Leonard, Sugar Ray 1956–

views updated

Sugar Ray Leonard 1956–

Professional boxer, businessman

At a Glance…

An Olympic Gold Medal

Championships Intermingle with Retirements

Another Thrilling Comeback

A Farewell to Boxing

Sources

“Image not available for copyright reasons”

By his last retirement in 1991, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard had become the first fighter to win titles in five divisions-every weight class from welteweight to light heavyweight. He also had the distinction of being the first boxer ever to earn $100 million in purses. Handsome and glib outside the ring-and unusually crafty within it-Leonard beat a number of formidable opponents on his way to wealth and fame.Sports Illustrated correspondent William Nack called Leonard “the very embodiment of the American dream,” and claimed that the engaging boxer’s career “is the paradigm for the sport.”

Melodrama played no small role in Sugar Ray Leonard’s professional life. He “retired” as early as 1976 and claimed to be through with boxing no fewer than four times; even at the age of 41, in 1997, Leonard insisted that he was still a competitive fighter, looking for a match. His numerous comebacks were celebrated with a great deal of hoopla, attesting to Leonard’s healthy ego, but they also proved that the fighter possessed unusual degrees of stamina and determination. Fighting through injuries that might have robbed him of his eyesight, overcoming drug abuse, and beating opponents who were expected to pulverize him became Ray Leonard’s signal achievements. As Nack put it, Leonard’s “was a remarkable performance, an exercise in guile, nerve, endurance and superior athleticism.”

Ray Charles Leonard was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on May 17,1956. He is named not after a boxer but after jazz great Ray Charles, because his mother wanted him to be a singer. The fifth of seven children, Leonard grew up in Palmer Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Palmer Park is hardly a ghetto, but it is not a wealthy community by any means.Sports Illustrated correspondent Rick Reilly called the area “a poor, mixed neighborhood with more than enough trouble to go around.”

Somehow the shy Ray Leonard was able to avoid the trouble. He sang with his sisters in a church choir and behaved himself in school. In a Washington Post interview, Leonard’s father called the fighter “a funny sort of kid” who “always hung back.” He continued: “It

At a Glance…

Born May 17, 1956, in Wilmington, NC; son ofCiceroand Getha Leonard; married Juanita Wilkinson January 19, 1980 (divorced, 1991); married Bernadette Robi (a model), August 20, 1993; children: (first marriage) Ray Jr., Jarre!. £Education: Graduated from high school in Palmer Park, MD.

Amateurboxer, 1969-76; professional boxer, 1976-91. Became World Boxing Council (WBQ welterweight champion, 1979; won juniormiddleweight championship, 1981 ; became undisputed welterweight champion, 1981 ; in retirement, 1982-84; retired again after one fight, 1984-86; became middleweightchampion, 1987; became WBC super middleweight champion and light heavyweight champion, 1988; retired in 1991. Boxingcommentator and analystfortelevision broadcasts; star of exercisevideo Boxout, 1993. professional boxer, onefight with HectorCamacho, March 1, 1997, retired again.

Selected awards: Gold medals at Pan American games, 1975,andSummerOlympicGames, 1976; inducted into the boxing Hall of Fame, June 15,1997.

Addresses: Agent— International Creative Management, 8899 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.

used to worry me. All my other boys were always into something, but Ray ...not until boxing.”

An Olympic Gold Medal

Leonard discovered boxing when he was 14, and he threw all his energy into it. He was tutored by two volunteer boxing coaches, Dave Jacobs and Janks Morton, both of whom worked out of the Oakcrest Community Center in Palmer Park. Jacobs and Morton knew they had a potential contender in Leonard, so they demanded good discipline outside the ring as well as in it. Sure enough, Leonard compiled a 145-5 record as an amateur and won gold medals at the 1975 Pan American games and the 1976 Summer Olympics. The handsome light-welterweight gained a degree of instant celebrity as an American medalist. His post-fight interviews, Reilly wrote, “delighted the nation.”

When Leonard won the gold in Montreal, he stunned viewers by announcing his retirement from boxing. “This is my last fight,” he said after his difficult decision win over Andres Aldama of Cuba. “My decision is final. My journey is ended, my dream fulfilled.” Leonard planned to return home to study at the University of Maryland, but he was also counting on some lucrative product endorsements that never materialized. The press revealed that he had fathered a son out of wedlock (he eventually married the child’s mother, Juanita Wilkinson), and advertisers balked at the negative publicity. At the same time, both of Leonard’s parents fell seriously ill. Feeling that he had to help out with the family burdens, Leonard decided to become a professional boxer.

Rather than turn his career over to a boxing promoter, however, Leonard placed his affairs in the hands of attorney Mike Trainer who, with the help of several investors, incorporated Leonard and signed all the shares in the enterprise over to the fighter himself. Trainer also signed Leonard to nonexclusive television contracts and brought in Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s former trainer, to work with the young boxer. Every move Trainer made was designed to promote Leonard’s best interests, and while boxing’s regular promoters snarled, Leonard used his post-Olympics fame to great advantage. Calling himself “Sugar Ray” after the great Sugar Ray Robinson, Leonard began to compile a record of wins, mostly by technical knockout, over carefully chosen opponents who could challenge but not overmatch him.

Championships Intermingle with Retirements

Leonard’s ascent through the ranks hardly smooth sailing, despite the advance publicity he could count on. He often suffered severe pain in his hands for days after a fight, and Dundee’s training regimen was fierce and unrelenting. By 1979-just two years after turning pro--Leonard challenged Wilfredo Benitez for the World Boxing Council’s welterweight championship. It was the first welterweight fight in history to pay its participants more than a million dollars apiece, Leonard won, earning a technical knockout over Benitez in the fifteenth round. Leonard began to defend his crown. His second title defense brought him into the ring with Roberto Duran, a Panamanian brawler with far more stamina than finesse. Leonard lost his first match with Duran, suffering a brutal beating in a toe-to-toe pun-chout that perfectly suited Duran’s style of fighting.

Leonard’s rematch with Duran, held in New Orleans on November 26, 1980, is still known as the “no mas” fight. The match revealed a more canny Leonard, one who could weave, feint, and clearly outbox Duran. Realizing he was being humiliated in the ring, Duran quit fighting in the eighth round, gasping “no mas, no mas ”(no more) and claiming he had stomach pains. The outing mended Leonard’s reputation and added to his reputation for intelligent boxing. He went on to win a 14th round TKO victory over then-undefeated Thomas Hearns to unify the welterweight title. After that, Ray Leonard’s troubles began.

During a training bout in 1982, Leonard felt a sharp pain in his left eye. He had suffered a detached retina, a serious and potentially blinding injury. Surgery repaired the damage, but the doctors warned Leonard that fighting could aggravate the condition. Leonard decided to retire. “There isn’t enough money in the world for me to risk my eyesight,” he told Sports Illustrated at the time. “You can’t put a price tag on that.” Leonard remained in the limelight by serving as a color commentator at major boxing matches on the Home Box Office cable network, and he finally got the product endorsements he had sought years before. Inevitably his popularity eroded, though, and against the wishes of his wife he decided to make a comeback.

Leonard was haunted by one overriding ambitionto meet Marvin Hagler in the ring. Hagler, a boxer several years Leonard’s senior, had been considered almost invincible since he won the middleweight hampionship in 1980. He served as a silent indictment of Leonard’s premature retirement, or so Ray Leonard thought. In 1984 Leonard met unranked Kevin Howard after six weeks of lackluster training, hoping the match would warm him up for Hagler. Howard surprised everyone-especially his opponent-by knocking Leonard to the canvas in the fourth round. Leonard eventually won the fight in the ninth on a TKO, but the match revealed his many deficiencies. He quickly re-retired that same night. This time the retirement lasted just over two years.

Only in the early 1990s was it revealed that Leonard had been abusing alcohol and cocaine during this period. Depressed over the premature end to his career, he turned to drugs and drink for solace. “I didn’t want anyone to tell me my career had to end,” he said at a press conference in 1991, as printed in the Long Beach Press Telegram.”I used [drugs and alcohol] when I felt bad, I used it when I missed not competing at that level. It was a crutch, something that enabled me to forget.” Leonard denied ever being addicted to cocaine and claimed that he quit using it when he began to contemplate yet another comeback. He did not take part in any anti-drug campaigns until he had been free of the substance for several years.

Another Thrilling Comeback

In the autumn of 1986, Leonard returned to serious training, challenged Marvin Hagler to a match, and began boasting that he could defeat one of the most savage and resourceful champions in middleweight history. Leonard and Hagler squared off in the spring of 1987. “By all logic,” Nack wrote, “in the face of all history, Leonard should never have been in that ring in the first place. Except for one sad, brief encounter with an unknown fighter in May 1984, he had not fought in five years and 50 days. And yet here he was, facing one of the most remorseless, murderous punchers in the ...middleweight division, without a single tune-up to hone his boxing skills. What he was trying to do was unprecedented in the history of this consuming sport.”

Amazingly, Leonard won the 12-round fight, deftly avoiding the punches of an aging Hagler. Nack declared that Leonard, the underdog, scored an “upset of upsets,” fought “magnificently, “and displayed “great courage and resolve.” After the Hagler match, Leonard decided to improve his physique even further. He added bulk and muscle, worked on his stamina, and strengthened his hands by punching the big bag. On November 7, 1988 he added two more WBC titles to his list by defeating then-super middleweight and light heavyweight champion Donny Lalonde, for the fourth and fifth championship titles he would earn in his career. Then, to the delight of promoters and boxing fans, he signed for a rematch with Thomas Hearns.

The Leonard-Hearns fight in June of 1989 was preceded by all the usual publicity, with each boxer predicting his own victory. At one press conference, Hearns suggested that Leonard had used steroids to enhance his musculature. Leonard took the jibe in stride at the press conference, but afterwards he vehemently denied the suggestion, offering the counter opinion that Hearns had the proverbial “glass jaw.” Leonard told the Washington Post: ”I’m still ascending, still gaining altitude. I still have the desire, the self-discipline, the self-motivation.” Determined though he may have been, Leonard was only able to fight Hearns to a draw-and Hearns knocked him down twice. The match remains one of the most controversial of either fighter’s careers.

Leonard took a year off after his meeting with Hearns to contemplate his future. With a 36-1-1 record, including 25 knockouts-and a fortune estimated at nearly $100 million-the specter of retirement began to loom again. Instead Leonard decided to fight the WBC junior middleweight champion Terry Norris, a man 11 years his junior. “I knew I had to fight again, “Leonard told Sports Illustrated.”I have to know that I’ve taken my talent as far as it can go. I want to be the guy who says, ’Leonard, it’s time to quit.’ I don’t want anybody else telling me that. It’s my life, my career, my decision.”

A Farewell to Boxing

Norris defeated Leonard soundly in a 12-round fight on February 9, 1991. Immediately following the match Leonard announced his retirement for the third time. “I had a great career,” he told Sports Illustrated.”It took this fight to show me it is no longer my time. I am not of the ’90s. I feel very good. I enjoyed my career tremendously. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Leonard indeed turned a page in 1991 and has since embarked on other enterprises. In 1993 he signed with International Creative Management, a Los Angeles-based talent agency, with the hopes of having an acting career. He also released an exercise video, Boxout, that incorporated some of his training techniques from his boxing days. His first marriage having ended in divorce, Leonard married model Bernadette Robi in August of 1993. The newlyweds bought a house in the exclusive Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles-the residence boasts six bedrooms, a solarium, a game room, and exercise room, a sauna, a wine cellar, a tennis court, a swimming pool with a bath house, a fountain and an orchid greenhouse.

Despite fabulous wealth and instant recognition, the legacies of Leonard’s boxing career, in 1993 he told Ebony: ”I will always miss the ring. I truly, truly love boxing. I love beating the odds. There is nothing that compares to that feeling you get from winning. It takes the body, the mind, the heart, the inner spirit. And I was able to overcome some incredible odds. “He concluded: “Some people look down on boxing as barbaric, but it’s a wonderful sport. It has enabled me to have an incredible life, not just materialistically, but because I’ve been exposed to so much and I’ve been able to give back. The gratitude I get back from helping people, kids in particular, is worth more than everything I’ve done. I’m truly happy.”

But not happy enough, evidently, to resist the siren song of a comeback once again. On March 1, 1997, Leonard fought Hector “Macho” Camacho in Atlantic City, losing in the fifth round, the first knockout of his career. Despite the loss, he still managed to earn $4 million, a feat that prompted the Newark Star-Ledger to call Leonard’s performance a “con job,” bluntly stating that “Leonard could not fight...Camacho had a hollow shell in front of him.”

True to form, Sugar Ray “retired” while still in the ring: “I’m sure my career is definitely over ...,” quoted CBS Sportsline USA,” ...I’m through.” Just as predictable, he threw his hat back into the ring weeks later, telling ESPN’s “Up Close” that “Yes, I would fight again. I want to, I’m going to__[W]ill I go back and try to fight a champion right away? No, I’m gonna take it easy and go through a series of tuneups to get myself back where I was two months ago.” Leonard was inducted into the boxing Hall of Fame on June 15, 1997.

Sources

Ebony, November 1993, p. 26-30.

Long Beach Press-Telegram, March 31, 1991, p. 1C.

People, September 6, 1993, p. 88-89.

Sports Illustrated, September 8, 1986; March 30, 1987; April 13, 1987; April 20, 1987; November 21,1988; December 4, 1989, p. 80-86; December 18, 1989, p 24-25; February 18, 1991, p. 22-25; September 19, 1994, p. 128-29.

Star-Ledger, March 3, 1997.

Washington Post, August 26, 1977; May 28, 1989; May 29, 1989; June 11, 1989.