym, training for Moore, he noticed that palookas who’d always managed to come down with mysterious ailments whenever he was looking for sparring partners were suddenly rearranging their schedules to be available. They wanted something to brag about, wanted to say they once held their own against the great Benitez. People were saying things too, louder and louder. That he seemed off in the way he acted towards people, well, more off than before anyway. When the Moore fight occurred, the latent, the whispered, became apparent and undeniable as Wilfred was knocked out by a right hand in the second round from the same fighter who could do nothing against a thirty-two-year-old Duran. Something was definitely wrong.

Wilfred had broken his ankle in three places while crumbling to the canvas so, with the necessarily-idle recovery time, he didn’t fight again for almost a year. This, of course, would have been a good time to retire, even at twenty-four, but that kind of thing never happens so we’ll move on. The truth was he needed the money. Tax problems, bad investments, all those things people always say when they’ve somehow managed to squander absurd sums of money. If he retired he would have no hope of getting back what he had lost. So instead he did what he’d done since he was seven. He fought.

He fought the decent Mauricio Bravo in Aruba on March 30, 1985, and knocked him out in the second round. Maybe the layoff had been the best thing for him he thought and this notion gained credence when he followed that victory with a seventh-round knockout of Danny Chapman in July. Now he could step it up again, the thinking went, and his next fight would be against the undefeated (22-0 19 KOs) Kevin Moley in Madison Square Garden.

Moley was a pretty good fighter who had been carefully nursed by his management team to an undefeated record. What happens in Boxing though is that eventually the protected kid with the stellar record has to fight someone legitimate. When that point is first reached, as it had been with Moley, what customarily happens is the fighter will fight someone who still has a recognizable and respected name but who is far enough along on his decline as to pose no real threat. Moley’s team identified Wilfred as that individual. They reasoned that he was nothing more than the shell of a once-great fighter and as such would represent an easy yet superficially impressive victory for their fighter. They were both right and wrong. They were right that he was a shell. What they failed to realize is that even the shell of a great fighter can often beat a merely good one. They got what they deserved those fucks. After being dropped by a right fifteen seconds into the fight, Benitez got up, made the sign of the cross, and proceeded to give Moley a thorough ten-round pasting. There were actual flashes of the old Benitez as he lay against the ropes impervious to his opponent’s attack, doubled and tripled up on his jab, and repeatedly bounced short straight punches off Moley’s melon. Maybe he was back all the way Benitez thought. Those other incidents weren’t signs after all, just a temporary lull. Damn he was still only twenty-six.

In the ring, after the fight, Benitez was excited. He grabbed the microphone that had been used to announce his victory and addressed what had been a supportive Garden crowd in broken, halting English. At times he seemed to have trouble speaking, it was one of those uncomfortable situations. But he managed to thank the crowd for coming to watch him fight
at the stadium of Madison of Madison Square Garden
. He told them he was born in New York but added that he was raised in Puerto Rico. He said he liked fighting in New York. He finished by yelling
God bless you all because God has made me winner again! God bless you!
to loud cheers. Off that he would not be retiring.

Coming off the Moley victory, Benitez signed for a similar fight against Matthew Hilton. Hilton was a highly marketable, white($$), Canadian, twenty-year-old with a serious left hook who was being groomed as one of Boxing’s next big stars. He was undefeated (18-0 13 KOs) and coming off one of those impressive-in-name-only victories against former middleweight champion Vito Antuofermo. Benitez actually trained properly for this fight and came into the ring in shape knowing that a victory over the high-profile Hilton in a nationally televised fight would likely gain him the Hagler title shot and big payday he had blown with his loss to Hamsho. He would be back in the Greatness conversation, still with a chance to make more history.