The Big Fight

What else was waiting for me, I could not be sure. The smart thing to do was to leave the fight game for good. I had beaten them all—Benitez, Duran (twice), Hearns, Hagler—my position as one of the all-time greats secured forever. In addition, unlike too many of my colleagues, I was not showing any ill effects from the hits I had taken. The years I lost due to the detached retina, which I long thought of as a curse, were actually a blessing. After beating Bruce Finch in February 1982, I appeared in the ring only five times for the rest of the eighties, for a total of fifty-four rounds. If I had not suffered the eye injury, there is little doubt I would have fought twice as often, and the damage those extra blows might have caused is frightening to consider.

Instead, in late November, I signed on to fight Terry Norris, the WBC super-welterweight champion. I was very excited. For the first time, I would be fighting in Madison Square Garden. I always felt I’d missed something by not competing in the Garden, where Dempsey and Louis and Marciano and Robinson and Ali had fought. At last, in the twilight of my career, I would get a chance.

As for my opponent, I wasn’t too worried. Norris had definite strengths. At twenty-three, he was fearless, fast, and could attack with either hand. But taking on John Mugabi at the Sun Dome in Tampa, Florida, or Tony Montgomery at the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California—they were two of his recent foes—would not be the same as a duel in the Garden against the conqueror of Duran, Hearns, and Hagler. The fight, for which I was guaranteed $4 million, was set for February 9.

In December, I began to work out across the street from the same Palmer Park gym where, twenty years before, I took up the sport. Of the three men who taught me back then, only Pepe was with me, determined that I train as diligently as I did in preparing for Duran. Keeping me on my toes was Michael Ward, nineteen, a welterweight from the D.C. area with a promising future. As the weeks went by, my body grew stronger. I had not been in this kind of shape since the Hagler fight. Poor Terry Norris would not know what hit him.

Neither would I. One day in camp, Ward dropped me with a shot to the chin. He also rocked me in the ribs. The fact that he got through my defenses was proof that my reflexes were not as sharp as I assumed.

The ribs were cracked, which meant I should have asked for an immediate postponement. I didn’t. I’d required a postponement against Kevin Howard, and it disrupted my rhythm. I decided the Norris fight would take place on February 9 or not at all.

Donning a flak jacket similar to the type quarterbacks in the NFL wear, I kept training, the sparring partners instructed to avoid hitting me anywhere near the ribs. I put a sweatshirt on over the jacket to keep the press in the dark. If news of the injury leaked, the fight would be postponed for sure.

I knew it the moment I walked down the aisle, much like a frightened groom who does not want to go through with the wedding. I loved everything about fighting but fighting itself, and it is fair to suggest that, except for the Hagler bout, the passion had been mostly missing for a full decade, since I beat Hearns. Only, I was too stubborn to admit it. Instead, I kept coming back and would continue to until someone would help me see the light. That someone would be Terry Norris.

As I climbed into the ring, I was no longer in pain due to the shots I received in the dressing room. It’s a shame there were no shots to alleviate the other pain I was feeling.

A few days before the fight, I was sent a cassette from Juanita, featuring a ballad from the well-known R&B singer and songwriter Peabo Bryson. I thought I was long over her, but I obviously wasn’t. I knew she was dating Peabo and that sending the tape was her attempt to hurt me as badly as I had hurt her. It worked. If that wasn’t bad enough, she gave the four ringside seats I had set aside for her to her attorneys and accountant.

Once the bell rang, Norris could do whatever he wished. Overwhelmed by the occasion? Hardly. He embraced it, not backing off for a second, displaying a combination of speed and power reminiscent of the warrior I used to see in the mirror. I was the one who looked lost, the old, pathetic fighter I promised myself I would never become, hoping to survive the full twelve rounds and be spared the humiliation of ending my career on the canvas of Madison Square Garden.

Norris dropped me in the second, a left hook doing the work, and again in round seven with a right. I landed my share of blows, but there was no power or speed in them and I never put Norris in any real trouble. So inevitable was the outcome that my dad, sitting near the corner, wanted to throw in the towel. He was overruled.

I prefer to think healthy ribs would have made a difference. Who was I kidding? My era was over. It was over after I upset Hagler. Putting away a less-skilled Lalonde and outdueling a thirty-eight-year-old Duran didn’t prove a damn thing, and in between was the loss to Tommy Hearns, no matter what the judges said. Now, facing a talented younger opponent, I didn’t stand a chance. The surprise was not that I lost. The surprise was that it took this long.

After the verdict was announced, Norris winning easily on every card, I saw no point in waiting a week or two to see how I might feel about the future once the bruises started to heal. I could wait a month or two, and it wouldn’t matter. I took the microphone from the ring announcer and made it official: I was retiring as a pro for the fourth, and final, time.

I had been wrong about so many things for so long, and here, with my announcement, I was even wrong about myself. I thought that retirement would devastate me, but to my surprise, I felt overwhelming relief. If I had kept winning and raking in the money, there would have been no incentive for me to quit. I could now move on with the rest of my life.

At least, I thought I could. In late March, nearly two months after the Norris loss, I was reminded the past is not always easy to leave behind. Especially the past I lived.

The Los Angeles Times was coming out with a story indicating that, according to the court records from my divorce, I admitted to drug and alcohol abuse between 1983 and 1986. It would be pointed out as well that in 1989 I appeared in antidrug public service announcements on TV.

After I hung up, the news began to sink in. I had to know this day would come, that I couldn’t keep my secret life secret forever. Still, when he told me, I was totally unprepared. Bern volunteered to accompany me to the press conference, but I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea. I got myself into this mess, and it was up to me to get out of it as best I could.

The flight back to D.C. seemed to take days instead of hours. I thought I’d go nuts playing out a million different scenarios, wondering: What do the reporters know? And what do I tell them?

I had a few drinks. The irony doesn’t escape me—getting wasted while preparing to seek forgiveness for my abuses—but I knew no other way. I was terrified. I was used to fighting for a title, but not for my credibility. A limo driver picked me up at Dulles Airport and took me to my house in Potomac. Mike came over after I settled in. The press conference was set for the next day at the Touchdown Club, the same D.C. establishment where I first met Ali back in 1976.

I didn’t sleep the whole night. In the morning, during the ride to the club, Mike and I hardly spoke. No magic words came to me, just as none did in the hospital on the night before my eye operation. In no time, we were there.

I took a seat near the podium. I was shaking. I would rather have taken on Mike Tyson than this assignment. I looked at the writers, spotting a lot of familiar faces from much happier times. The day was almost as torturous for some of them as it was for me. They didn’t want to bring me down. They were my friends. But they had a story to write.

Gathering my nerves, I stood up and did just what Mike suggested. I told the truth. I said what I did was wrong, and that I was ashamed for letting down my family and fans.

At times I struggled, but I kept my composure. I was surprised at how liberated I felt. I wasn’t aware of the energy it took to live a lie all those years. Then, just like that, the session was over, the writers rushing to file, Mike and I left to assess the fallout. Luckily, it was minimal, and he deserved the credit. By strongly urging me to come clean immediately, instead of waiting for the press to probe deeper, we took control of the situation. The public forgave me and so did corporate America. In time, I was doing endorsements again.

Back in Los Angeles, Bern and I were growing closer. I was spending so much time in California, I bought a condo in Santa Monica. For years, after the pain I caused to Juanita and the children, I told myself I would never marry again. I obviously was not very good at it. Then came Bern, and I couldn’t imagine not sharing the rest of my life with her.

For her birthday in April 1992, we were with about a hundred friends at a party on the pier in the D.C. area when I proposed in front of everyone. She said yes. I was never happier. In August 1993, we tied the knot in the gardens of our lovely new house in California. With my fighting days over, I worked on an exercise video and a Nintendo video game, and kept up my responsibilities as a member of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I also hadn’t given up on the idea of acting. I had done my share of it in the ring.

I embarrassed myself more often than I care to remember. Once, in Monte Carlo, it was arranged for me to meet Nelson Mandela the following morning at eleven. I could not have been more excited. I knew of no greater man for how he survived all those years in prison and yet emerged without any desire for revenge. All he wanted was peace and equality for the country he loved.

What was I thinking? At forty, I was an old man in a young man’s sport. For that matter, I was an old man when Norris whipped me in 1991. What made me believe the outcome would be any different more than five years later? If anything, my reflexes would be slower, my footwork less fluid, my body less able to absorb pain. I was lucky to walk out of the Garden in one piece. I might not be as lucky the next time.

In looking back, though, I told myself Norris defeated me because of the injury to my ribs, not because he was a superior fighter. I also was a victim of my own success, the victory over Hagler convincing me I could pull off another shocker anytime I put my mind to it. The public would think I was deluded. The press would predict disaster. Come fight night, I would be the one standing, my arms raised in the air, overcoming the odds once more, the skeptics left to scramble for an explanation.

One of those guys was Hector “Macho” Camacho. I was doing the TV commentary in June 1996 when Camacho won a decision over a forty-five-year-old Duran in Atlantic City. Afterward, Camacho proposed that he and I fight next. I did not give it much thought but J. D. Brown did, and by October we had a deal, the match slated, after an initial delay, for March 1, also in Atlantic City, with my purse being a guaranteed $4 million plus a share of the pay-per-view revenue. People said I came back for the money. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I came back for the challenge. That’s what fighters do. It’s what we do better than anything else.

Bern didn’t understand. She couldn’t. Only fighters know what it feels like to yearn for that place we go to when preparing for battle. There is no place like it.

Yet I found a way to get her on board, just as I did with Juanita when she was opposed to my comebacks. I agreed to work with Billy Blanks, a fitness and martial arts expert, who built up the strength in my upper body and legs by having me lift weights for the first time. Blanks was a strict believer in the Tae Bo workout, as was Bern, which combines tae kwon do and boxing.

I also put in my normal amount of time in the screening room. I was encouraged by what I saw. Despite being six years older, I was quicker and stronger than Camacho, the International Boxing Council middleweight and welterweight champion. With the body shots I planned to throw, I’d wear him down just as I outlasted my sparring partners every day at camp in Chandler, Arizona, near Phoenix. It made no difference that since my most recent retirement he’d fought twenty-eight times, for a total of 219 rounds. I beat Hagler after being away for three years, and Camacho was no Hagler. In his youth, Camacho was filled with a lot of promise. His youth was a long time ago.

Things could not have been going any better, until, suddenly, they could not have gotten any worse. On January 31, doing an exercise Blanks taught me in which I stepped onto a bench with weights on the back of my shoulder, I felt a sharp twinge in my right calf.

As with the cracked ribs before the Norris fight, there was little doubt that I should have asked for an immediate postponement, but I wasn’t going to give in this time, either. The bout had already been put off due to problems with the original promoters, forcing us to make a new arrangement with Titan Sports, the pay-per-view firm operated by wrestling’s Vince McMahon. Another postponement, and it’s possible I would have come to my senses and used the injury as an excuse to back out for good. I preferred fooling myself. That was one of my best talents.

It became necessary to fool the press and the public as well while I rested the leg. If word of the torn muscle got out, there would be calls for the fight to be delayed, if not canceled. I couldn’t let that happen.

The idea we came up with was brilliant, practically out of a Hitchcock film. We closed camp, pretending to work on a secret strategy. A number of fans managed to peek through the cracks in the tent, believing they saw me working out. What they really saw was Roger in a hood. I was on the other side of town visiting the doctor to build up the muscles in my leg. I sneaked in much later to do any interviews. No one ever found out. The leg gradually improved, though it was still far less than 100 percent, keeping me from running or sparring for weeks. The extent of my exercise was riding on a stationary bike. J.D. suggested I have the doctor give me a few shots, but I told him to wait until fight night. I needed the leg to be good for only an hour, maybe less.

Those final days were strange. The entire original cast was gone, including Juice, Ollie, Joe, and Pepe, who was replaced by my new trainer, Adrian Davis. Adrian was certainly capable, though there was no real trust between us. There couldn’t be. Trust takes years, not weeks. Even Mike Trainer was not around. He looked over the contract, but that was all he did.

For some unknown reason, my mom and dad and siblings were given seats about five rows from ringside, while Bern sat in the front row. My parents were never that far back for any of my fights. My mom, to no one’s surprise, was furious and didn’t hesitate to make her feelings known. Neither did my sister Bunny. I didn’t see what took place, though from what I was told, Bunny attempted to slap Bern in the face, believing she had been responsible for the seating arrangement. She wasn’t. It was J.D. who made the error. It didn’t matter. When she couldn’t get her way, Momma left and missed the whole fight.

I was having my own problems. The shots the doctor had given me in the calf made it go completely numb. I was going to have to fight on one leg. I also got concerned when Roger held his hands out for me to hit. I missed. I never missed.

Once the fight got under way, I didn’t have a chance. Camacho was in total control, backing me into the ropes. I fell to the floor late in the first round, but it was the result of a shove.

In the second, I rallied a bit, landing a right jab to Camacho’s nose and a right hook to his head. Perhaps there was hope for me yet. If I was not the fighter I once was, neither was he. In round three, though, that illusion disappeared in a hurry. Camacho nailed me with a left hook to the cheek and a right to the face. From then on, I was helpless, the end coming in the fifth. Camacho sent me to the deck early in the round and proceeded to throw about a dozen punches in a row before the ref, Joe Cortez, stopped it. Thank God he did. Lying flat on my back in the Atlantic City Convention Center would have been the worst possible way to end my boxing carrer. I was humbled enough as it was, requiring assistance to climb the two steps to the dais for the postfight press conference.

At least there would be no more comebacks. If losing to Norris did not do it, losing to Camacho would surely end any fantasies I might have had of recapturing my former glory. I could now attend the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony, scheduled, appropriately, for June, and be resigned to the fact that it was finally over.

Or could I? Within days, amazingly enough, I was busy plotting another comeback. I convinced myself that the loss to Camacho, like the one to Norris, was due to injuries, and to prove money wasn’t the issue, I planned to donate the entire purse to charity. The problem was: Who would I fight? It couldn’t be a bum. The public wouldn’t pay the big bucks for the closed-circuit telecast, especially after the awful show I gave them against Camacho. Nor could it be a top-ten contender. No matter how motivated I might be, I’d be in no shape to take on anyone that good, not without another fight or two.

In the end, sanity, thank goodness, prevailed and nothing came of my plans. Prior to the Camacho fight, J.D. held discussions with people representing Oscar De La Hoya, the light welterweight champion, which were subsequently dropped. I was lucky I didn’t beat Camacho. I can’t begin to imagine what Oscar, still in his early twenties, would have done to a has-been like me. Yet as the months went by, the Camacho loss depressed me to no end. You dumb fuck, I kept asking myself, how could you have been beaten so badly? It was on my mind when I went to sleep and when I woke up. I kept searching for a way to fix it, even if that meant I’d have to get back in the ring.

I should have been happy. Bern and I were building a nice life for ourselves, excited by the arrival of our baby girl, Camille, in the fall of 1997, and then came a son, Daniel, three years later.

My new business ventures were moving along, too. In 2001, I launched a boxing promotional company in association with ESPN. In 2004, I was named the cohost, with Sylvester Stallone, of a new NBC reality series, The Contender, in which promising young fighters worked on their craft in hopes of becoming a world champion. The show put me back in the public eye. It also helped me finally get over the Camacho loss.

Then why, in the summer of 2006, was I on the set of Live with Regis and Kelly in New York with the most painful hangover I could remember? And why, on Christmas Eve of the year before, was I out cold, lying on my kitchen floor.

The answer, as Juanita and Bern had told me, is that I was still an alcoholic, and it was not the outcome of the Camacho fight I was anxious to fix by drinking. It was the events of a lifetime ago, before I became famous, when two men I trusted took advantage of me, and two parents I loved turned our house into a war zone. For years, I ran—to the gym, to cocaine, to the bottle, to other women, to anything or anyone that would make the pain disappear, which it did, though never for long.

That July, I finally stopped running. I looked at my eyes in the mirror, just as I did in the dressing room before my toughest fights. What I saw I had never seen before, eyes willing to admit I needed help, and before it was too late.

What made me stop? I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the argument I had a few days earlier with my son, Jarrel, now in his early twenties, who was living with us. He was playing loud music in his room and not following our rules. I asked him several times to stop. He didn’t. Enough was enough. I told him he’d have to move out.

Jarrel then threw me against the wall. I did what I always did when someone tried to push me around. I clenched my fists and got ready to pop him—until I stopped myself, thank God, remembering this was my own son. I walked out. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a fucking machine.

I couldn’t sleep the whole night. The next morning, I made a bunch of calls, and by the end of the week I was sitting in a conference room with about twenty strangers, attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

What I didn’t say, however, and wouldn’t say for months, was that I was an alcoholic. Being in the same room with these people was one thing. Saying the word was another. Yet I went back almost every day, and began to sense a change inside me. The urge to bury pain with a drink was still there, but I overcame it. Whenever I woke up depressed, a meeting instantly put me in a better mood. I knew I was not alone.

Eventually it became my turn to lead a meeting, and share my struggles with the others. Even then, when I finally did say the A word, I said it under my breath. The important thing is that I said it. I saw myself as who I am and will always be, an alcoholic.

Being sober for the last four years has helped me see a great deal. I see the pain I caused to those I cared about most, and who cared most about me. I blamed the alcohol or the cocaine or the character I created, Sugar Ray, as if I had nothing to do with him. I never blamed myself. Till now.

For years I felt pity for Roger and my closest friend, Derrik Holmes, for the drugs they consumed, which ruined much of their lives. I thought they were weak, but what made me any better? I was blessed in countless ways they never were, and still I fell apart. I beat Duran and Hearns and Hagler, but for the longest time I couldn’t beat alcohol and cocaine. I wasn’t strong. Not where it counted.

I’ll never be able to make up for the past, which I’m reminded of every time I gaze into the eyes of Ray Jr. or Jarrel when they watch the love I give to Camille and Daniel. I know what they’re thinking: Where was the love when we needed it? I wish I had an explanation that would make them feel better. I don’t. All I can do is be the best father I can to all my kids.

I spend a lot of time these days traveling around the world giving motivational speeches. People come because they remember me as Sugar Ray Leonard, but Sugar Ray is not who I am when I speak. I am Ray Leonard, father of four, survivor of drug and alcohol abuse, who found out what truly matters. I explain that while each of us faces enormous challenges every day, it’s not the sins we commit that will define us. It’s how we respond to them. If they are lucky, as I have been, they, too, will receive a second chance. I want to make sure they don’t blow it, either.

People assume I was happy during my fighting days, and I often was—hanging out with the boys in training camp, studying films of my opponent, walking down the aisle toward the ring. There was no place I would rather have been. I think a lot about those times. When I watch any of my fights on television, I can recall precisely what I was thinking and feeling. I can be Sugar Ray.

For that, no one awarded me a championship belt. No one put me on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And no one filled my head with lies about how superior I am. I am not superior. I never was. I was just blessed with skills our society values.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Sugar Ray. I know how fortunate I was to have him around. Because of him, I saw the world and was introduced to people I never would have met. I escaped the unfortunate fate that befell many of my friends.

Each time I go back for a visit, I’m reminded of how difficult their lives have been, and remain. Despite the progress the neighborhoods have made since I was a kid, there are still sections of town where nothing has changed, where there is no hope for a better tomorrow.

He was there when I needed a place for my pain and anger. Without him, I can’t begin to imagine how my life would have turned out. Because of Sugar Ray, I learned how to accept Ray.