The Big Fight (26 page)

Boxing didn't stop when Joe Louis retired or Muhammad Ali retired, and it wasn't about to stop with Sugar Ray Leonard on the sidelines.

A writer asked me if I would miss the sport during the next six months.

“Time will tell,” I said.

 

 

 

I
didn't miss it at first. I enjoyed being back home with Juanita and Ray Jr., now eight. We watched television, went bowling, did a lot of things normal families do. I was also grateful to be spared Mount Motherfuck and the other rigors of training. It felt no different from the breaks I regularly took after every fight. Three months went by between Bonds and Kalule, five between Hearns and Finch. Long gone were the days of fighting once a month. Plus, with the endorsement opportunities and the chance to do more boxing analysis on television, there would be plenty to keep me busy.

Yet as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, I was overcome with more and more anxiety. Whenever I had felt those emotions before, and it was fairly often, I headed to the gym. There was nothing like pounding the bags, or some poor soul's face, to flush the anger out of my system. Without the gym, I needed a new haven.

It didn't take me long to find one.

I don't recall where I was or who I was with when I did cocaine for the first time that summer. I was wary, I must admit, knowing how much drugs messed up Roger, as well as my sister Sharon. Yet I wasn't weak like they were. If I could handle Benitez, Duran, and Hearns, I could certainly handle a little white powder. Besides, during my trips to California, the people I did coke with did not work on the streets, as did the drug dealers back in Palmer Park. They lived in mansions with swimming pools. They were some of the most high-profile stars in music and movies, people of stature. If they thought cocaine was cool, who was I to argue? Wherever I went, cocaine was on the table, as if it were part of the furniture. I was surprised when it
wasn't
there.

The high I got from cocaine was incredible. I tried pot a few times as a teenager, but it made me paranoid, and I was too serious about boxing to mess around for long. Coke made me feel like I did in the ring, in complete control. I became funny, engaging, articulate. Coke made the anxieties go away. I was Sugar Ray again.

Except that they kept coming back, over and over. Which meant I needed more coke. Lots more.

Fortunately, due to my celebrity status, I didn't have to buy my own. The high rollers I hung with were thrilled to share with the champ, coke being another symbol of their vast wealth and power. As time went on, though, and my appetite grew, I couldn't wait for the next party in Bel Air or the next visit to a swanky club in West Hollywood. I paid for the stuff myself, doling out one thousand dollars here, two thousand dollars there, which seemed a bargain for the buzz cocaine gave me. Only, those dollars began adding up in a hurry. One friend I used as a supplier estimates that I spent a quarter of a million dollars per year on coke, and I bet he's not far off. The stuff he bought was high quality, though he admitted to me last year, as I had suspected, that he cut some of it for what he termed “a handler's fee.” There was nothing I could have done. I was not about to ask a stranger working the streets to take his place.

I kept my habit a secret, but always worried that people would find out. Each time I visited Dr. Michels for a checkup, I wondered: If you do cocaine, can your pupils still dilate? If he did observe a difference, he never said anything. Nor did anybody else. Yet they had to know.

One time, a member of my team tried to convince me to stop taking drugs by appealing to another vice of mine, and smartly picked a time when he knew I couldn't walk away. We were thirty-five thousand feet in the air, flying to somewhere I don't remember.

“Ray, did you happen to know that cocaine kills your sex drive?” the person said.

I appreciated the effort. I knew, however, that there was no validity to that statement, not for me. Cocaine, if anything, increased my interest in sex.

What about Mike Trainer? If he was my protector, it's natural to ask: Why didn't he protect me from my most dangerous enemy . . . myself? It's because that's never what our relationship was about. He kept track of my business affairs but did not interfere in my personal matters, unless I sought his advice, which was rare. Even if Mike had spoken up forcefully, I was not in the frame of mind to listen. The spell drugs and alcohol cast over me was overwhelming and, like most victims of substance abuse, I was the last to recognize it.

“You need to see somebody,” Juanita told me one morning after another night I couldn't remember. “You're an alcoholic, Ray.”

No way, I told her. The impression I had of alcoholics came from the movies—dirty, down-and-out bums thrown out of bars, not famous prizefighters worth millions. Not Sugar Ray Leonard. She was right, of course, but to admit to being an alcoholic was something I could not do. Not in 1982. I did instead what any alcoholic would do when he or she gets angry. I drank some more.

The public, thank goodness, had no clue as to who I had become. They still saw me as the kid who took the gold in Montreal, and the three of us as the all-American family they wanted us to be. It's strange to believe that so many fans would be fooled, but it was a role my wife and I knew how to play. We were experts. When a TV crew or magazine reporter came to the house for a puff piece, we posed for cute pictures and said all the right things. The moment they left, we returned to being as dysfunctional as ever.

I assumed nothing could take me down, and that included the authorities, although there were some awfully close calls over the years.

After one nasty fight with Juanita, I took off in my Jeep and was driving on Route 1 just outside D.C. when a pickup truck hit me as I was trying to make a left turn. The car was totaled, the wheel bent up, and I briefly lost consciousness. I was fortunate to escape with only a bruised sternum and cuts on my face and wrist. While I was being treated in the hospital, a friend who assisted with my security found out where the vehicle was impounded, and supposedly conducted a thorough search before the cops could to make certain there was no coke on the seat or in the glove compartment. There wasn't. He later claimed that he proceeded to pay the orderlies in the hospital a couple of hundred bucks apiece to hand him the sample of blood taken from me after the crash, which surely contained traces of alcohol. To show how messed up I was, when he explained what he had done, it did not occur to me how close I had come to getting into serious trouble.

The other harrowing moment that stands out came as I was about to board the
Queen Elizabeth II
for a cruise to England in the late summer of 1982. I had agreed to appear in a documentary film to be shot on the ship. The way I was acting, leaving the country was the best move I could make.

When I was about ten or fifteen yards from being searched by customs at the gate, I suddenly remembered the cocaine in my pocket and started to panic. How would I talk my way out of this one? Thinking fast, I slipped the cocaine to Ollie Dunlap, my administrative assistant. I figured it would be easier to get Ollie out of jail than me. I didn't tell him what was in the aluminum foil, though by the expression on his face I could tell that he had a pretty good idea. He broke into a cold sweat and kept his hand clenched until we passed through customs. Once I was safely in my cabin, I got the cocaine back and never carried it in public again. I apologized to Ollie. I could have ruined his life. It was bad enough that I was ruining my own.

The cruise on the
Queen Elizabeth II
was memorable for another reason besides almost going to jail.

The crew filming the documentary asked me to spar a few rounds with a fellow named Steve Sinclair, who had a job on the ship's crew. Why not? After all, what could some lowly sailor do to me? I'd throw a few innocent body shots, slip a few from him, and the crew would have the footage they required. Yet before I knew it, with several hundred tourists assembled in the ship's ballroom, Sinclair, an ex-fighter who weighed about 190, landed a hard blow, to my injured eye, no less, which I didn't exactly appreciate during an “exhibition.” Ollie told me later that my eyes got that intense, almost deranged look he knew only too well. I promptly tagged Steve with a belt to the body. There was nothing innocent about it. Down he went. He wasn't badly hurt, thank goodness, and collected himself to finish the show. Needless to say, he didn't throw any more hard blows.

It was not until the session was done that it hit me:
What the hell is wrong with you? You are the welterweight champion of the freaking universe and you just knocked down a sailor who works on the
Queen Elizabeth II
. You could have hurt him bad!
Maybe it was my head, not my eye, that needed to be examined. As for the eye, I was relieved that the punch did no apparent damage, though putting gloves on only a few months after surgery must rank among my dumbest decisions, and the list is long. At the same time, the applause felt wonderful. I missed fighting more than I was willing to admit.

 

 

 

W
hile the leaves began to change colors, one reporter after another wanted to know if I'd ever fight again.

As usual, I was vague enough to give off signals in both directions, which indicated how confused I was. Juanita, my mom, and what seemed to be the entire free world, judging from the mail I received, felt the same as they did in the spring when I had the operation. With my finances and faculties in order, why should I take the risk? I understood where they were coming from, and at times agreed with them. Other times, I felt that at my age there was still so much for me to accomplish. The end of my career would come soon enough.

In October, I flew to Brockton, Massachusetts, to tape an interview with Marvin Hagler for HBO. I had begun to do quite a bit of work for the cable network, which was becoming a more prominent player in boxing. When we sat down in his backyard, I was impressed by the tranquillity of the surroundings and what they said about the man himself. He was at peace. He did not need the spotlight to make him whole.

As Hagler and I talked, I could not help but wonder: Why was I asking the questions instead of answering them?

Dr. Michels had assured me that I would not be risking any greater damage to my eye than normal if I decided to compete again. I could call Mike Trainer and he'd initiate talks with Hagler, Pryor, or anyone else and put together an attractive matchup in no time. As for the public, they might question my wisdom at first, but would eventually welcome me back with open arms. In any case, interviewing Hagler was tougher than I imagined. During a break, I drank about two or three Long Island Iced Teas, my favorite alcoholic beverage. I went back to finish the interview, but Ross Greenburg, my boss at HBO, took one look and had me drink a few cups of coffee. Ross always knew what to do whenever I lost my bearings. He was issuing instructions in a production meeting for an upcoming telecast once when I took out a vial of coke and a spoon and had a hit right there at the conference table. He kept talking as if nothing happened.

As the weeks went by, I changed my mind every day, if not every hour. The only firm decision I made was that I'd make a formal announcement about my plans on November 9 at the Baltimore Civic Center in a program entitled “An Evening with Sugar Ray.” I could never do anything quietly, could I? I invited family and friends, including Howard Cosell, who kindly agreed to be master of ceremonies. We sold tickets at two dollars apiece, the proceeds going to a fund to provide summer jobs for kids in Baltimore. The night promised to have all the excitement of a title fight . . . except for the fight itself.

About a week before the announcement, I made the decision: I would retire. I could not imagine going against my fans. I wanted more than anything to please them while I was in the ring, and the same desire carried over to
leaving
the ring. If I resumed my career, I'd be violating the trust they had placed in me since the Olympics, when, of everyone in the fight game, I was the lucky one chosen to succeed Ali. By yielding to common sense, I'd demonstrate that their faith in me was well deserved, that I was, indeed, the rare prizefighter to exit the stage at the proper time. I revealed my feelings in a
Sports Illustrated
cover piece, set to hit the newsstands a few days after the ceremony in Baltimore. The byline said it all: “by Ray Charles Leonard, as told to Pat Putnam,” the magazine's boxing writer. I was Ray now. Sugar Ray belonged in the past.

When the night arrived, the suspense in Baltimore was exactly the mood I was looking for. Nobody, not even Juanita or Mike or my parents, knew for sure what I would tell the crowd. The trouble was, neither did I.

I thought I knew. Why else would I have agreed to the
SI
interview? Yet while I waited in the dressing room, as the crowd, which included Ali and Hagler, took their seats, I began to have second thoughts. There was only one way to regain control.

“Give me my medicine,” I told Kenny and Joe Broddie, who carried it with them.

That's what I called coke, as if it were a prescription to make me feel better, which I suppose it did. I took a few hits but I still wasn't relaxed. I took a few more. The extra hits did the trick. The boys checked the outside of my nostrils to make certain there was no residue of powder. Imagine if I had missed a spot and it was caught on camera. I could have retired and been arrested on the same night.

Howard seized the microphone in the makeshift ring that had been set up and the event got under way. While the approximately seventy-five hundred fans in attendance saw highlights of my greatest fights, I couldn't help but think back to my first pro bout against Luis Vega, staged in this very same arena five years earlier. A lot had happened in those five years. I had grown from a boxer into a fighter, a boy into a man. My mind continued to wander as Ali entertained the crowd. It was only six years since Charlie Brotman and I visited with him in his dressing room at Yankee Stadium before the Norton fight. It was a lifetime ago.