The Big Fight (9 page)

Mike gave Janks a bewildered look, as if asking,
What the heck is wrong with this guy? Does he know how to talk?

“Don't worry,” Janks said. “I'll call you later.”

Thanks to Mike, who knew somebody high up at the school, I was awarded a nonathletic scholarship to the University of Maryland, where I planned to pursue a degree in business administration. I also wanted to help kids just as I was helped.

The first day of classes was weeks away. In the meantime, I'd cash in on my new fame just as swimmer Mark Spitz did in 1972, perhaps appearing on the front of the Wheaties box. To help me sift through the offers, we contacted public relations specialist Charlie Brotman. Charlie knew everyone in town, working wonders with the Washington Whips, the soccer franchise, and the Tapers, the professional basketball squad. If Charlie could generate awareness for these rather obscure outfits, he would make a fortune for an Olympic gold medalist and TV star.

I waited for a letter in the mail or a knock at the front door from somebody offering me $1 million, and it couldn't happen fast enough. I thought back to the night early in my courtship with Juanita when I asked her to the movies. I went to Kenny and my mother to borrow a car. They turned me down. With nobody else to approach, I had to tell Juanita we couldn't go. I was ashamed and determined.

“Juanita,” I said, “one day, I promise you, I'll have enough money that I won't have to ask anybody for anything. They're going to have to come to
us
for money.”

In the aftermath of Montreal, that day had arrived.

Or so I assumed. As the summer wore on, the glow from the gold fading by the hour, it became evident that Madison Avenue did not picture me as the right person to promote its products to Middle America.

“We loved watching Ray in the Olympics,” was the standard response, according to Charlie, “and we know he has a great future ahead of him, but . . .” The “but” had to do with the paternity suit. As I feared, they didn't bother to check the facts.

In their view, there was no room in a family company for a black spokesman—a difficult sell to begin with—who had a child out of wedlock and didn't fulfill his obligations as a father. It didn't help that fighters had never been seen as ideal role models. Poor, uneducated, inarticulate, they would not appeal to average, hardworking Americans. Instead, the only offers I got were for appearances at local businesses, with the payoff very little—a few hundred dollars, tops—or, at times, none at all. I went anyway. I accepted every free dinner I could. That's what growing up the way I did will do to you.

I was, to put it mildly, not organized. I reached into my pockets once and handed Charlie dozens of phone numbers and appointments hurriedly scribbled on torn napkins and matchbook covers. I had no clue as to what I agreed to, with whom, and when, often committing myself to be in two places at one time.

Charlie never stopped working the phones. One deal he arranged took the two of us to Hollywood, where I signed pictures at an automobile show, “The World of Wheels.” For every autograph, I was paid a buck or two, Charlie stuffing the bills into his pockets and socks. When we got to our hotel room, he dumped the entire pile on the bed. I started to count. “We're rich,” I told Charlie, the total several hundred dollars, at least. I jumped up and down and tossed the cash in the air. As thrilled as I was, Bruce Jenner, the decathlon winner from the Montreal Games, was raking in the real dough, pitching every product on the planet. I had no problem with Bruce doing so well. He earned it. But there was no doubt in my mind that if I were white, I would have done a lot better, paternity suit or no paternity suit.

Once again, I kept my opinions to myself. Bringing up my race was never going to do me much good. If anything, it might make my situation worse. I was not as reserved, though, when it came to the matter of how my family responded to the suit. They found someone to blame instead of the county. Juanita, of course. She was perceived as a gold digger before there was any gold to go around. Never mind that I was the one who got her pregnant and didn't have the money to support our child.

I should have stood up for her and explained why the county filed the suit, but the other Leonards, as thickheaded as ever, wouldn't have backed down anyway. I was fighting a losing battle, and it didn't matter that my mom actually accompanied Juanita the first time she applied for welfare. The atmosphere grew so tense she stopped coming by the house. I couldn't blame her.

That was not the worst of it. The worst were the incredibly harsh comments the girls Juanita knew from high school made to her face, such as: “You tried to trap him with a baby, but it's never going to work,” or, “I want him, you little shit, and I am going to fight you for him.” She'd be walking down the street and someone would point her out: “There goes the bitch that did it to Ray.” When a few girls threatened to beat her up, I was concerned for her safety. Yet, in her own feisty manner, Juanita was as tough as I was, never abandoning her faith in the bond we maintained with each other. She could withstand any insults as long as she believed we'd be together.

The controversy also kept Juanita from going with me and my family to visit President Gerald Ford in the White House. I saw no need to put her in the spotlight. But I was glad I went. The pride my parents showed was something I'll always cherish. Growing up in the Deep South, they never imagined they would one day be having a conversation with the president of the United States.

Howard Cosell was there, too, and was most gracious.

“Don't worry about it, Ray,” Howard said, referring to the paternity suit. “It will blow over.” Howard was a true friend.

As the days wore on, the story did not blow over. Nor did the emptiness in my soul since returning from Montreal. I wanted to believe that the void was directly related to the suit, and the negative reaction it generated among the fans of mine who felt betrayed.

I knew better. The truth was that, without chasing the gold medal as a distraction, I was lost.

I didn't realize how lost until the night I almost made the worst mistake of my life. I get chills when I think about it.

The first thing I did wrong was to call up a friend from D.C. who hung around with a much different crowd—the crowd I spent my high school years doing all I could to avoid. I knew they committed crimes. I just didn't know which ones. I didn't
want
to know.

I could have called a lot of friends to be with, but for once I didn't gave a damn about doing the right thing. I had done the right thing in representing my country, in bringing home the gold, and what good had it gotten me? I wasn't a hero. I was a nigger. And if I was a nigger, I might as well hang out with the other niggers.

I drove to an apartment in the northeast part of town where a friend of his lived. About ten people were already there listening to music and smoking weed. I knew a few of them.

“What's up, Sugar?” they said when I arrived. I could tell they were a little surprised to see me.

After exchanging small talk for about a half hour, I noticed several guys heading toward the bathroom. They were gone for a while before I began to investigate.

The door was closed. I knocked.

“It's me, man,” I said. “Let me in.”

When the door opened, I saw them brushing against one another, handing a long needle down the line, from one to the next.

They were doing heroin. I was naïve about drugs but I wasn't
that
naïve.

“Do me, man,” I pleaded. “Do me!”

Almost immediately, one of the guys prepared to tie a piece of rope around my arm. The needle was slowly headed my way.

Just then, my friend realized what was happening.

“Ray, I am not going to let you fuck up your life,” he said. “It is too late for us. Our lives are already fucked up. You
are
somebody. You're an Olympic champion.”

Those words hung awkwardly in the crowded bathroom, but they were exactly the words I needed to hear. No, I was not going to fuck up my life. I took off as fast as I could, my arms spared the needle marks that would have done more damage than I could ever contemplate.

As the weeks went by, however, and I was still not offered any exciting money-making opportunities, I started to believe that maybe I wasn't somebody after all. Janks Morton warned me I'd feel this way. He spent a lot of time around former NFL players, seeing how their sense of worth crumbled after they could no longer make a tackle or catch a pass.

“Ray, you need to take advantage of your name because you are hot right now,” Janks pointed out. “It won't be this way forever. If you don't do something about it soon, it will be too late.”

I did not agree. People would come around eventually. After all, I had brought the gold to Palmer Park. I was chosen by the famous Howard Cosell as the successor to Muhammad Ali. I was . . . Sugar Ray Leonard!

In early September, Janks, frustrated with my inability to grasp reality, asked me to accompany him to a busy D.C. intersection at lunch hour.

“I bet you could stand here for hours and few people will recognize you,” Janks said.

“That's insane,” I shot back. “People will stop to ask for my autograph. I was on television!”

I stood there forever, the minutes turning into hours, hundreds of people passing by as if I were invisible. In total, less than a dozen mentioned they had seen me on TV or congratulated me for capturing the gold. I kept changing where I stood to give them a better angle, almost blocking their path. It made no difference. I became more and more discouraged. I wasn't as popular as I thought. I was Ray, not Sugar Ray, Leonard. Once I conceded the point, Janks and I headed back to Palmer Park.

It was not the decline in my popularity, however, that made me begin to reconsider my future. It was the decline in the health of my parents. Both became ill around the same time and didn't have the money to pay the medical bills that piled up every day. My father was already feeling bad in Montreal but didn't say a word. That was how he was brought up, and he figured I had enough to worry about. When we returned to Maryland, he felt worse. It got to the point where he couldn't digest any food or urinate, and was slurring his words. Pops insisted that it was just a cold. Yeah, some cold. He slipped into a coma and was rushed to the hospital. He suffered from spinal meningitis and tuberculosis, and lost forty pounds. There was talk that he might not make it.

As usual, I buried my emotions. Until the day I couldn't.

The doctor was speaking to my father while he played with a dollar bill, as if he were a little boy. He was having another of his hallucinations. I looked into his eyes and thought, here was my rock, the strongest man I had ever known, and he was totally out of it. I cried, and seeing the pain in my mom's face only made me cry harder. Yes, they fought like hell. Yes, they almost broke up over and over again. But Cicero and Getha Leonard loved each other. They loved each other from the time they got past my grandparents' rules and started dating in South Carolina, and now their future as a couple was in serious jeopardy. As for Momma, a short time before the Olympics, she had been briefly hospitalized for a heart ailment, forcing her to miss work.

After every visit to the hospital, the same idea kept racing through my mind: Perhaps I should turn pro. Only in boxing could I earn the money to help pay my parents' medical expenses. As a boy, I took it upon myself to put my skinny body between them when they fought while my older brothers and sisters did nothing. I believed it was a matter of life and death. As a man, I felt the stakes were the same.

Was it a difficult decision? Absolutely. Instead of becoming the first in our family to earn a college degree, I'd be embarking on a vastly different sort of education, learning how to beat other people's brains in.

It was one thing to be an amateur fighter with the noble goal of representing your country in the Olympics. It would be quite another to harm other human beings, and risk ending their lives, for money.

Before making a final decision, I was invited, along with the other gold medalists, by the well-known boxing promoter Don King, to Yankee Stadium to attend the heavyweight title fight in late September between my hero, Ali, and one of his rivals, Ken Norton.

I couldn't accept quickly enough. Not only would I see Ali fight in person for the first time, I would be introduced to the crowd as the Olympic light welterweight champion. After being ignored at the D.C. intersection a few weeks earlier, my ego could use the boost. I went with Charlie Brotman, who saw an excellent opportunity to get my name out again in the public eye, whether I turned pro or not.

Ali was not the Ali from his early years as a pro, who dazzled opponents with his speed. He now relied on his will, typified by his struggle with Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975. He lost to Norton back in 1973, when his jaw was broken, before narrowly beating him in their rematch six months later. The fight at Yankee Stadium was sure to be another one that could go either way.

In the end, Ali was very fortunate to exit the ring with his belt, and his faculties, still intact.

But that's not what I remember most about the evening. It's what took place before the bell rang.

Charlie and I were at ringside when Cosell motioned from a special box seat for us to come say hello. I was always honored to visit with Howard.

After we hung out for a while, we got off on the wrong floor on the way back to our seats and wound up in the stadium's basement. The door opened and a massive security guard gazed at us rather menacingly. For a second or two, I thought we might not see the fight after all. Thank goodness, the guard realized who I was, smiled, and politely asked if I might want to see “Muhammad.” Was he kidding? Of course I did, though I wondered: Why would Ali spend a second with me this close to the start of a championship fight? Didn't he need to focus every ounce of attention on the task at hand?