Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (26 page)

It’s still a fight in the second round with Cooney so-so jabbing and scoring with lefts softened by Spinks’s knowing movements away from Cooney’s predictable one-at-a-time lefthand shots. The fighter-thinker Spinks (you feel-see-think-see this with him at ringside) tells him to send Cooney a message: you think you’re winning this fight, you think you’re bigger and stronger, so
wham!
—my notes read: “three-punch combo—one, two—flush—Gerry’s nose, Gerry’s jaw.” The round goes to the slower, shorter, lighter, smarter Spinks who says, “I’m here! I’m here!” even as blood begins to trickle from a torn right eyebrow. If Pierce Egan, who might have been doing this piece for the
Post
if it had been around in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, would have said for Round 3, “Spinks comes out gaily.” A worried and slightly confident Cooney catches him with glancing left hooks, but the fighting mind of Michael brings him in and out. Cooney fights back awkwardly, ineptly, bravely, but once again the writers turn to each other because they are concerned with the entertainment value of a close fight and not with the futures of the contestants after this match, or maybe that the careers of one or the other is over. “This is a fight!”

The fourth round is the key, and it looks as if the key is in Cooney’s hand, and he’s ready to open all the doors in Trump’s Plaza Hotel, Casino, and Roman Colosseum. Spinks is retreating, Cooney is coming forward, Cooney is winning, and he’s not fighting an all-out knock-about as he did against the Nortons and Ron Lyles and Jimmy Youngs. He seems to know what he’s doing. Spinks goes back to his corner on what appear to be weakening legs. One more round … the bigger, stronger banger is ready to take him out in five.

Only, wait! Round 5 tells us what boxing-fighting-mental-physical-heavyweight fighting is all about. Just when you think Cooney is coming on, Spinks and his ring-wise corner know what Michael has to do to save and win this fight. We were close, but not close enough to hear what Eddie Futch was telling Spinks, but it must have been, “Look, Michael, you know he’s wide open for right hands, you know you can catch him with combinations that will confuse and bemuse and abuse him. Forget legs, forget tired, get off first and take him out. He discourages. He’s brave, he takes a punch, a fair punch, but give him a bunch of punches and …”

And Round 5 is two minutes in and Big Gerry Cooney is in very big trouble. He’s forgotten everything he’s learned in all those months from Victor Valle, or maybe he’s remembered what he’s disremembered that Victor Valle forgot to tell him.

Anyway, with fistic fate thumbing its nose at all the experts—those who had Cooney winning early or Spinks winning by decision late—with two handfuls of seconds left in Round 5, Spinks is beating the deleted out of Cooney, hitting him with so many punches only a computer can count them. And Cooney is down. And down again. And a very nice boy/man or man/boy from Long Island is not only down but out of the fight game and into the rest of his life. While Michael Spinks, the fighting man’s thinker, the thinking man’s fighter, goes on to better things. Like the other Mike—Tyson.

So, if Tyson bonecrushes Tony Tucker and Tyrell Biggs and Frank Bruno and all the other million-dollar nonentities Jim Jacobs has lined him up for through 1987 into 1988, somewhere down the road we may see the heavyweight fight that brings us back to the good old days of one heavyweight champion. Like Louis, Marciano, Ali, and Holmes. Out of the alphabet soup, HBO, WBC, WBA, IBF … we’re down to an ultimate two now—and it only takes two men when their names are Tyson and Spinks.

[June 1987]

I
N THIS AGE OF HYPE
and hyperbole, maybe we have to watch the fat adjectives and the easy-come superlatives—but banging this out a few minutes after Hit Man Tommy Hearns got hit by so many thunderous right hands that his knees wobbled, his eyes glazed, and Marvelous Marvin Hagler left him for dead, let’s throw caution out the window (just as Hagler did) and call this the most furious eight minutes of all-out fistfighting seen by this old ring-goer in fifty years.

And if you want to go back another twenty-five, that’s all right, too. Because old-timers (and new-timers who have seen the old films) came away from this one with their own knees trembling, convinced that they had seen the most ferocious first round since the first three minutes of the legendary Dempsey-Firpo fight, when champion Jack Dempsey was knocked through the ropes, and both men fought each other to a standstill, until in a handful of minutes only one man was standing, Dempsey, and the Wild Bull of the Pampas was down and out but never forgotten.

Hagler-Hearns belongs in that select company of Greatest Fights of the Century. And the fifteen thousand who were lucky enough to see it live Monday night—and the two million in theaters around the country—will be talking about Round 1 as long as boxing remains the savage and exciting sport it is, and boxing nostalgia lives on. Officially it was all over two minutes and one second into Round 3, but to those of us at ringside, the fight was won in that explosive and unexpected first round, when Hagler sprang from his corner, caught Hearns in a flurry, and had him backing up before the fight was thirty seconds old.

Suddenly and almost immediately, all those physical advantages that Hearns’s boosters had been describing all week—height, reach, speed, punching power—were taken away from him by a champion who fought like a man possessed, possessed of pride, relentless ring smarts, and a will that was stronger than Tommy’s. If a battle as furiously fought as was this one can also be described as a psychological victory for Hagler, it’s because he willed his way through Hearns’s long and snaky left jab and his vaunted right hand.

To his credit, Hearns fought back, forced to sacrifice the game plan and fight for his life.

Fight back he did, with his own wicked jabs and own right hand that cut the hairless one high on the forehead. With blood spurting down to make a grotesque red mask of his face, the champion pressed on. Time and time again, in the first round and the second, Hearns would go reeling backward, with Hagler in pursuit, as if Hearns were a mugger surprised by a victim who refused to give up his wallet and instead turns on and runs his tormentor down.

Hearns had been tormenting Hagler all week, with his short but showboating training in the posh Caesar’s Palace Pavilion, predicting a third-round knockout, while Hagler, true to his blue-collar background and character, was putting in his hard and lonely work in a downtown gym. Tommy was surprisingly accurate in predicting a three-round fight. Not even more surprisingly, it was the tall, racehorse-trained challenger who would fall in three.

In the prefight analysis, we had mentioned a possible chink in Hearns’s shining armor, a failure of nerves or a tendency to
panic when the pressure became so overwhelming that his skills deserted him. By the end of that already historic Round 1, that’s exactly what was happening as he tried to ride out the storm with evasive moves that failed to evade. When they both connected—and there were too many punches to keep track of as in a normally hard fight—it was Hearns who showed the hurt and Hagler who poured it on.

Though he fought back in spurts, Hearns was clearly weakening, off balance, his discipline gone as a bloodied but oh-so-unbowed Hagler roared, or rather, warred on. On the cap he had been wearing all month was a dirty three-letter word: WAR, and that’s what we mean about no tripe to the hype because Hearns was fighting to survive and Hagler was fighting as if his country had been invaded, or—since he’s a home body—as if a dangerous thug had gunned his way into his house, a thief whose violence had to be taken away from him by brutal counterforce.

There was an anxious moment when referee Richard Steele called time for a closer look at Hagler’s cut, a moment when there might have been an ironic turnabout with Hearns winning by TKO a five-minute fight he was clearly losing. But Steele waved the aroused champion back to the fray, and the champion showed his appreciation by banging Hearns with a thunderous right hand, followed by combinations to head and body that carried a mean message: “I own you! I own you!”

Poor Tommy Hearns, looking so swaggeringly dominating in the countdown days to Monday night’s drama, had a sad look on his face that said, “I agree. I agree.” Down went the Golden Boy in the golden trunks, as the bloodied-face winner—and still champion—was carried around the ring on the shoulders of his handlers in a scene reminiscent of
The Great White Hope.
There have been a lot of fight movies put down by this critic because the nonstop blow by blow à la
Rocky
looks like an exaggerated melodrama. Monday night we saw the real—not the reel—thing, and although it was only an eight-minute movie, it moved us to emotions true fight fans will never forget.

When this writer was a few years younger he used to ask his father, “Dad, did you really see Luis Firpo knock the great Jack Dempsey out of the ring?” One of these years I expect to be answering a similar question from my five-year-old. “Yes, Benny, it really happened, just the way you heard about it, a great champion imposed his will on a famous challenger in the opening round.”

[April 1985]

T
HIS WAS THE FIGHT THAT
only Angelo Dundee, and the loyal adherents of the new world middleweight champion, described with any accuracy.

Sugar Ray would be too fast for Marvelous, they assured the Haglerians. He would frustrate his stronger, harder-hitting opponent with body moves and head moves, move in, throw punches in quick bunches, and dance away from the heavy artillery. He would neutralize Hagler’s aggression, outsmart and outcute a champion who had successfully defended his undisputed title a dozen times, hadn’t lost in eleven years, and was edging into the golden circle of middleweight immortals like Sugar Ray Robinson and Carlos Monzon.

That was Sugar Ray’s scenario, and to the wonderment of some and chagrin of others, it
played,
at least through the first half of a technical fight when Sugar Ray, boxing with old-time skill laced with caution, was able to run, flurry, score points, make the old champion miss, and make those of us who had foreseen an early Hagler knockout look as if we should find another line of work.

For those who are drawn to boxers who run and hide, land punches that sting rather than jar, Sugar Ray was proving to be their darling. But in the fifth round, Hagler seemed to decide that enough
was
enough and began to press the elusive comeback artist with bodypunching that hurt. He won the
round big, and the closer followers of the game were convinced that the tide was turning. Sugar Ray was slowing down, and although Marvin wasn’t speeding up he was pressing on in a way that made us feel that sooner or later the tires would go flat on Sugar’s bicycle.

Round 9 had echoes of Hagler-Hearns’ tumultuous Round 1, with Hagler finally nailing and hurting what seemed a slowly melting Sugar. But to his credit, Leonard would flurry back, refusing to let his weary legs and arms quit on him as nature would tell him to. He wasn’t winning, but the crowd—and apparently the judges—were giving him an A for effort, an A+ for being there at the end of ten, somehow still dancing, but with the heavy feet of the marathon dancers shuffling on and on in the old Depression days.

Dancing, running, surviving, showboating, playing to the crowd, that oh so fickle crowd, Sugar Ray was still there at the final bell. Our old middleweight champion, not bloodied or bowed, but simply frustrated, had won a close decision on this reporter’s card. But two of the three judges found for Sugar Ray, choosing light over heat, or glitz over true grit. It was one of those subjective decisions that had boxing writers in fierce debate, and at least in one case a New York writer and a Washington writer almost ready to fight Round 13 themselves.

It was that kind of evening, with a now bitter Marvelous Marvin telling us, “I can’t believe it. I rocked him, I hurt him, he fought like a girl, a split-decision should go to the champion, I felt at the end of the fight I won it, but Pat [co-manager Petronelli] said, ‘No, no, this is Vegas.’ ”

The truth is, a somewhat befuddled and maybe aging champion let the early rounds slip away from him, didn’t press with the savagery of the Hagler we know, and leaves this glitzy and unpredictable town “with a terrible feeling in my mouth.”

If there’s a rematch, let it go fifteen. Maybe then the better man will emerge victorious. But for the moment, the king is dead, long live the king.

[April 1987]

I
T WAS A NIGHT TO
give heart to the underdogs of this world to dream the impossible dreams.

It’s a once upon a time fairy tale of a light-heavyweight champion not considered with the great ones—Conn, Moore, Foster—who accomplished Saturday night what no light-heavyweight champion had ever been able to accomplish: lift the crown from the heavyweight champ.

Going up against that undefeated heavyweight champion, even one clearly on the skids, Michael Spinks was not only a 5-to-l underdog to Larry Holmes but given no chance by any of the boxing writers I checked with through the day—with one exception. Our fearless leader, Jerry Lisker, called it in advance loud and clear: Spinks!

As far as Holmes had obviously slipped from the form that made him a credible successor to Ali, I thought he’d have enough left—the straight jab and the hard right—to handle the strong and actively unorthodox Spinks. In the early rounds that seemed the smart pick, with Holmes moving forward and jabbing, no longer brilliantly or punishingly, but doing enough to establish control.

Then things began to happen. Spinks things.

Larry was looking slow and puffy and Michael was taking heart. At times Michael’s style was to walk away. At times he backed off and dropped his arms. At times he cried out that Holmes was giving him the elbow. But there were also times when he startled Holmes by suddenly moving forward and throwing punches in bunches. They didn’t hurt Holmes, but they made him unhappy.