Thomas Hearns : The Challenger Is Confident That Hagler Is Facing an Exercise in Futility-- and, Yes, He Even Sez So.

The Thomas Hearns camp is remarkably cavalier, given the high-stakes match he has upcoming. Here he stands to make more than $5.4 million, possibly acquire Marvin Hagler’s middleweight title, and become, once more, the Hit Man, the scowling ring assassin he was pre-Leonard. And how does he prepare? He invites six women into his ring and leads them through aerobic exercises.

Some think, as fight preparation goes, this is more suicidal than cavalier. Monday night, in an outdoor arena behind Caesars Palace, Hearns’ ring company will consist of no greater beauty than Hagler, the bald one, who is pinning his own considerable hopes of greatness on the complete and total destruction of Hearns. The exercise is expected to be somewhat more violent than normal aerobics, and it’s likely at least one of the combatants will achieve no other shape than bad.

Watching Hearns lead the lovelies through a few stretches, days before this fight, the thought occurs: Has he lost his mind?

Knowing that Hagler is training in a downtown gym, fine-tuning his anger in his usual boot-camp regimen, depriving himself of even fresh air, it occurs that Hearns may have lost his will to live as well. It is difficult to picture the menacing Hagler standing in the middle of the ring, microphone in hand, working the crowd of the Coliseum room. Ask yourself: Is this how one girds oneself for 12 rounds of life and death?

It’s easy, on the basis of just one of these workouts, or shows, really, to characterize Hearns’ preparation as, well, inappropriate. An entire production team scurries about--hangers-on, bodyguards, relatives, publicists--giving the camp a look of a traveling party. Everything is a bit more, face it, Las Vegas than you’d expect. A sign is propped at ringside:

Thomas Sez!

--I’m in great shape.

--I weigh 164 pounds.

--I will KO Hagler in 3 rounds.

--I wish the fight were today.

--Yes, I still dislike Hagler.

The sign has everything but neon lights racing up and down it.

Yet, it would be dangerous, for Hagler at least, to mistake Hearns for a preening celebrity come Monday night. It would be dangerous to think that Hearns’ pre-fight preparation, as comical as it might appear, qualifies him more as a lounge act than the super-welterweight champion he already is. The Hearns roadshow has not been all aerobics and pretty girls; the training you don’t see has been pretty rugged. Full-fledged middleweights have been encouraged to pound at will in sparring, and his workouts in Miami were reported as brutal.

But the roadshow has been longer than Detroit to Miami to here. Rather, it has been a four-year trip, from Las Vegas to despair and back again. That long.

Nearly four years ago, on the same blacktop he’ll mount Monday night, the Hit Man was hit and hurt, suffering his first intimations of mortality. It proved easier to shake off that new notion of vulnerability than any punch by Sugar Ray Leonard, although they were hard enough to stop Hearns in 14 rounds, his first and only loss. Hearns, his old mystique missing, never really seemed the same after that.

He did go on to win the World Boxing Council’s super-welterweight title but hardly any distinction to go with it. Then, with Leonard more or less out of the picture, a super fight between Hearns and Hagler was proposed in 1982. But Hearns postponed it because of an injury to his pinkie finger, and the bout was eventually canceled by promoters. To some, Hagler for instance, Hearns’ courage was in doubt, as well as his punch.

“For $2 million,” Hagler says, “I’d have cut off my pinkie finger.”

It was possible then, as it is now watching him lead aerobics, to think that Hearns did not want any part of Hagler. But, in fact, that’s all Hearns ever wanted, that and to restore that Hit Man mystique.

“We knew we’d never get another shot at Leonard,” says Emanuel Steward, Hearns’ trainer and manager. “From that day on, all preparation has been for a Hagler fight. Thomas was frustrated and depressed after the Leonard fight, but I don’t feel he had lost any self-confidence. He lost a great fight. But that was that. We immediately tried to get him a fight before the year was out, and we did get Ernie Singletary three months later.”

Steward was careful in the selection of opponents. It may be, as Hagler says, that “Emanuel Steward did a great job after Sugar Ray Leonard took his confidence away, feeding him fishes.” Or it may be that Steward was single-minded in readying Hearns for an eventual Hagler fight.

“We picked the most durable,” he says, “not the best boxers. We’d knock those out. The fights after Leonard were not taken for knockouts but for stamina.”

Hearns, with one or two exceptions, certainly had the opportunity to build stamina. Singletary took him 10 rounds, Jeff McCracken took him eight, Murray Sutherland and Luigi Minchillo took him the route. This has proved inspiring to both Hagler and Hearns. “Look at the guys he couldn’t stop,” Hagler says with glee. Yet, Hearns says he was learning for the first time that he didn’t need to knock people out to win.

On the other hand, knockouts were good, too. Some of the magic of this fight is due to the fact that Hagler was stretched 15 rounds in defeating Roberto Duran while Hearns dropped Duran in two, looking like the Hit Man of old.

Certainly that knockout established the marketing of this fight, which could become the biggest-grossing fight in history. “His charisma,” promoter Bob Arum says, “is like that of a gunfighter. Can’t sell him as a master boxer, even though he is. You sell him as a shoot-from-the-hip guy.”

Hearns, nearly four inches taller than Hagler (and four years younger), sez! he will indeed knock Hagler out in three rounds, using his straight right to go over the southpaw Hagler’s left. “My plans are to KO in three,” he says. And if that doesn’t happen? He shrugs. “Then I’ll turn around and start boxing him. I’ll win by a decision.”

Hearns is of such confidence that, beyond leading aerobics in his spare time, he’s even announcing plans beyond Hagler. After he wins the middleweight championship, his third title, he plans to defend it a few times and move up to light-heavyweight and fight for a fourth title. Hearns, 26, is still growing and is no longer the skinny welterweight we remember. Middleweight seems to suit him fine, and there is no danger that he will come in light for Hagler as he did for Leonard nearly four years ago.

As for Leonard, Steward will tell you it was all a tactical mistake, that Hearns was working too hard, came in too light and simply ran out of gas. Hearns will tell you: “I try not to even think about it. People did have a tendency to treat me differently, but I’ll never let that happen to me again.”

Thomas Sez!

--”This should overshadow that whole situation.”