Hearns Salutes His Conqueror, and Promises That He’ll Return

Thomas Hearns stood silently for a few seconds Monday night, staring at the ceiling of the Caesars pavilion, groping for something to say to several hundred reporters.

This was about an hour after he had suffered a second crushing defeat, comparable in pain and disappointment to his loss to Sugar Ray Leonard here three years ago.

“What can I say,” he finally said. “I’m just glad I’m in great physical condition and I thank the Lord I didn’t come out of it damaged in any way.”

Then, he paid tribute to Marvelous Marvin Hagler:

“I have to give Marvin proper respect for being a great champion. He proved that tonight, by going in there against me and proving to me he’s worthy of wearing all those (championship) belts.

“The man showed his greatness, and it was one damned great fight. Even though I got stopped, we gave the people what they paid their money for.”

He talked about the pain of defeat, and you knew his thoughts were drifting back to his loss to Leonard.

“I am a winner,” he said. “I shall come back again, which I did once before. I can hold my head up. Even the greatest lose sometimes. This is not the end for me.”

He looked at promoter Bob Arum on the stage next to him and made a pitch for a rematch.

Referring to the intense excitement of the 8-minute 1-second bout, he said:

“It happened once, let’s do it again.”

He answered only one question, one a lot of viewers must have pondered: Why did he come out in the first round throwing big punches instead of staying away from Hagler, and using his superior reach to better advantage?

“I had to,” he said, “because it (the opportunity) was there. It presented itself. Marvin started running in on me, and I had to protect myself.

“He wanted me to back up, to run, and I didn’t want to do that.”

If it looked like a hall-of-fame fight on closed circuit TV or from ringside, imagine what it was like being in the ring with Hagler and Hearns.

Referee Richard Steele, his light green shirt still spotted and smeared with Hagler’s blood, said it looked like one of the great fights to him.

All week, Hagler has been wearing a baseball cap that had “WAR” on the front. And that’s just what it was, according to Steele.

“I haven’t ever seen that much action in three rounds and I’ve been refereeing 15 years,” he said.

If you can believe a 10-day national telephone poll, America’s boxing fans had it pretty well figured. According to Top Rank, Arum’s promotional company, a poll of 5,000 boxing fans taken April 4-13 resulted in 61% picking Hagler to win. At Las Vegas betting windows, most sports books had Hagler favored by only 6-5 Monday morning.

Arum said that hard numbers from closed circuit and cable TV revenue from around the country won’t be available for several days. But he said phone checks Monday indicated Hagler-Hearns had a chance to surpass the all-time record $22-million business that Holmes-Cooney did in 1982.

“This morning, I was conservatively confident we would do at least $17 million,” Arum said. “After making some calls today, I’m pretty sure we’ll do $20 million. We needed a huge walkup to get it ($22 million), and we may have had it.

“I called our closed circuit people in diverse places like Philadelphia, Sacramento, Chicago and Indianapolis, and they were all happy with the walkup. At the Spectrum in Philadelphia, I was told they had ‘very long’ lines for tickets at 8 a.m.”

New York matchmaker Teddy Brenner, interviewed on the closed circuit telecast after the bout, said: “That was three of the greatest rounds of boxing I ever saw. Hagler was magnificent, and Hearns simply wasn’t physically strong enough.”