The Big Fight (2 page)

I did the commercials. I appeared on the talk shows. I made millions while Hagler, for much of his career, risked his life for thousands. These slights, as well as the promise of making at least $10 million, were why, in the summer of 1986, he accepted my challenge. He would put an end to the Sugar Ray Leonard hype machine, once and for all.

 

 

 

I
came up with a plan as I waited for him. Since the fight was made official I had worked on messing with Hagler's psyche, and here was one more chance. I wanted to know which Hagler I would be facing, the invincible one or the insecure one. After he entered the ring and received his ovation, every bit as generous as mine, I slowly glided toward his general direction, shuffling my feet and shadowboxing. As I crept closer, I began to think like a choreographer on Broadway, carefully plotting my steps.

The two of us were soon only a few feet apart, headed for a certain collision. If Hagler backed off to avoid me, I kept thinking, I would win the fight. If we bumped into each other, I would lose. He was the champion defending his turf and I was daring to take it away. It went back to the code in the hood, where the strongest person on the streets stood his ground against any threat.

It was a matter of respect: Did Marvin Hagler respect me or not? It then dawned on me: He was not going to move. I screwed up and I was going to pay the price.

Please fuckin' turn,
I thought.
Now!

At the last possible second, he did, darting to the side to avoid contact while I did not budge one inch. I was relieved. Hagler was mine.

We met in the center of the ring for referee Richard Steele's instructions. I looked down at the canvas, not at Hagler. I was in my zone and did not want to be disturbed.

We retreated to our respective corners, soaking up the final words of wisdom from the boxing lifers who had done everything they could to prepare us for the moment, which was only seconds away. It was now up to the two of us, half-naked and half-scared, ready to kill or be killed.

The bell rang.

M
y eyes didn't lie when I was a kid, either, and what they revealed to me in the mirror when I got home on that unforgettable day was no major surprise. I was hurting. I was hurting bad. To make things worse, I needed to clean up the marks on my face before my dad, Cicero Leonard, would notice. He was a fighter in his day, and he wouldn't think too highly of a son of his who got beat up pretty good the first time he stepped into a ring. Gaining his respect meant everything to me and it was never easy.

I was seven or eight years old. I don't recall exactly what inspired me to take on the skinny kid at the No. 2 Boys Club in D.C., several blocks from our small apartment on 210 L Street. Proving something to my dad, and myself, was probably the reason. Daddy didn't talk much, but when he did, he loved to reminisce about his favorite fighter of all time, “the Brown Bomber,” Joe Louis. He talked about growing up in the town of Mullins, South Carolina, when he used to sit by the living room radio in other people's homes—his family was too poor to purchase one—listening as Louis put away his latest victim. Louis, the undisputed world heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, offered black people hope that a brighter future was coming, that they wouldn't be condemned to second-class status behind the white man forever. As the radio announcer described the action, my dad mimicked the champ's every move, dreaming of his own glory in the ring. He loved to fight from the day he could walk.

Besides Joe Louis, my dad's other inspiration growing up was his father, Grandpa Bilge. How many of the stories about Grandpa are true and how many are myth I suppose I will never know, such as the time he knocked down Belle, his prized mule, with a single belt. If this really did happen, then Bilge, six feet three and 240 pounds of pure muscle, not the grandson he never met, was the best puncher in the Leonard family. After a long week of work, Bilge spent Saturday nights with his buddies, drinking home-brewed corn liquor and bragging about his strength.

My dad, like many black kids in the Deep South, never made it out of elementary school in the early thirties. Bilge, needing every healthy hand, put him to work plowing the fields of a large farm owned by another man. My grandparents were sharecroppers, which meant they grew crops on rented land for a percentage of the farm's production. The owner supplied the equipment and mules, and cash or credit for them to live on until the crop could be harvested. For ten hours a day, six days a week, Daddy hauled tobacco and cotton and sweet potatoes, Grandpa Bilge keeping very close watch. If he did not do what he was told, he got a good whuppin'. Bilge would wait until Daddy was in bed, and beat him with a switch, the branch of a tree. My grandma Sally, as much as it pained her, did not object. She knew her place.

Everybody did their share on the farm, including Grandma, all four feet two inches of her. The story goes that on the very next day after giving birth to one of her fourteen children, Sally was back in the fields.

As exhausted as my dad was, on Sundays, his one day off, he took on any kid from the county who was courageous enough to fight him in a ring he built by himself in his front yard using plow line ropes, an oak tree, and wood-cut staves, narrow strips of wood forming the sides. He sometimes fought as many as three or four fights, with few interruptions. After he put away the competition, which he did without much difficulty, he was cleaned up by Grandma and ready for another Sunday ritual, church.

I absorbed one blow after another that afternoon at the No. 2 Boys Club. I didn't quit, just as my dad wouldn't, searching for any openings to make the skinny kid feel the same pain I did. It didn't happen. I didn't land a single hard blow, while he kept connecting with lefts and rights I never saw. My head was pounding. My legs were burning. Blood was pouring from my nose. Mercifully, the slaughter ended. I was no son of Cicero Leonard. Fortunately, Daddy didn't notice the damage on my face, nor did any of my five siblings, and after healing from the wounds, I returned to the much safer world of comic books, in which the good guys prevailed over the forces of evil.

 

 

 

 

I
n 1941, war came and Daddy spent three and a half years in the navy, working as a cook. He expected to be sent overseas. He never was, stationed instead in Maryland and Florida. Being in the service was still a jarring experience for someone who had never slept a night away from home. Once he adjusted, he kept up with his favorite pastime, fighting. He lost only once in forty-seven bouts, to a fellow named Little Red from Philadelphia. Little Red didn't carry much of a punch but he was fast with his hands and feet. Daddy, who fought at five feet nine and about 160 pounds, was no Joe Louis, and this was as good a time as any to find out.

Daddy battled for everything he wanted in life, including his beloved Getha, and didn't care who might be in his way.

He met Getha in 1948 in the town of Gapway, South Carolina, about two hours from Columbia, when he went to pick up his cousin Robert, who had just gone on his first date with the young beauty. On the way home, Robert couldn't stop raving about Getha and how he planned to marry her one day. Pops, also now smitten, envisioned a different future and figured he might as well stake his own claim right away.

“I'm going to take that girl from you,” he told Robert.

“No, you ain't,” Robert said.

They proceeded to do what any two mature young men would if they couldn't settle an argument. They fought. Without providing a blow-byblow account, let's just say Robert never dated Getha again. Which didn't mean Daddy was going to win her over without another fight, and this one would be much tougher.

According to the rules established by Getha's mother, Nettie Elliott, boys were permitted to pay a visit only on Wednesday and Sunday nights from six to nine. At nine P.M. sharp, your ass was out the door, one way or the other. When Cicero asked Getha if he could stop by one Sunday evening, she approached her mom for permission.

“I reckon so,” Nettie said.

When it came to Grandma Nettie and her daughter's love life, that was about as much enthusiasm as she could muster, and with good reason. Getha had given birth to a son, Roy, about a year before with a man who was no longer around. Nettie and her husband took on the responsibility of raising Roy until years later, when he came up north to live with us in D.C.

For about a month, Cicero and Getha saw each other—only on Wednesdays and Sundays, of course—and held hands, her parents in another room. Soon they announced they wanted to get married.

“Do you know what you're doing?” Grandma asked Momma. Momma said she did.

Yet my grandfather, in vetting a possible marriage, wanted to make sure Cicero would be a strong provider for his only daughter. He went around in his road cart to the farms in the county, asking if this Cicero Leonard was a good worker. Satisfied by the responses he received, he allowed the wedding.

For the first couple of years together, my parents stayed in South Carolina, before settling in Wilmington, North Carolina, where my dad found work on the Coca-Cola assembly line, putting bottles in crates. The move came at the perfect time. The jobs available for blacks in South Carolina in those days were mostly in farming, and Daddy figured he had spent enough time hauling tobacco. Besides, Momma was never a farm girl. The sun made her sick. Soon, the kids started to come, one after another, me being the third youngest of six, arriving on May 17, 1956. I was named after my momma's hero, the great Ray Charles, whose hit song “I Got a Woman” reached the top of
Billboard
's R&B singles charts in 1955. A member of the church choir, she was hoping for another singer in the family.

In 1960, packing everyone in a car borrowed from my daddy's brother, Norwood, we moved again, to Washington, D.C. We lived with him until we found an apartment only a short distance from the Capitol. Uncle Norwood said there was a lot of work in town, and he was right, as Daddy landed a job at a wholesale grocery store, filling up the outdoor stands with fruit and potatoes. After a few years, we left the District to rent a house in nearby Seat Pleasant, Maryland. In the late sixties, we moved to Palmer Park, a racially mixed lower-class area about twenty minutes from D.C. We rented first before buying a place of our own, on Barlowe Road, for eighteen thousand dollars. Given the modest dwellings we had lived in, the house felt as spacious as the Hearst Castle, and I didn't mind that the rooms were cramped or that I shared a bedroom with my two older brothers. Daddy worked as the night manager of S&R, a twenty-four-hour supermarket, for about one hundred dollars a week, twice what he earned at the other store. It would be the last real job he ever held.

He worked long hours, from midnight until almost noon, and then, whatever the weather, walked the whole five miles home. Every so often, he asked for a lift, but folks always said they were headed in a different direction. I can't imagine the humiliation he must have felt when he watched the same people drive right past him. It took years before he saved enough money to buy a car. Sundays were our favorite time, Daddy taking the family for a picnic of barbecued fried chicken and watermelon or to the beach. While we played in the water, he slept on the grass, the heavy toll of the week catching up to him.

My mom didn't have it any easier, working as a nurse's assistant at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring from eleven P.M. until seven A.M. After making dinner, she caught a bus to downtown D.C., where she transferred to another bus. For seventy-five cents, which was no small change, she then took a cab from the bus station to the hospital, and another back to the station on her way home. The trip took her two hours each way.

Daddy did everything in the store that no one else wanted to do, which included driving a large trash truck to the suburbs twice a week. On evenings when the truck was parked in front of our house, my brothers got so embarrassed they couldn't wait for him to drive it out of sight the following morning. Every winter, he put up the Christmas lights at the home of one of S&R's two owners, or “boss men,” as they were known, who lived an hour away in northern Virginia.

Pops didn't have a choice. Good jobs for black men were not in abundance. He and Momma were struggling to feed six children and couldn't afford to alienate anybody. The boss men weren't cruel to my dad, although they didn't hesitate to put him in his place.

“Your son is too small,” they said years later, after I began to attain a little success as an amateur boxer in the Washington region. “He will never be anything.”

“He will,” insisted Pops. “He will. You just wait.”

They laughed.

When I became rich and famous, they stopped laughing.

“Do you think your son might want to buy the store?” one of the owners asked.

“No,” Daddy said. “Not a chance.”

He told me one of the most satisfying moments he ever experienced was when he walked into S&R for the first time as a customer instead of as an employee after I made it possible for him to retire. He was as proud as a father could be.

The feeling was mutual, even if I was slow to come around. I will never forget the day I saw Momma holding Daddy's unsteady hand, showing him how to write his name, one letter at a time. My father, my hero, could not write his own name. Eventually, though, I grew to have a deep appreciation for the sacrifices he made and how tough it must have been to survive in the world without a decent education. Yet he never felt pity for himself or allowed anyone to feel pity for him.

 

 

 

P
almer Park, a community of similiar one-story structures, was not the most dangerous place, although we did have our share of drug dealers and troublemakers, many of whom hung out at the Landover Mall, a couple of miles from my house. My friends and I tried to keep our distance from them but didn't always succeed. One afternoon, several of us were hanging out near the front entrance to the Palmer Park Recreation Center when we stumbled upon an argument between a thug in the neighborhood and a fat, mentally challenged kid. The guy suddenly took a wrench and pounded the kid's head over and over. The blood gushed out the way you see it in the movies. He didn't care that we were watching. He knew we weren't going to call the cops or help the kid, or we'd have the rest of his friends coming after us.