The Big Fight

In the same three years, I was neither a boyfriend to Juanita nor a father to Ray Jr. I made what I would describe as cameo appearances, showing up in their lives for brief stretches before disappearing again for days or weeks at a time. Either I hung out in the gym in pursuit of my next victory or I hung out with friends, my “boys,” as I called them, in pursuit of my next piece of ass. No matter what financial responsibilities I assumed for Juanita and little Ray, I saw myself as a free man in every sense of the word and was bound to prove it . . . over and over and over. After the three of us started to live together in the summer of 1977, I rented a separate apartment that I kept secret from Juanita. Although she had heard rumors, she didn’t know for sure until she tricked a friend of mine into coming clean, and I still tried to deny it. Even after I told her the truth, I didn’t stop using the apartment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At seventeen, Benitez shocked veteran Antonio “Kid Pambele” Cervantes to capture the WBA junior welterweight crown and become the youngest boxing champion in history. Seventeen! When I was seventeen, I was three long years away from competing in the Olympics. At twenty, he won the WBC welterweight championship by beating Carlos Palomino. He knocked out Randy Shields in six rounds. I couldn’t put Shields away in ten, and was fortunate to earn the decision. In thirtynine fights, a draw vs. Harold Weston was the only blemish on his record.

Outside the ropes was an entirely different matter, and that’s where he was vulnerable. His weakness? The same as many fighters: the opposite sex. His father, Gregorio, became so annoyed with Wilfred’s lack of discipline that he predicted that it would likely cost him his belt.

“Both my wife and I are very disgusted with Wilfred,” the elder Benitez said. “Even if they gave me $200,000 to work in the corner, I would not . . . he has not listened to anything I have told him . . . he would rather be out somewhere—anywhere—than in the gym. I have told him many times that Leonard will be in top shape and in top form, and that Leonard will beat him if he doesn’t train.”

Gregorio, who managed his son before he sold his interest to Jim Jacobs, the noted boxing film collector, later claimed he was merely trying to motivate him (“If I say he is going to win, then he no work”), although that type of psychological ploy wasn’t something my father would ever have needed to motivate me. As much as I adored women, I knew my priorities, which was why Juanita spent very little time at our training camps and why, with one exception, the two of us did not have sex in the months leading up to a big fight. Ali couldn’t say I was a “bad nigger” anymore.

I didn’t pay attention to anything Gregorio Benitez said. I always felt that the write-ups in the papers did nothing to enlighten me about a fighter’s strengths or weaknesses. I saw what I needed to see on film, and it was not just their footwork and punching tendencies that provided important clues. It was the words they chose and the tone they adopted in interviews. Was there the slightest sign of fear in their voice, or in their eyes, and if so, how could I take advantage of it? It was risky, however, to frame too much of any strategy on these celluloid images. How Benitez fought Palomino would no doubt be different from how he would cope with my habits. I didn’t move my feet the way Cervantes did or attack like Weston. No two fighters are the same.

In breaking down Benitez from head to toe, his assets were impossible to overlook. What impressed me the most was how elusive he was, moving his head at the last possible instant to avoid direct contact. He was a very effective counterpuncher with each hand, which prevented his foes from being too aggressive, and switched easily between a righthanded and southpaw stance. When pinned against the ropes, he was extremely dangerous, and though he was not regarded as a knockout puncher, he placed his shots well. The final blow receives most of the attention from boxing fans, but it’s usually the accumulation of punches that sends a fighter to the deck. Benitez, from what I heard, was also in excellent condition. Perhaps the master psychologist Papa Benitez knew what he was doing after all.

One clue I picked up on film was that Benitez didn’t like his opponents dictating the fight to him. If he was not in control, he became a little unsure of himself. Benitez was able to regain the upper hand—he survived three knockdowns against Bruce Curry during their 1977 bout in winning a split decision—but I planned to keep him on the defensive the whole night. I would attack from every conceivable angle, changing speeds the same way a pitcher does on the mound. Exploiting a small advantage in reach, I would use the left jab to score points and wear him down. He also had a tendency to dip his head as he threw his left, leaving him open to my uppercut. In my favor, too, was the fact that I’d fought eight times already in 1979, while Benitez had been out of the ring since March, when he beat Weston in their rematch.

As for my own work in the gym, my sparring partners got the better of me during the first week or two. That was not unusual. Once the rust was gone, I took command and put the hurt on them. I was serious when I sparred. A lot of fighters don’t mind if others hit the bags or make loud noises in the background while they’re in the ring. Not me. In order to totally concentrate, I needed everyone else to stop what they were doing. Sparring is not just to develop the muscles; sparring is to develop the mind.

The fight being held in Vegas, I’d have another key advantage over Benitez: Vegas was my home away from home, where I had already fought four times and felt at ease among the high rollers and celebrities. Benitez, despite his Playboy reputation, had never been on a stage quite like this and was likely to get distracted, if only slightly, and fights are often lost when one of the competitors is not completely focused on the man who will come at him from the other corner determined to beat his brains in. You can’t wait until the day of the fight to enter that zone. You must be in it for days, if not weeks. It’s no different, really, from the leading man who must memorize his lines in rehearsal and get into character before the cameras roll.

Another place I felt at home was on national television, and the fight was to be broadcast by ABC and Howard Cosell. Beginning with the Games in Montreal and my pro debut against Vega, I was on TV regularly. Benitez was not.

Then there was Caesars. It was boxing’s new mecca, replacing Madison Square Garden in New York, which had held that honor for most of the twentieth century. By the late 1970s, Caesars was where the money was and where boxing was much more than a sport. It was a spectacle, with the boxers’ names on the marquee in giant black letters, like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Nothing compared to Caesars: the aroma of cigars and booze, the parking lot packed with Ferraris and Rolls-Royces, the sexy outfits and fancy jewelry the gorgeous women wore at ringside, the organized-crime figures you could spot from a mile away, the Hollywood celebs who showed up to be seen. I wouldn’t choose to fight anywhere else.

As November 30 approached, the atmosphere, however, was different from how it normally was in the days leading to a championship fight. There was a real battle going on in Iran, as fifty-three innocent Americans were being held hostage by followers of the country’s new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. The hostages were on everybody’s minds.

Given the awful beating Classen was taking, many felt the referee should have stopped the fight long before Classen was knocked out in the tenth round. Although I wasn’t familiar with Classen, whenever a member of our small fraternity is killed in action, I feel a deep sense of loss, as do many of my colleagues. We are aware of the great danger every time we step inside the ropes, but that doesn’t lessen our shock and grief. Yet I could not afford to mourn the unfortunate death of Willie Classen. Not then. Not during the few hours that remained before I would enter the arena to risk my own hide. If I did, and I lost my focus, I could end up just like him.

By then I was already in the last stage of the change in personality I underwent before every critical match. As fight night neared, I became high-strung, rude, snapping at people for no apparent reason. Not having sex for months didn’t exactly lighten the mood. To their credit, the boys gave me a lot of leeway and didn’t take it personally. I was aware of my behavior, but it was more important to preserve the level of aggression I would rely on in the ring. Unless I brought out the savage in me at the right moment, I’d be doomed, and once I adopted that mind-set, I could be as mean as any brawler, especially when I was in trouble, as I was against Marcos Geraldo and would be against Tommy Hearns. I hated to lose more than anything.

Of course, in the weeks prior to any fight, it was difficult, and unwise, to maintain the edge every second. If I did, I would burn out just as I did in the gym while I prepared for Johnny Gant. Only, any loss of motivation against Benitez would be much more dangerous. I would not be able to take a week off and escape to rustic Vermont to clear my head. Gant, with all due respect, was no Benitez.

I would need to find a distraction. The answer was television. Situation comedies and action-adventure films often took my attention, if only for an hour or two, away from Wilfred Benitez. As the years went by, I turned into a VHS junkie, buying practically every tape in the store. I would slide a tape into the machine, and if it didn’t instantly produce a new world, much like the comic book heroes of my youth, I’d put in another until I found the appropriate diversion. After a short respite, I returned to the task at hand, visualizing how I’d break down the other man’s spirit and defenses and win the fight.

On the day before the Benitez bout, I went for a three-mile run at six A.M. Jake and Angelo were not crazy about the idea, but running calmed me down. As I kept telling everyone, the fight was for “all the marbles.”

The latest question from the doubters was how I might fare if the fight lasted the full fifteen rounds. I had yet to go past ten, while Benitez went fifteen in five fights, including the previous two. No matter. I was in tremendous shape and knew when to conserve energy and pace myself. Moving up from a scheduled six to eight to ten to twelve rounds was not a hard transition to make earlier in my career. Why should fifteen, if it went that long, be any tougher? I sparred five-minute rounds in camp instead of three to build stamina. That was the only adjustment.

Yet, as prepared as I was, one authority in the boxing business outside my circle believed I needed some last-minute advice. I was in my room around nine P.M., going through my normal visualization about what I anticipated for the fight, when the phone rang. It was Muhammad Ali.

After I got over the shock, I listened intently. It was partly due to the suggestions Ali made in his dressing room at Yankee Stadium in 1976 that I didn’t sign with an established promoter. I was sure he’d come up with another gem. I wasn’t disappointed.

I had to chuckle. Ali’s warnings were akin to Richard Nixon giving a lecture on how to run a clean White House. Nobody clowned around like Muhammad Ali, who threw away more rounds than many fighters won. But he made a good point. The last thing the Vegas judges wanted to watch was another lounge act; there were plenty on the Strip already. They wanted to see punches that connected. They wanted to see a fighter serious about his craft. Considering the likelihood of an extremely competitive fight, I knew one or two points could make the difference.

Around midnight, I jumped out of bed and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. For ten minutes I did some shadowboxing. The exercise was geared more to checking out my mental state: Was I willing to put everything on the line? The answer was a resounding yes. I slipped back under the covers.

Benitez and I walked toward the center of the ring to receive the traditional prefight instructions from referee Carlos Padilla. Any assumption on my part that Benitez would be overwhelmed by the moment was immediately put aside.

He stared me down as we used to stare at each other in the hood, where most street fights wouldn’t begin for maybe thirty or forty minutes while each man, his fists defiantly raised, attempted to scare off the other. Forcing someone to give up in our unwritten code generated more respect among the group than beating the living daylights out of him. Benitez was trying to establish a tone so that I would be more wary of him once the bell rang. Prizefighters since John L. Sullivan in the late 1800s had played these mind games all the time. In this case, there was reason to believe it might work. As we stood only inches apart, I was the one who appeared tentative.

I needed to recover, and fast. When I retreated to the corner, I told myself, here was the championship fight I had yearned for since committing my heart and soul to this life three years earlier. I thought for the longest time that I would never want anything as much as I wanted the gold medal. Yet as the ring started to clear at Caesars, so did my mind, giving way to the will that defined me as a fighter, and a man.

In these final moments, I never felt more alive and more authentic. It was as if I entered a room where no one else was permitted to go, where there was no confusion and no fear, where I felt happy and at peace despite taking part in a sport that required merciless brutality. In a strange way that made sense to me, I found boxing’s warlike nature serene, almost beautiful, and it was why I made my comebacks years later against my better judgment and the counsel of others. I never did it for the money; because of Mike Trainer’s shrewd investments, I was set for life. I didn’t do it for the fame, either; there’d be an endless supply of that as well. I returned to the ring to experience the pure, almost indescribable sensation I could not attain anywhere else. I miss it terribly.

The bell rang. I was determined to show Benitez who was in control from the outset. His cocky stare was soon replaced by a look of genuine concern. He was in for the fight of his life. I landed the left jab and right hand, which created an opening for the hook. I won the first two rounds easily.

In the third, I nailed Benitez with a left, which promptly sent him to the canvas. Perhaps I gave the champ too much credit. Perhaps this evening, similar to many others in my undefeated career, was destined to be a short one. Whenever I put another man down, I finished him off.

Not this man. Benitez rose and took a standing eight-count. He was not seriously injured, and when he came out for round four, I felt like I was chasing a ghost. He slipped one punch after another. I was known as the dancer with the slick moves, but facing him was like looking in a mirror, and I did not appreciate what I was seeing. I never missed so many punches, and that takes a heavy toll, as an exhausted George Foreman discovered against Ali in Zaire. You spend more energy hitting air than hitting flesh, and it begins to wear on your confidence. Why am I not landing punches? What is wrong with me?

It became apparent that this was going to be a long night. Which meant that both of us, with our experience, instinctively sensed the need to pace ourselves. At various intervals, we took about twenty seconds off to step back and, standing almost flat-footed, allow time to go by without initiating any rough exchanges on the inside. Similar respites take place in every fight that doesn’t end in the early going, and you can see it in the eyes of each man, who, with legs burning and lungs on the verge of exploding, relays a signal to the other without saying a word. The restless spectators, frustrated by the lack of sustained action, might not approve, but they can’t relate to the pressures and demands we face every moment in the tiny space called a ring. Nobody, not even Joe Frazier, has been able to maintain a frantic pace for three full minutes round after round.

In the sixth round, our foreheads accidentally cracked together, although I was fortunate to fare better in the exchange. Blood poured down his face, while there was only a small welt on my forehead. The danger was that the blood would flow into his eyes and impair his vision, which had stopped countless fights in the past. The sport is filled with exceptional boxers who did not reach their potential because they cut too easily. Yet I did not try too aggressively to take advantage of the bleeding. I knew he could still counter and score points if I was sloppy. Benitez also injured his left thumb, and no fighter at this level is skillful enough to prevail with only one good hand. But he carried on, and actually got stronger, landing a number of solid shots over the next few rounds. My respect for him grew with every blow.

Part of the reason for my uneven performance was my fault, a stubbornness in continuing to depend on the right hand even after Angelo urged me to use the more effective jab. I suppose my ego, often a fighter’s worst enemy, did not quite believe he could be in front of me one second, ready to be hit with a hard right, and gone the very next. This being my first title appearance, I sought the glory of a dazzling knockout. There was nothing glamorous about winning on points.

The main reason was Benitez. I wasn’t the only boxer who could dig deep inside himself. In the ninth, after he landed a few well-timed licks, I retaliated with my most lethal combinations of the evening, sending him into the ropes. Still, he refused to go down. The critics were wrong about him, just as they were wrong about me. He was a warrior. I rocked him with a strong left hook and two overhand rights in round eleven, knocking out his mouthpiece, but not him. His father must have been proud. The fatigue was setting in, though, as I was in uncharted territory, past the tenth round, for the first time. My arms were spent. My head was pounding. My lungs were gasping for air. Maybe I couldn’t go the distance.

It was not during the actual fighting that I felt the worst of it. I was too busy searching for an opening or attempting to avoid his combinations. It was during the breaks between rounds. That’s how it always was. Resting in the corner for the one minute that never seemed to last long enough, I’d catch a glimpse of the man in the opposite corner and sometimes ask myself: Why should I put my body through another three minutes of torture?

It didn’t matter one bit whether I was in control of the fight. My body wouldn’t know the difference. No wonder some fighters surrender on their stools. They assess their predicament and decide that giving up is better than absorbing the pain guaranteed to come again if they answer the bell.

Benitez remained sharp in rounds twelve and thirteen and took the fourteenth, perhaps his finest of the night, to give him hope of retaining the title with a strong fifteenth. He was as sure of himself as he was in the prefight stare, grinning when we met in the middle of the ring for the touching of the gloves to kick off the last three minutes.

I could not believe he was still on his feet, and while I was convinced I was leading on points, I couldn’t be convinced enough. Judges were known to render stranger verdicts, as they already had on the undercard by awarding middleweight champion Vito Antuofermo, a 4–1 underdog, a draw against Marvin Hagler. There’s no question Hagler was robbed. It’s no mystery he never again trusted judges in Las Vegas. I would have felt the same way.

I landed a hard left and soon followed with a right to the jaw. Later in the round came three left hooks, and with less than a minute to go, Benitez was too worn out to slip away once more. He was mine. At last.

A stinging left put him on the canvas. He rose quickly, as he did in the third, and grinned, but he was hurt. He was hurt bad. After Benitez took the mandatory eight-count, I went in for the kill. That is what fighters are taught to do from their first day in the gym, and I was no exception.

The next thing I remember, I was standing on the second strand of ropes, my arms raised triumphantly in the air. I wasn’t filled with the odd range of emotions I felt when I was on the podium in Montreal. I was ecstatic. The win, making me the new WBC welterweight champion, represented a beginning, not an end. The future was limitless.

Some might wonder how two men who for forty-five minutes tried to destroy each other could embrace so soon after their battle was over, but it was precisely because we faced each other in combat that we needed to share this moment. Only the two of us—not our handlers or our loved ones—could relate to the sacrifices we made, physically, mentally, and spiritually. For months, the opponent was the enemy, the major obstacle standing in the path of greater earnings and greater fame. Yet, as most of us who fight for a living come to recognize, some sooner than others, the opponent is also a partner on the same journey.

“Don’t be cocky,” Howard teased, punching me lightly on the chin. There was no danger of that happening. Not after the punishment I took from Benitez, to date, the worst of my career.

For a fighter not recognized for his power, he fooled me. My face was swollen around the cheekbones and there were large welts under both eyes. I was nauseous, dehydrated, and my right hand was throbbing, as if someone had injected a needle into my knuckles. I spoke to the reporters afterward, with Benitez at my side, but instead of attending a celebration, I went to the hospital for X-rays of my hand, which proved negative. By around eleven P.M., I was back in my suite at Caesars, soothing the aches and pains in a tub of hot water. I lay there for an hour, at least, and could have stayed longer. I was in no mood to see a soul.

Soaking in the bath, stealing an occasional glance at the ugly face in the mirror, I asked myself the same questions most fighters do once every battle is over, win or lose: Was it really worth it? Were the rewards, as lucrative as they might be, worth getting beaten up, not to mention the hits one must endure day after day in the gym? And what about the chances of permanent brain damage? Fighters generally bury those fears, but I had met enough who took too many blows to the head and by their late thirties or early forties were never the same again. Would that be my pitiful fate as well? Would I have to depend on another person for the most menial tasks?

The questions were more relevant than ever. With the $1 million from the Benitez fight, after doling out a substantial portion to the government and my handlers, there was still plenty in the bank for me to walk away for good and live comfortably for the rest of my life. It was tempting.

“Ray, you are the world champion now. You have nothing left to prove,” Mike Trainer said at the hospital. “This is a brutal way to make a living. Isn’t it wonderful to know that you do not have to ever fight again if you don’t want to?” Mike meant every word. He could never bear to see me get hit. He stayed in the dressing room until each fight was over.

Not after climbing to the top of my profession at the age of twenty-three. Not with more lucrative paydays in the years ahead. Not with there being no welterweight alive who could take me down.

And not as long as everyone in my circle kept urging me to continue—and why wouldn’t they? Even if they harbored serious doubts about the condition I was in, mentally or physically, which I know they did, especially in the weeks leading up to the Hagler bout in 1987, what would possibly compel them to speak their minds? A fear for my safety? Please. They cared about me, but they cared more for their own welfare, and no one else could provide for them and their families as I could.

Every fighter is aware, or should be, of how damaging it is to be surrounded by a group of yes-men who won’t pose the questions that have to be asked. The danger, of course, is that the boxer, oblivious, will take on the next assignment and the one after that, and who will ever know which blows were the ones that made him an invalid for the rest of his life? For Muhammad Ali, was it Joe Frazier who gave him Parkinson’s? Earnie Shavers? Leon Spinks? Larry Holmes? Ken Norton? Who? If I said, at the age of fifty-four, that I was thinking about coming out of retirement to fight Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr., some of the boys would say, “Go for it.” I’m half serious.

More than anything else, I wanted to be remembered as one of the immortals in boxing history, not just among my generation. I knew that defeating Benitez was not going to put me in that category. That goal is what inspired me to go running at five o’clock each morning, and to hit the bags until my hands could take no more. The fans had barely finished filing out of Caesars when the speculation began over who would be my next big opponent. The most likely candidates were Roberto Duran and Pipino Cuevas.

That day would arrive soon enough, but on this day, I paused to reflect on what I had just accomplished. I was now the champ, and no two words mean more to a fighter. For the rest of my life, no matter how I would fare in future contests as my skills deteriorated, I’d be called “the champ.” Not “the champion,” mind you—“the champ.” It had to do with respect, as my father preached. “If a man doesn’t have respect,” he said, “he doesn’t have his soul.”

Benitez and I never met again in the ring. I would see him at other fights throughout the 1980s, but it wasn’t until about a decade ago, when I paid him a visit in Puerto Rico while I was promoting an ESPN boxing show, that the two of us got a chance to spend some quality time together. It was a day I will never forget.

I picked up his mother first in San Juan, and we drove for more than an hour before arriving at a convalescent home in the suburbs. The facility resembled many of these places, the odor of sickness and death in every corridor. We reached a room that was almost dark, its lone inhabitant sitting in a rocking chair, his face and stomach bloated, his eyes staring blankly into space.

I forced a smile. I was devastated. It was one thing to meet fighters from earlier eras and see the harm our sport can inflict. It was quite another to witness the effects on someone from my era. In his early forties, his mind was essentially gone, the heavy price for sixty-two fights in a career that lasted way too long, until 1990. The official diagnosis was traumatic encephalopathy, a disease caused by a series of concussions. I couldn’t help but think it could have been me in that rocking chair. Benitez squandered his entire fortune, and that could have happened to me, too, as it did to many fighters who made sketchy investments or were ripped off by those they should never have trusted. He didn’t have a Mike Trainer to protect him. Few did.

Benitez and I were brought to another room, where, to my surprise, a screen had been set up to show our 1979 fight to about two dozen people. I was ambivalent about the idea, to say the least. Benitez would not remember the night, and if he did, why, in his helpless state, should he be subjected again to his most famous defeat?

Nothing was said by either of us during the first fourteen rounds. I had not seen the footage in years, but I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I started to fantasize about an alternative outcome, for this day only, in which Benitez would retain his title and everyone in the room would toast their native son.

It then hit me: Showing the fight was, on the contrary, an excellent idea. I could spot a spark in his eyes. He was back where he belonged, in the ring instead of in a chair. He was young and healthy again.