Comeback Again Kid : Leonard Is Back at 40, Figuring Retirement Is Just for Old Guys

It’s the sweetest time of all for the sugar man. Ray Leonard has his opponent in a corner with no escape and he’s loving it. His eyes are sparkling, his body is swaying, his hands are flying and his mouth is running.

“Bam! Bam! Bam!,” he says. “Give it up. Give it up. It’s over.”

His opponent knows it’s over. He has been watching Leonard operate for 40 years, and victory has rarely slipped from the man’s grasp.

Cicero Leonard hopelessly pushes back from the table. His son has won another checkers match.

“Good game, Pops,” Ray says.

To look at Leonard beaming last Friday in the Arizona apartment that has served as his training headquarters for 2 1/2 months, one might have thought he had won a sixth world title. The trademark smile was in place and the adrenaline was flowing. He craves the competition and basks in the triumph, whatever the sport and whoever the opponent.

But more and more, the endless games of checkers and marathon rounds of golf and constant games of tennis have produced hollow victories.

Ray Leonard is first and foremost a fighter. He enjoyed his ultimate triumphs and achieved consummate satisfaction in the ring.

And so to the ring he will return on Saturday night, at 40 six years removed from his last retirement, to face 34-year-old Hector Camacho at the Atlantic City Convention Center for something called the International Boxing Council middleweight championship. Ray Leonard will try to recapture the magic and again be Sugar Ray, heir to the nickname once carried so gloriously by Sugar Ray Robinson. Leonard’s return shouldn’t come as any surprise. This guy has retired more times than Magic Johnson, has had more sequels than Rocky.

A lot of people are scoffing at this bout, looking at Leonard as yet another guy who doesn’t know when to call it quits. After all, he already is in the Boxing Hall of Fame. What is left to prove?

Some say Leonard is doing this for the money, his share of the $5-million purse being just more than $3 million, although he says a large chunk of his purse is already earmarked for the Sugar Ray Leonard Foundation, established to aid kids.

Others say the comeback is for Leonard’s ego, his longing for the spotlight overcoming his common sense.

Undoubtedly, both factors have figured in the decision. But Leonard himself sees it in simpler terms.

“I’m just going back to my old job,” he said. “I always thought in the back of my head that I would do this one more time. I’ve decided to do it at the tender age of 40. It’s now or never. The clock is ticking.”

Seeing Leonard’s excitement at the mere thought of putting the gloves back on, it’s hard to believe how many times he has taken them off and said he was hanging them up for good.

--Retirement No. 1: It came at the most unlikely time--after he had won the gold medal in the junior-welterweight division at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

Leonard had the talent, he had the looks and he had the personality to become a highly successful and terribly rich professional boxer.

Instead, he thought about retirement.

Nobody took him seriously, but to this day, Leonard can’t say for sure he would have turned pro had he not had to help his father, who was suffering from spinal meningitis.

“I was thinking about going into communications, into broadcasting,” he said. “But I needed money and there were no job offers, no endorsements.”

Not for long. Not once Leonard turned pro. On Feb 5, 1977, at 20, he earned his first boxing paycheck, winning a six-round decision over Luis Vega in Baltimore.

With his blinding speed, competitive spirit, superb ring generalship and ability to take a punch, Leonard reminded many of a small Muhammad Ali. The comparison was enhanced because Leonard, like Ali, had trainer Angelo Dundee in his corner.

Still, there was only one Ali, and only one Sugar Ray Robinson. But Leonard, fighting all the way from welterweight to super-middleweight in the ‘80s, a golden age for those divisions, carved out his own legend against foes such as Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler.

After winning his first 27 fights, Leonard lost a 15-round decision to Duran in 1980. But later that year, Leonard avenged it with a victory in the famous “No mas” fight, when Duran quit in the eighth round in New Orleans.

--Retirement No. 2: It came in 1982 while Leonard was preparing to defend his World Boxing Assn., welterweight title against Roger Stafford. Leonard discovered he had a detached retina in his left eye.

It was again time to call it a career, but this time it seemed permanent.

Leonard held a dramatic news conference to announce his decision, with Hagler in attendance.

Leonard-Hagler? “It will never happen,” Leonard insisted.

Never is not a word Leonard should ever use.

By 1984, with surgery having corrected the eye problem, Leonard was back in the ring, beating Kevin Howard on a ninth-round technical knockout in Worcester, Mass.

--Retirement No. 3: Leonard went down in the Howard fight, the first time he had been knocked off his feet as a professional.

A lucky blow? Leonard saw it as more than that.

“It just wasn’t there,” he said. “There’s no sense in fooling myself. That’s it.”

Uh, not quite.

There was still the lure of meeting Hagler. Leonard couldn’t put it out of his mind.

Finally, on April 6, 1987, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Leonard un-retired again for the long-awaited, much-anticipated match with Hagler. Leonard, having fought only once in the previous five years, was the underdog. But he pulled off a major upset by winning a close 12-round decision.

Leonard didn’t fight again for 19 months, a sort of mini-retirement we won’t even count. Then he came back to beat Donny Lalonde for the World Boxing Council light-heavyweight and super-middleweight titles, fought Hearns to a controversial draw and beat Duran in their rubber match.

What was left to do? Retire, of course.

--Retirement No. 4: This one lasted until 1991, when he returned to fight then-unheralded Terry Norris for the WBC super-welterweight belt.

For once, Leonard wished he had stayed in retirement. At age 34, he looked much older. His skills seemed to have deserted him and he lost a 12-round decision.

--Retirement No. 5: Nobody argued with him about this one. The Norris fight seemed to have convinced the boxing community that, finally, retirement was a good idea for Leonard.

“I was on a real roll with retirements,” he said last week. “I don’t know what the hell happens to me.”

So what in the world is he doing back?

It was a gradual process. Leonard had all sorts of plans for his life after boxing. He was going to be a broadcaster, an actor and a manager of other fighters.

While he and longtime friend J.D. Brown were searching for fighters to sign Brown realized the old competitive blood was again flowing through Leonard’s veins. First a trickle, then a gusher.

Leonard would look at a fighter and tell Brown, “Man, this guy couldn’t carry my gym bag.”

When Camacho challenged Leonard, he didn’t reply at first. But a little more than a week later, after completing a routine workout, his body feeling and looking as good and as trim as ever, Leonard called Brown.

“Make the fight,” Leonard said.

Does he worry he’ll look the way he did against Norris?

“At that time,” he said, “I was going through a difficult divorce [from first wife Juanita] and I had gotten a rib injury prior to the fight. I went into the ring that night in a daze, a trance. I tried to stay focused, but I couldn’t.”

Dundee, who hasn’t worked Leonard’s corner since the Hagler fight, understands his old fighter’s motivation to come back.

“Ray will walk into that arena,” Dundee said, “and the center spotlight will be shining on him and he’ll get that old feeling back. That’s important to him. When you retire, you can never have that same feeling.”

And then what? If Leonard should beat Camacho, would he keep fighting? Can he compete against the middleweights of today?

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

Would you be in the top 10 of today’s middleweights?

“Yeah.”

Top five?

“Hell, yeah.”

Top two?

Leonard just smiled.