The Big Fight (13 page)

The story was the same on the road, my boys taking care of the arrangements. In Baton Rouge, for example, while I trained for Marcos Geraldo, they kept a sharp lookout for any pretty women who came to the sparring sessions, or to the fight itself, jotting down their numbers and addresses. Weeks later, about ten of us, including my brothers, flew back into town to divvy up the pool of talent, and, believe me, there was plenty to go around after I got first dibs.

Looking back, I can offer no defense for my conduct. I was wrong and I have to live with these sins, and the ones to follow, every single day. They eventually cost me my first marriage and deeply harmed the relationships with my two older sons. At the same time, I wasn't the first, and I wouldn't be the last, celebrity to surrender to the irresistible temptations fame provides. Until one has experienced the full range of pleasures that most people are denied their whole lives, and that includes sex with breathtakingly beautiful women, one has no concept of how alluring they can be. If I had not been rich and famous, these women would not have given me the time of day.

The boys, now old men, tell me they miss the glory days. At the age of fifty-four, blessed with a second chance at marriage and fatherhood I didn't deserve, I do not. Still, I understand how they feel. We thought we owned the world. No possession was beyond our grasp, and there was no reason to wait for it. If I went to a car dealership and spotted a Maserati that I desired, the car would belong to me within minutes. I wouldn't sit in an office for an hour to work out the financing. “Call Mike Trainer,” I'd tell the lot owner, “and make the deal.” He'd hand over the tags and I'd drive away with my new toy. Cars, women, they were all toys.

Why did Juanita stick around? Why not leave me and find a man who would treat her with the proper respect? In her early twenties, she was more beautiful than ever and, just as in high school, could have attracted anyone she wished for.

Maybe it was because of our son or because she'd invested so much time in us already. Whatever her reasoning, it was a miracle that she didn't blow my brains out. If it had been the other way around, I would not have been as forgiving. When we were teenagers, I routinely beat up guys if they even looked at her the wrong way. I sent one kid under a jukebox, another almost through a windshield. In the mid-1970s, during a period when we weren't seeing each other, I went crazy when I heard she was dating somebody else. I stopped by her house at about three in the morning, practically pushed her into the car, and after driving about three or four miles, told her to get out and walk home by herself. Within a minute or two, I regained my senses and turned around to pick her up. It wasn't until the late 1980s that she stopped trying to save our marriage. I could not blame her. She gave me more chances than I deserved.

Meanwhile, with every fight—every hike in prize money—came the growing realization that to my family and friends I was no longer Ray the son, Ray the brother, or Ray the buddy. I was Ray the bank.

I was the one with riches they never dreamed of, and believed they were entitled to as well. One day, somebody might need three hundred dollars. Another day, five hundred dollars. Rare was the day that a member of my family or a friend did not seek some type of bailout, promising to pay me back, although we both knew he or she never would. We both knew they never
could.
It reached the point where I told them not to pay me back. Did I resent being my own private welfare state in Palmer Park, Maryland? You bet I did. I might have felt differently if they had made a genuine effort to earn the money themselves, however degrading the work might have seemed. They didn't. They weren't proud, like my dad, who busted his butt at a job with no chance to ever move up.

Of course, why would they be like Pops? Why would they look for honest work when they knew I'd come to their rescue every time?

“What's a little money to you, anyway?” they said. “You're going to make another fortune in six months.”

All they needed was to see the signs of my success—the Mercedes Benz, the six-bedroom home in the suburbs, the television in almost every room—to know I could afford to give them whatever they wanted. They were never going to break Ray the bank.

They didn't seem to recognize when it had been only a week or so since their most recent withdrawal. If they did, they didn't care. All they cared about was squeezing another dime out of me. They went through the cash almost faster than I could give it to them, and they weren't savvy enough to use it as an opportunity to improve their lives over the long haul. Money was, like a lot of things, something they couldn't handle. Fortunately, they are better off today than they were thirty years ago because they had the good sense to marry spouses who taught them how to be responsible in middle age.

My friends and family members told the bleakest stories. Too bad Oprah wasn't around in those days.

“Ray, you know, my car is broken down,” one friend said, “and there's no way for me to get to work without it. It's too far to walk.”

“Ray, I'm way behind on the rent,” another said, “and the landlord is threatening to kick me out if I don't pay right away.”

Rent was a regular hook, not food or clothes or other basic necessities.

On and on it went, forever, it seemed. One friend had the nerve to suggest I pay him the exact sum he owed Uncle Sam. He was not kidding.

They didn't come right out and ask for money. That would be too bold. Yet the subtext of the “conversation” was obvious from the second they walked through the door.

Roger was assertive enough to ask, though not for cash. He asked for
chickens—
each chicken the equivalent of one hundred dollars.

“Ray, can you spare me a couple of chickens?” he'd say.

I have always wondered whether asking for chickens was Roger's clever way to make it appear like he was not seeking a handout from his younger brother. If it was, I wasn't fooled for one moment. Kenny, meanwhile, came to me with dozens of schemes to make a quick buck. He was like Ralph Kramden from
The Honeymooners
. Not one idea made any money, or sense.

The amounts to satisfy their needs, at least for the short term, were manageable, never larger than two thousand dollars, which I could easily produce from the cash in my safe. Or I simply wrote a check. Either way, it's not as if I missed the money.

My accountant, Don Gold, didn't quite see it that way.

“If you give away two thousand dollars a hundred times,” Don said, “that's a lot of money.”

Mike Trainer was more emphatic. “Ray, when you start saying no to these people, when you start being an asshole, that's when you will be happy,” he said. He was right. He later came up with the ingenious concept of hiring family members and friends as independent contractors in training camp, allowing me to deduct their expenses from my income.

On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? If I turned them down, I would come across as the black man who made it big in whitey's world and then forgot where he came from and the people who helped him get there. Giving them money was also a heck of a lot easier than squabbling. Rewarded for my fighting skills, I still did whatever I could to avoid any conflicts outside the ring. The memories of my parents' brawls were never far beneath the surface.

On occasion, I handed over more money than they wanted, and sometimes when they did not want any at all. If someone needed a few bucks for gas, I would pull out a Ben Franklin without a second thought. When Kenny mentioned he was going shopping for a new suit, I would tell him to buy whatever he preferred, money being no object. He might spend close to a grand. One time, I went to visit my sisters without notice and took them to Saks Fifth Avenue, and gave each a five-thousand-dollar limit.

I could never be the asshole Mike suggested, except once. It happened when Roger walked into my office. I knew what he wanted and did not let him get the words out before I flashed him the same cold stare we got whenever we disappointed our father. He could see I was in no mood to make another contribution to the Roger Leonard Emergency Fund. His face turning red, he ran off without saying good-bye.

I bought homes and cars for my brothers and sisters, and for countless others. When a group went to dinner, whether there were five, ten, or twenty of us, I picked up the check. Everyone expected it. Helping to sort out the multitude of gifts was Mike's trusted assistant, Caren Kinder. Caren was my gatekeeper for decades, protecting me to no end. She was invaluable in determining what I needed to know and when I needed to know it.

More distressing than the loss of cash was the loss of closeness. No one bothered to ask: “Ray, how are
you
?” They came to me to fix their problems, never to hear about mine.

I wanted to shout: “You guys do not get it, do you? I'm in great pain, too, and my pain is just as important as your pain.” After they left, their needs met, I closed the iron gates and felt alone.

Looking back and trying to make sense of this period from their perspective, I wonder if being alone was simply the price I was meant to pay for my success. They put me on a pedestal as well, and I felt just as lousy then as I did when they came for money. When the family gathered for dinner and I was running late, my mom would say, “We can't eat till Ray gets here.” Momma would not have waited for any of her other kids, but since I was Sugar Ray Leonard, I was to be treated differently. It was never what I wanted. I was suspicious enough already of people's motives in the outside world, not knowing if they liked me for who I was or because of my popularity. At home, I figured I would be loved for simply being myself, a son and a brother. That's not what happened, and it was my loss. It's hard to blame them too much. After all, it was up to me to let them know how I felt, and I didn't. I couldn't.

I couldn't because of the pressure I felt living up to the image I had worked tirelessly to create. I was incredibly blessed, especially for a young black man from Palmer Park, Maryland. How could I then tell my family, or anyone, of that pain—that darkness—inside me? So I did what I always did. I buried it, which made me feel even worse.

To be fair, none of us, and that included me, had the slightest experience dealing with sudden, unimaginable success. White folks from the middle and upper classes coped much better whenever one of their own struck it rich. Money wasn't a strange, new object to them as it was for poor folk.

 

 

 

T
here were problems I couldn't fix with money, such as Roger's addiction to drugs, which dated back to the early 1970s.

Heroin was his drug of choice. Perhaps I could have made a difference if I had paid more attention to him, but there was only one person I paid attention to, and his initials were SRL. Instead of love, I gave Roger money, even if we both knew where it was going. I'm ashamed to admit I was worse than his dealer.

Similar to my friend Derrik Holmes, Roger, who turned pro in 1978 as a light middleweight, was loaded with natural ability. There is no question in my mind, and I don't believe there is in his, that if he had been able to conquer his demons, he, too, would have been a world champion. Roger was clever, elusive, fearless. His opinions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of my opponents were invaluable. There was little my brother could not do, except stay clean.

“You can't be a part-time fighter,” I often told him. “You will never make it that way.”

He didn't learn. Roger registered sixteen victories and only one defeat before he, like Derrik, quit for good in 1982. Unlike Derrik, he never fought for a title, and he has only one person to blame.

In the early eighties, Roger enrolled in a rehab center in Atlanta but was back on drugs within a week of his release. I went to see him in rehab, but I was high myself and in no position to offer any advice. I was incredibly embarrassed and hoped he didn't notice. It was not until about a year later, when he checked into a center on his own in D.C., that he made progress. He dropped by my house to inform me of his plans.

“Don't tell anyone, Ray, but I'm going in,” he said.

I handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill, which he spent on heroin, though it was the last time he did any drugs. He's been clean for almost thirty years and today counsels others not to make the choices he made.

Roger wasn't my only sibling addicted to heroin. So was my sister Sharon. I was quite upset but there was little I could do—until I got word while training for my fight with Johnny Gant that one of my sparring partners, Henry Bunch, had supplied her with drugs.

I decided to teach Bunch a lesson. I extended the rounds of sparring from three minutes to five and, ultimately, seven, for the sole reason that I could hurt him over and over. He was busted up pretty good by the time we were done. Many years later, I found out Bunch had not given her drugs. I felt awful.

 

 

 

A
few weeks after the Price fight, I started to train in earnest for Benitez. He was sure to be my stiffest challenge to date. When summing up the 1970s and 1980s, boxing experts routinely cite Duran, Hearns, Hagler, and me among the era's best fighters, yet too often fail to include Benitez. He is overlooked because he was never in another memorable match after he fought me. Nor did he possess the charisma I displayed nor was he as intimidating as the other three. That doesn't mean Benitez wasn't truly gifted. He just happened to be born at the wrong time.

The youngest of three brothers who fought professionally, he was only seven years old when he made his debut in the Puerto Rican Golden Gloves. At thirteen, he won the national AAU title, and two years later, knocked out Hiram Santiago in the first round of his first pro fight.