Leonard Trains to Avoid Bad Day in Ring

He spars in an almost eerie silence, no sound except for the shuffling of feet and the thud of gloves in the near-empty gym. There is no applause at the end of rounds, no bantering with the crowd, no mugging or winking. Ray Leonard is now content to save those for fight night. He is searching for something he has misplaced, and to do it properly Leonard knows he needs to concentrate.

What Leonard is searching for, of course, is Sugar Ray.

“You never know what a man has left,” Leonard said, talking about Roberto Duran. But he could just as easily have been talking about himself. Leonard, the man to whom boxing and winning once came so naturally, now finds that the fights are difficult, the wins no longer automatic. He is haunted by the fear that perhaps his triumphant, almost effortless return to the ring against Marvin Hagler in 1987 was an illusion. He has been dropped three times in his last two fights, and he must wonder if some night soon, he will go down and not get up. It is heavy baggage to carry around, and Leonard is trying to shed it the only way he knows how -- by fighting Duran, the only man to beat him in 37 professional fights, in a scheduled 12-round bout Thursday night.

“The question we’re dealing with is, can a fighter have a bad day?” said Mike Trainer, Leonard’s attorney, manager and the guiding force behind his career. “That’s what this one is all about.”

The bad day Trainer is referring to, of course, is June 12, 1989, when Leonard suffered the indignity of struggling to a draw with Tommy Hearns, a fighter he was expected to beat easily. Ever since, people have wondered just how much Sugar is left in Ray Charles Leonard. And although he won’t admit it, Leonard has wondered about the very same thing. That is why when Leonard speaks of Thursday’s fight, he speaks not of the “fiasco,” nor of avenging his only professional loss, nor defending his World Boxing Council super-middleweight title.

Instead, he says, “This one is for very personal reasons. I don’t mean for any vendetta. Not for vindication. I don’t need to be vindicated. To hell with what the public thinks. Let’s just say this one’s for me, and me alone.”

What Leonard needs to prove to himself is that the Hearns fight was just a bad day. It pains him to think that maybe he has reached the point in his career where all that’s left are bad days, by his own brilliant standards. That perhaps the hesitant, vulnerable fighter who was knocked to the canvas twice by Hearns is now the real Sugar Ray.

“I don’t know if it was just a bad night, a bad performance or if it was Tommy Hearns,” Leonard said at the time. “If, after I look at the tape, I feel it was Tommy Hearns and I can’t get any better, then I’ll have to make a decision. This is going to require me to do a lot of thinking, a lot of evaluating. I really have to search for the answers.”

Now, less than five months later, Leonard believes he has found the answers: streamlining his entourage, isolating his camp, closing his workouts to the public and eliminating the star trappings that once were the hallmark of a Leonard fight camp.

And the most important answer -- convincing himself that the Hearns fight was not due to the inevitable deterioration that shows up in a 33-year-old fighter but to some vague, unexplainable mental funk that had never struck him in his 36 previous fights.

“I looked at the tape and evaluated it,” Leonard said. “Dozens of times. And the more I watched it, the less critical of myself I became. I put up a pretty damn good fight, if I do say so myself. There was nothing in the fight that indicated I could change anything physical. It was all mental.”

And yet, listening to his “reasons,” one is still hard-pressed to understand what Leonard means. “Putting up a good fight” is the talk of losers, something Leonard has been only once in his professional life. And to blame his flat performance on mental duress -- well, wasn’t Hearns’ brother indicted for murder the very day of the fight? It certainly didn’t detract from Hearns’ performance.

But still, Leonard has come to believe that “distractions” did him in against Hearns, although he is unable or unwilling to spell out just what people or events caused him to lose his focus. He insists it was not the separation from Juanita, his wife of 10 years, nor the absence of trainers Angelo Dundee and Janks Morton, who were discharged after the Hagler and Donny LaLonde fights, respectively. “I have my own notions about what they were,” he said, “which is why I’ve made such drastic changes in my surroundings.”

And the changes are striking to anyone who has been around previous Leonard camps. At his West Palm Beach training camp for the Hearns rematch, Leonard’s manner was almost that of royalty. He was driven to his workouts -- a distance of about 100 yards from the hotel entrance to a tent pitched on the lush resort grounds -- in a white limousine. An obsequious publicist, manning a public-address system, announced Leonard’s every move to the throng that gathered daily. Among Leonard’s fawning admirers were Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby. Rock music blared during the workout, and it seemed as if Leonard spent as much time smiling and winking at the crowd and kissing babies as he did training.

Still, most observers agreed Leonard could not have looked any better than he did during his two months in West Palm Beach. Fit and happy, his workouts were a pleasure to watch. People came away fearing for the safety of Hearns, who was looking just ordinary in the stifling confines of Detroit’s Kronk Gym.

“He was rocking and rolling,” said Trainer. “But then we came here (to Las Vegas, 10 days before the bout), and something happened. He lost something and I could see it happen. I don’t know if it was because the media and public was around, or if it was something inside Ray. But once we got here, he did not look good.”

“I just deflated,” Leonard agreed. “Something apparently affected me. Maybe I started to believe all the things (the media) said about Tommy being washed up. But there was a definite loss of intensity.”

In an attempt to rebuild intensity, Leonard has pared his operation to the bare essentials. Instead of a hotel ballroom, Leonard is training in a former warehouse tucked away in a Vegas industrial park. No public allowed. No music. No fun and games.

And those who have survived the Leonard purge -- Trainer, camp coordinator Ollie Dunlap, trainer Pepe Correa, matchmaker J.D. Brown, bodyguard Bobby Stewart and the sparring partners -- tread lightly and seem thankful to still be drawing a Sugar Ray Leonard paycheck. They will not discuss those who have been dismissed: trainer Dave Jacobs, bodyguard Irving Malabar, publicist Charlie Brotman, Leonard’s brothers Kenny and Roger, among others.

The perfect Leonard camp member may now be his miniature schnauzer, Gambler, who scampers around the gym but asks nothing of his master besides affection. “This is the way I want things now,” Leonard said. “I can’t remember it being this way since I turned pro. It allows me to channel myself in on what I’m doing, just working out with no miseries and no distractions.”

“The reason he’s so self-absorbed, I think, is that he’s become painfully aware that each of these fights could be his last,” Trainer said. “And I don’t think he wants to go out on a poor performance.”