"Everything I've Done Is Unique"

By Tom Callahan

At 26, pretty Sugar Ray could no longer summon the desire

The first time that Sugar Ray Leonard retired from boxing, in Montreal after winning a gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, he said, "My journey has ended. My dream is fulfilled." No one doubted that he meant it or that he would fight again.

Like Decathlon Winner Bruce Jenner, Leonard imagined his place on the Wheaties box was secure. His error, confusing the commercial opportunities awaiting white heroes and black heroes, was soon revealed, along with a paternity suit, a sadly overblown welfare department formality. Leonard never denied he was the father of Juanita Wilkinson's boy child. But the mean publicity that followed was the clincher: if Leonard hoped for his own 7-Up commercial, or anything else, he would have to fight for it.

In February 1977 he turned pro and began beating his way through the welterweight thicket on a course Manager Angelo Dundee had carefully laid to the championship. It started with Luis ("the Bull") Vega at the Civic Center in Baltimore. Most boxers start in four-round preliminaries, but Leonard's debut was a six-round main event and a $40,000 payday. It was televised nationally.

So descriptions of him as a media creature, even creation, were unavoidable. Sometimes Dundee even referred to him poetically as "prime time," and said the first sign of Leonard's greatness was "just the way he raised his arms and filled the screen." He had an irresistible smile, an appealing way. He could also fight. After 25 victories, no losses and almost three years, Leonard stopped Wilfred Benitez in the 15th round for the welterweight championship of the world, or at least of the World Boxing Council. At the moment of victory, he flew to a corner of the ring and jumped onto the ropes as if into the arms of everyone.

Roberto Duran bullied him and took his title in June of 1980, but Leonard retrieved it five months later. Duran, after shivering all his great lightweight career in the shade of Muhammad Ali's shadow, came into the spotlight as if out of a cave and was greeted by an Ali just his size. He rubbed his eyes. Later he rubbed his stomach. When Duran quit in the eighth round of the return match, a Leonard tour de force, nobody could believe either the alibi--the little wolf had wolfed down too much lunch--or the truth: an uncivilized man took a civilized way out.

So it was not until the Thomas Hearns gladiator in 1981, for both the W.B.C. and the World Boxing Association titles, that Leonard proved himself a gladiator beyond any discussion: a media child and corporate man (his purses had come to $35 million) but a fighter first. Hearns was finished in the 14th round, though Leonard was battered bubble-eyed. Eight months later, with only one small fight in the interim, the retina of that left eye detached. For six months Leonard brooded. Then last week he called assembly in Baltimore, where he had started. He had an announcement.

It was a bizarre last scene. The dull appearance of the Civic Center was not much relieved by Rocky-style bunting tacked over a small ring. Eight or ten thousand spectators contributed a dollar or two admission price to charity. They savaged M.C. Howard Cosell, who demanded, "All right, quiet!" And they serenaded Muhammad Ali, who looked like the winner of a pie-eating contest.

Cosell must have been there to signify television. Ali was definitely the symbol of fighters who do not retire. What Singer Wayne Newton represented was unclear, perhaps Las Vegas. "It's a great thrill to be here tonight," Newton said, bouncing into the ring, resisting the impulse to undo his tie. Maybe Newton's part had to do with something Leonard once said:

"When I turned pro, I had desire and natural ability, but it takes more than that to be great. It takes the feeling of the ring.

Like a singer--like a veteran singer--can get on any stage and do his thing. Without that feeling, you can't perform."

The evidence, including a prewritten, first-person SPORTS ILLUSTRATED account, suggested the evening was pure melodrama. But Leonard insisted his decision to retire was not finally made until right there in the ring, when, looking directly at Middleweight Champion Marvin Hagler and rhapsodizing over what a splendid match they would make, he said, "Unfortunately, it will never happen."

"I wanted Hagler there," he said later.

"I was looking for something to excite me.

It's difficult to describe. I just thought I'd say, 'Hey, let's go for it.' I didn't. The eye was a factor quite naturally. When it was restored to normal, I changed my plan.

Then every day I changed back."

Is a 26-year-old fighter in his prime likely to stay out? "But everything I've done is unique," he argued. "I was advised in a unique manner" (by his trainer Janks Morton and his attorney Mike Trainer, who circumvented the venal promoters).

In his Civic Center soliloquy--"beauty is"--Leonard made sure to mention that besides Juanita, whom he married in 1980, little Ray and the rest of his family and friends, beauty is also "Fort Knox," "selling 7-Up" and "Sugar Ray Leonard Inc."

Finished with everyone his size, he is ready to try Bruce Jenner again, to act in movies, perhaps portray Henry Armstrong, the legendary champion of three weight divisions (whose record Alexis Arguello could not break last week against Aaron Pryor). "Boxers in the past have been known to be ugly," Ali told Leonard. "But we're pretty. You and I can't take credit, though. It started with Sugar Ray Robinson. He was a pretty man before us. Pretty."

Ali was patting Leonard's hair, and Ray recoiled just barely perceptibly from Ali's touch and maybe from the reminder that Sugar Ray is still Robinson. There is nothing a retiring man can do about that, nothing any man can do about that.

--By Tom Callahan

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