Making Sense of Boxing

If I had $50 million in the bank, all the Mercedeses I could drive, two houses--one in Florida--both my eyes and ears, and all my teeth, I wouldn’t be caught walking on the same side of a brightly lit street with the likes of Thomas (Hit Man) Hearns, Marvelous Marvin Hagler or Roberto (Hands of Stone) Duran.

If anyone suggested I get in a fistfight with them, I would want him trussed and institutionalized at once.

It has always been a mystery to me why the spectacularly well off don’t all lead the kind of sybaritic life of a, well, King Farouk. I mean, they don’t catch hot rivets on the 95th floor of a skyscraper or join the bomb squad. But they do climb into racing cars, or speeding boats, or jump out of planes or stand their ground against charging water buffalo with one shot in the chamber.

And, clearly, they fight people named Hit Man or Stone Hands.

There must be easier ways to combat boredom. I mean, don’t they play polo anymore? Aren’t 10-foot putts exciting enough?

If I had $50 million, I’d get somebody to do my crossword puzzles for me and I’d never order the stew at a truck stop. Danger, you don’t need.

So, as long as I had Sugar Ray Leonard on the phone, I thought I would get his thinking on the matter.

Sugar Ray, you have to remember, has been a rich man since the ’76 Olympics. He retired from the ring seven years ago with a detached retina and all the money he would ever need. He had a cable television announcing job, a fine family, the good life. When you got that, what do you need with Marvin Hagler?

A case could be made that Sugar Ray knew he was the best fistfighter on the planet Earth and what was Marvin Hagler doing with his title? No one ever accused Ray of having an inferiority complex.

When he beat Hagler, it was one of the most astonishing fistic upsets of the generation. It so shocked Hagler that he never put on another glove. For months, he could be found talking to himself in odd corners. He--and the fight world--had thought the rusty, eye-damaged Sugar Ray would be as easy to beat as the white of an egg.

But that seemed to prove that. Now , Ray could take his belt and go back to the life of the country squire on Chesapeake Bay. He had exorcised his tormentor, reclaimed his place in the firmament.

That fight had made a kind of perverted sense.

But Ray didn’t let it go at that. He fought the Canadian champion, Donny Lalonde, in one of the great so-what matches of our day. Nobody took the blond, slow, clumsy Lalonde seriously and the fight lost money.

Then, Ray seemed to be playing Russian roulette with his own reputation. He had already torn to shreds one of the hoariest aphorisms of the fight game, “They never come back.”

He destroyed more than the pugs. He destroyed their psyches. He ran Marvin Hagler right out of the game. He had, before his retirement, run Roberto Duran right out of the ring. He had turned the cool, confident Hearns into a hysterical counter-puncher.

He risks flip-flopping his own image. He gave Hearns a second chance when there was no public clamor for the rematch, when the picture everyone carried in his mind was of Sugar Ray administering a beating to the erstwhile Hit Man in Round 14 in 1981.

Hearns floored him in the rematch and, in the minds of many, beat him. It was ruled a draw but that had the effect of dimming the luster of Ray’s win in the first fight and adding confidence and redemption to Hearns’ psyche.

Not content with that, Ray is now seeking to rehabilitate Roberto Duran. He all but made Duran the punch line of a sick joke the last time they met when the once savage and violent Panamanian grew so frustrated he quit in mid-ring--and mid-fight--with a muttered “No mas,” a shocking breech of the macho code that Duran could have carried with him the rest of his life.

Why is Sugar Ray tampering with his own legend? Why is he in the business of giving second chances to his historic victims? Would David want to give Goliath a rematch?

The short answer is simple: He likes to fight. It’s what he’s about. It’s almost his recreation. Actors act, singers sing, chefs cook. And fighters fight.

“Everybody’s life is made up of A, B, C, D,” says Sugar Ray. “When you can do Y, you do it. You are an artist, you practice your art.

“You see, I don’t only fight with my fists. I fight with my mind. A fight is my stage, my canvas.”

Yeah, but why repaint old canvases, rewrite his own history, re-make old plots? “Camille” doesn’t need a sequel.

Sugar Ray has a different view. He’s not remaking Duran’s image, he’s restoring his own.

“The way people talked about that first fight, first it was funny. Then, the ‘No mas’ thing went into the language. School kids took it up. Then late-night talk shows. I began to resent it. It was almost as if they were saying it was a ploy to set up a third fight. It got all distorted.”

Distortion, like beauty, must be in the eye of the beholder. The public notion of that fight is of a soundly beaten Duran, not looking forward to seven more rounds of steady drubbing, deciding to hit the silk.

Fittingly, in Las Vegas, “no more” is going to be “one more time.” At the new Mirage hotel-casino on Dec. 7, plutocrat Leonard is going to climb back into the ring with the guy who beat him the first time and would do anything not banned by the Geneva convention to erase the memory of the second fight.

If this is the way the rich get their kicks, I’m glad I was poor. We just rode Ferris wheels.