COMMENTARY : Leonard Roped In: It’s All in the Game

Last Saturday, Sugar Ray Leonard was on stage one more time. He always liked to manage things. In all of his retirements from whatever happened to be his current title, he was never content simply to say he was done with boxing. He called news conferences, wanted an audience. Liked, also, to display his new refinements of language, to preen a bit in that area.

Of his most notable retirement, in 1982, he made pure theater. This was in Baltimore, as the centerpiece of a charity event titled “A Night With Sugar Ray Leonard.” Among the celebrities Leonard invited came Marvin Hagler, in expectation that Leonard would announce the long-awaited Leonard-Hagler fight.

In what was supposed to be a highlight moment, a smiling Leonard looked down at Hagler from the ring with a microphone in hand and declared: “A fight with a great man ... this great world champion ... would be one of the greatest fights of history. Talk about money. Talk about Fort Knox.”

And then from Leonard, “But unfortunately it won’t happen. I’m retiring.” A dumbfounded Hagler had come there all the way from Brockton, Mass., to be conned, to be humiliated. Leonard with his disarming smile had been Chaucer’s “smiler with a knife under the cloak.” Sugar Ray had had his little surprise but it wasn’t his finest moment.

On Saturday it was another kind of moment for Sugar Ray. Now he might be called the gutsy one, telling all about the downside of himself, how he had been for some past years a cocaine user, sometimes sotted with alcohol and sometimes a wife abuser. Without need to do so it was his choice to go public, after those newspaper disclosures of his misconduct as a husband.

He could have simply issued a statement, but he opted for a news conference that commanded all the media. This scene was the newest challenge for the great little fighter and Olympic champ who early on had captivated so many and later reached new fame by coming out of the limbo of only one fight in four previous years and dethroning the invincible Hagler.

Did Leonard win this newest confrontation, the ugly one about his shame, his secrets? In terms of media coverage he did, if that fulfilled him. He was bucking national TV college basketball hysteria, the epic of the Final Four. Sugar Ray made the front pages.

As anybody would be in his circumstances, Sugar Ray was shaky at the start, but he was not long in gaining composure telling a straight story of his sins and his sorrows. Sometimes there were gaps while he groped for words that still eluded him, but he was articulate.

Sugar Ray Leonard’s latest crisis will be taken in stride by boxing folks. In such cases, the common retort is “So what else is new?” Tales of one more champion’s tendency to self-destruct are commonplace. The industry Jimmy Cannon once labeled “the red-light district of sports” never set much store by high moral standards.

A common experience among boxing champions has been, like Leonard’s, wife trouble. Their history is full of it. It grabbed Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston and even the family man, Rocky Marciano. The multi-wived Muhammad Ali begged the courts that the alimony payments were too great. And Mike Tyson is of course famous for slugging his wife and others, for his vulgar talk and what his rightful manager claims is Tyson’s dirty double cross.

Liston came to his end in a drug stupor in a Las Vegas hotel room. Sugar Ray Robinson outraged many folks with his show-off pink Cadillac and assorted girlfriends on two continents. He was no stranger to expensive wines and later stumbled around small-town arenas trying to get a payday against younger punks who beat him up. His rescue came from friends who set him up in goodwill work in California. Joe Louis wound up being kept on as a penniless greeter in Las Vegas casinos.

Dempsey was a popular hero, who profited from getting the bad end of the famous “long count” against Gene Tunney in Chicago in 1927. But Dempsey wasn’t always admired. In World War I he was denounced as a slacker despite manager Jack Kearns’s attempts to show him off as a deferred shipyard worker using the proper tools. It didn’t work because a photo showed that shipyard worker Dempsey came to work in patent leather shoes. That became a new scandal.

So what is the impact on boxing of Sugar Ray Leonard’s fall from grace? Nothing whatsoever, not even a ripple.

At this point, what direction will life take for Sugar Ray Leonard? Imperishable is what he did in the prize ring, feats that brought to memory the great Sugar Ray Robinson, if not quite parity. But as the role model he aspired to be in his do-good ministrations among the young, he is besmirched. Although Leonard has been a comebacker of great note, so many times licking the odds, have they ever been this extreme? His many millions will be an obedient servant, but will they buy him things lost?