The Big Fight (10 page)

Apparently not. A few minutes later, Charlie and I were hanging with the champ in his locker room. It had been only eight months since Ali asked me at the Touchdown Club the question about having pussy in the days before a fight. It's a good thing I didn't remind him. It wasn't the right time.

“Are you turning pro?” Ali said.

“I'm thinking about it. I haven't made a final decision,” I said.

Ali stared at me, his quiet eyes like giant black saucers.

“Well, if you do turn pro,” he said, “just make sure that you don't do what I did. Don't let anyone own you. Remember, you are the one in the ring, and most of the money you earn should belong to you.”

He added that if I did go pro, I should hire his trainer, Angelo Dundee.

“He has the right complexion and the right connections,” Ali said.

Ali's handlers were getting a little anxious.

“Hurry up, champ,” one said. “It's time to go.”

Nobody rushed Muhammad Ali.

“I'll be there in a few minutes,” he said. “I'm talking to my friends.”

“My friends?”
Muhammad Ali was referring to me as one of his friends!

I still was not ready to make a decision. Yet sitting in Yankee Stadium that night, I found myself mesmerized by the whole spectacle—the pressure, the applause, the electricity, all of it. I pictured myself in the ring, performing, winning—the welterweight version of Ali. Bailing out my parents was the initial motivation to turn pro, but I'd be lying if I said it was the only one.

In New York, I went to meet Don King, who gave me a tour of his properties, including his luxurious penthouse apartment. Coming from Palmer Park, I felt like I was entering a new world I didn't know existed.

It didn't take long for Don to make his pitch. Patience was never his forte.

“Ray, I can make you a fortune,” he said, “and you'll be the world champion.”

Don rambled on as only he can. He offered me a deal that would, as he promised, make me wealthy. The numbers, and I don't recall exactly what they were, would have set me up for a long time.

There was only one problem. I kept hearing a voice in my head:

Which is precisely what would have happened if I had signed with Don. He would have had the right, for example, to renew the contract if at any point during its last year I was ranked in the top ten of my division. I rejected the offer, and that was the end of our “negotiations.” Over the years, I ran into Don on fight nights and we got along fairly well.

In one typical rant, he said: “Ray, you are very rich but you are still a nigger and you always will be a nigger. The white man is gonna take everything from you.” I usually laughed during his tirades. Not this time.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You have more white attorneys working for you than anybody in this business.”

King was speechless for the only time I can remember.

Another millionaire to approach us was Abe Pollin, the owner of the Washington Bullets and Washington Capitals. The Pollin group offered a $25,000 loan at first and later increased it to a $250,000 signing bonus. However, Pollin would have eventually owned half of my future earnings. No deal.

Meanwhile, as my parents' medical bills continued to rise, it was no longer a matter of
if
I was going to turn professional. It became a matter of
when
and
how.
More specifically: How would I afford it?

Maintaining distance from the boxing establishment meant that there was no capital to subsidize such an unpredictable venture. Winning the gold was no guarantee that I would succeed at the next level. The history of the sport is littered with promising amateur talents who never made it in the big leagues.

I could think of only one person to manage my new life and career, one person who had any sense of how the world really worked. That was Mike Trainer.

I didn't know Mike too well at the time, but what I did know impressed me to no end. There was not a trace of BS in anything he said. If he could get something done, he'd tell me. If not, he'd tell me that, too. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he was similar to me in one fundamental respect. He worked his way through law school, bagging groceries and delivering mail. He attended the University of Maryland, not Yale or Harvard. He earned his breaks, every one of them.

Mike put together a shrewd business plan, which he referred to as “a community-oriented investment organization.” He installed me as the lone stockholder of a new corporation, Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc., asking twenty-three friends, who were businessmen in the Washington area, to lend the company a total of about $20,000. Mike also put in $1,000 of his own money. I was the president, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer. Our meetings did not last long.

The loans would be repaid in four years at 8 percent interest, and here was the part that made the arrangement most appealing: None of the investors would own a piece of me. They would not tell me whom to fight or when or for how much. When one potential investor inquired whether, in return, I might go with him on his sales route, he was immediately shot down by the others. The enterprise was designed to give me the best opportunity to make it as a professional boxer, not as a professional pitchman. These men weren't going to get rich off me, and that was fine with them. They might not even get their money back. What if I could not compete at the highest level? What if I couldn't sell tickets? We would find out soon enough.

On October 12, 1976, I made it official. Boxing was my future after all.

“I'm doing it for my parents,” I told the press. “They're kind of down now and I'm capable of lifting them back up. I want to put them in a good financial position.”

One last piece of the puzzle remained and it was a vital one: We needed someone with legitimate credentials in the fight game to navigate past the numerous pitfalls bound to emerge. Nobody on our team—Jake, Janks, Mike, Charlie, or I—understood how the industry, corrupt since the dawn of time, operated, and we couldn't afford to learn on the job. One major slip-up, in or out of the ring, and we might never recover.

After doing his research, Charlie narrowed the field of potential candidates to be my manager and trainer to three strong finalists: Eddie Futch, who guided Joe Frazier after the passing of Yank Durham; Gil Clancy, who oversaw the development of former welterweight and middleweight champ Emile Griffith and others; and Dundee, the indispensable presence in Ali's corner since his second fight in 1960. Futch and Clancy would have been good choices, but Angelo could not be topped. As Ali said, he had the right complexion and the right connections. He knew the judges and the reporters, and there was no telling when those connections might make a huge difference.

“Ray, you got to give time to the press,” Angelo used to tell me. “Even if I'm really tired, I talk to them. They'll have the last say.”

Angelo also knew, perhaps better than any trainer in history, the adjustments to make in the corner on fight night during the crucial moments when the wrong decision can cost your man the belt. Such as the night in 1963 when he secured for Ali extra time in his tough battle with England's Henry Cooper by enlarging a split that had already opened up in his fighter's gloves. A loss to Cooper would've certainly put a halt to Ali's bid for the crown. One year later, during his first championship fight against Sonny Liston, when a solution presumed to have been applied to the champion's face somehow got into Ali's eyes during the fourth round and blurred his vision, Dundee refused his demand to cut off the gloves and end the fight. He pushed Ali toward the center of the ring and told him to hang on until his sight was back to normal. Before round seven, when Liston didn't get off his stool, Muhammad Ali was crowned as the new heavyweight champion of the world.

Angelo Dundee comprised the final member of a team I was convinced would someday make me a world champion as well.

So much had transpired in the short three months since Montreal.

So much was yet to come.

A
ngelo Dundee came aboard in November, agreeing to a deal for 15 percent of my earnings. A few weeks later, I left D.C. to train at his base, the historic 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach. I was in awe. I could not believe I would be working out in the same ring where Ali hung out all those years. I had heard of the place for so long I almost expected gold locker rooms and new, shiny equipment. Instead, the gym was the same as any other, except for one difference. I could smell its greatness.

Angelo observed as I went through a standard workout, hitting the bags, jumping rope, and doing a little sparring. He offered a few pointers afterward but was generally pleased with my technique.

“We're not going to change nothing in his style,” Angelo had told the reporters in D.C. “We're just going to add a few touches. The Sugar Ray Leonard who was good enough for the Olympics is good enough for the pros.”

Angelo estimated it would take about three years before I'd earn a shot at the title. With each of his fighters, he selected opponents to challenge them, but not too severely or too quickly. If that meant a delay in vying for the crown, so be it. Ali didn't take on Liston until his twentieth fight, more than three years after he turned pro. A loss to any combatant at an early stage in his career could derail a young promising boxer for years to come, and perhaps cause irrevocable damage to his fragile psyche.

The man chosen for my pro debut was Luis “the Bull” Vega from Ponce, Puerto Rico. At five feet seven and 141 pounds, Vega, to be blunt, appeared to be no bull. A loser in eleven of his prior twenty-five matches, he would not pose a serious threat, which was just what we aimed for on opening night. The scheduled six-round duel was slated for February 5, 1977, at the Baltimore Civic Center, which put together a more attractive offer than Abe Pollin and the Capital Centre group.

I was thrilled to launch my new life in Baltimore. Roughly forty miles from Palmer Park, Baltimore was close enough for my fans and family to attend, including Pops, who, sitting in a wheelchair near ringside, was given a one-day pass from Leland Memorial Hospital in Riverdale. He was so excited he almost passed out.

At first, the doctors told him he was too sick to travel. Being Cicero Leonard, he did not back down. His long-term prognosis was excellent, thank God, and due to the money I would be making, he and Momma would not have to worry any longer about their bills. On the subject of money, the credit went to Mike Trainer. It was obvious from my first fight that the risk I assumed by hooking up with someone outside the close-knit boxing fraternity would pay large dividends. I stood to earn, depending on the size of the gate, as much as forty thousand dollars, an unprecedented sum for a pro debut. And I thought I was rich when I signed the autographs at the car show in Los Angeles.

Vega, on the other hand, was guaranteed only $650, becoming the first of many fighters in my career to earn a lot less than I did but as would be the case with nearly everyone I faced, he did not come close to matching me as a box office draw. My fights attracted national television coverage and fans who didn't normally follow boxing. For the first time in decades, since perhaps the original Sugar Ray, nonheavy-weights made headlines. And journeymen professionals such as Luis Vega were granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pull off the upset and become famous, and perhaps rich in their own right. With Ali nearing the end of his magnificent run, someone needed to seize the throne.

The fight, to be carried by CBS, generated a terrific amount of hype, the marquee at the Civic Center reading: PRO DEBUT, SUGAR RAY LEONARD, SATURDAY FEB. 5, 4 P.M. Billboards and banners were plastered on practically every block downtown. Taking a page from the Ali playbook, I predicted a knockout in the fourth round, and figured Vega might go sooner. If that wasn't arrogant enough, I sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter inviting him to the event. Surprisingly, Carter, in office for only two weeks, found a better way to spend his Saturday afternoon.

On the day before the fight, I took Juanita and my son to see
Rocky
. The film was inspirational and instructive: I must not take Luis Vega, or anyone, for granted, I told myself.

Fight night finally arrived. Before stepping into the ring, however, I took a shot I didn't see coming. From Janks Morton, of all people.

Janks approached me in the dressing room. I expected words of encouragement, perhaps a last-minute suggestion on how I should approach this memorable night. Instead, there was only one person he was thinking about, and that was Janks Morton.

“Ray,” Janks said, “make sure that Mike gives me my percentage.”

His percentage?
I was livid. Janks may very well have had a legitimate gripe, but this was hardly the time or the place to bring up any financial concerns.

The matter was dealt with eventually, but that wasn't the point. The point was that for the first time, I realized how money could affect those closest to me, and it would not be the last time. I loved Janks Morton, and I'll always be grateful for his generosity during those uncertain weeks after the Olympics. He handed me cash, almost every day, it seemed, that he could have easily used for his family. But that didn't excuse his selfishness. I saw a side of him I never saw before, and it would change our relationship forever.

 

 

 

A
fter kissing my father, I climbed between the ropes to a warm ovation and the theme song from the Olympics. I took off my purple robe with stars on the sleeves—this was showbiz, after all—and said a brief prayer.