They Don’t Come Back--Bet on It

It’s the oldest axiom in the fight business, older than “The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” or “Never lead with your right,” or “A good big man will always beat a good little man.”

“They Never Come Back,” it says. In caps. In stone. Bet it. Make book on it. Take it to the bank. Tell a friend.

It caught up with Dempsey in the rain at Philadelphia. It froze Jeffries one hot day in Reno. It took on Jack Johnson shading his eyes under the broiling Havana sun. It got to Joe Louis toppling onto the ring ropes and canvas, his bald head glaring in the ring lights as it thudded on the apron. It mocked Benny Leonard into a charade of lost skills in the cigar smoke of the Garden one depressing Depression night.

It gets them in all sports. The hop goes off the fastball, the putts stop dropping, the serve is a soap bubble. But it saves its most wicked delusions for pugs. It’s remorseless. Heartless. Sadistic.

Its latest victim is Sugar Ray Leonard. A beautiful fighter to watch in his prime. A leopard. A study in grace and speed. A living painting.

But that was his prime. In his prime, he might have beaten Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Doubtless would have beaten him, in fact. He was faster, for one thing, the fastest thing with two fists in the game.

But that was five years ago. That was another Sugar Ray Leonard. That was the marvelously gifted young pug who, when he saw an opening, bam! Left-right-left! And step back and let the man drop.

This one will see the opening, the hinges will creak, the message will stumble along rusty relays--and the punch will come in on a slow track like a flat wheel, too little, too late.

Only the delusion is there. Sugar Ray thinks he can still do it. Well, so did Jeffries. So did Louis, Dempsey, Jack Johnson. So did a hundred others who thought the calendar was for other guys.

Well, maybe not Jeffries. Jim Jeffries had not had a fight in five years in 1910 when they lured him out of retirement and the good life to fight Johnson. Jeffries was supposed to restore the prestige of the white race. There is a lot of evidence Jeff was reluctant about his role and his ability to perform it. But they convinced him it was his sacred duty. As if a fist fight were Armageddon. History shows Johnson roared with laughter as he beat the fat, slow, overweight, over-age, rusted Jeffries methodically to a pulp.

Jeffries must have wished many times over the 14 rounds as humiliation piled upon humiliation that he’d stayed on the farm.

Will Leonard? Will he begin to ask himself along about Round 5 Monday night: What the hell am I doing here?

That might be the way to bet.

What impels a man to give up the good life, the soft ease, the comfort, the leisure to climb back into a ring after five years in silk sheets and whipped cream to trade head smashes, eye cuts, and kidney damage with a young bull of a boxer from Brockton? Joe Louis could tell him it was unwise.

It isn’t always the age that does it. It’s the inactivity. It’s the oxidation you get on skills. The legs that turn to water. The arms that feel like strands of fettuccine. The ears that ring because you can’t get out of the way of punches anymore. The commands of the mind that the rest of the body can’t carry out any more.

When Dempsey fought Tunney at Philadelphia in 1926, he hadn’t fought in three years. His last real fight had been against Firpo in 1923. He had been leading the soft life--hanging around Hollywood with his movie actress wife in the interim, putting on three-round exhibitions, vaudeville shows, not fights.

Jack Johnson had only two real fights in five years and was lolling around Paris’ bistros and race tracks before he came to Cuba to transfer his title to Jess Willard.

Benny Leonard laid off for seven years till he tried a comeback, only to get knocked out by Jimmy McLarnin in a fight that never should have been made but, at least, that Leonard had the excuse he had been wiped out in the ’29 stock market crash.

This Leonard has all the money he will ever need, we are told.

Does he have all the glory he will ever need?

Obviously not.

This is no Jeffries lured out of comfortable security by misguided chauvinists. This is no bankrupt victim of economic breakdown. This is a man volunteering not to be remembered as he should be remembered--as a dazzling flash of light on the sports horizon, a thrilling performer in a cruel, thugs’ sport--but probably as a dazed, bleeding, swollen, cut or maybe unconscious figure under the ring lights of a parking lot arena of Caesars Palace casino.

You have to admire him. There are elements of Don Quixote in this quest, suggestions of the Christians facing the lions, St. George charging the dragon.

You have to salute him. You have to thrill to him. He makes cowards of us all, opting for the danger, the challenge instead of the nice comfortable, bourgeois, take-no-chances center. You have to think “Go for it, Kid!” You have to love him.

But you don’t have to bet on him.

Because, Sugar Ray growls, “I don’t pay any attention to history.” And it was that eminent ringsider, George Santayana, who said “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”

So do those who try to come back.