Sugar Ray Leonard: 'I felt safe in the ring. My heart turned icy'

[Jan Klimkowski]

Thanks Jan.I like these type of stories a lot.

Me too, Keith, me too.

"In the rematch with Durán I was boxing smart and, then, I started fooling around. I threw those crazy bolo punches and the audience was laughing. Really laughing. I could see in Durán's eyes he didn't like it. He was a bad bully and here I was ridiculing him. Eventually, he just quit. He threw up his hands in frustration and walked away. He never realised the ramifications it would have on the rest of his life. But that fight should not dictate his legacy. Durán was a great fighter."

I remember watching this fight.But,I remember it being said that Duran had broken ribs or something that made him say "No Mas".Sugar Ray seems to say that Duran just gave up.I wonder what the real story is?

Me too. :gossip:

I don't know which version - the broken ribs (a cover story to save face?) or the ridicule - is true. Maybe both.

I am intrigued by the psychology of it all, the myth making in the heads of these warriors.

The section about Duran before the piece above shines light on the psychology:

"Joe Frazier said Roberto Durán looked like Charles Manson," Leonard cackles. "And he did. God, Durán was so violent, so mean. Some people out there, in the streets, can shoot you in the face and then go get some lunch. They have no conscience. Durán was like that. It freaked me out because Durán was so nasty. He got to me the first time."

Leonard lost his unbeaten record to Durán in June 1980 in a clearcut decision. But, five months later, Leonard came to the rematch with a different plan. "My brother Roger gave it to me. This was drugged-up Roger. In the gym he said: "You have to piss him off.' I said: 'You gotta be kidding?' But Roger kept telling me. 'You gotta embarrass this guy. You gotta make him mad with you.'

There was a story I heard on the radio about the Thrilla in Manilla. Ali was brutal towards Frazier in the build-up:

From wiki:

Ali and Frazier met for the third and final time in Quezon City (a district within the metropolitan area of Manila), the Philippines, on October 1, 1975: the "Thrilla in Manila." Ali took every opportunity to mock Frazier, again calling him '"The Gorilla," and generally trying to irritate him.

The fight was far more action-filled than the previous encounter, and was a punishing display on both sides under oppressively hot conditions. During the course of the fight, Ali said to Frazier, "They said you were through, Joe." Frazier's terse reply quickly followed: "They lied, pretty boy." After 14 grueling rounds, Eddie Futch stopped the fight after Frazier was determined to finish the fight despite both eyes being swollen shut. Ali won the battle, but said afterward that it was the closest he ever felt to death.

Found it, in print.

From the Daily Mail:

During a joint TV interview in the Philippines capital, Ali ridiculed his poorly educated opponent as an idiotic Uncle Tom' who kow-towed to the white boxing establishment; remarks which so incensed Frazier that a brawl broke out in the studio.

But when they came face-to-face at a chaotic press conference, a few days later, Ali drew on his penchant for poetry to unleash an even more merciless tongue-lashing.

It will be a chiller, a killer, and a thriller when I get the gorilla in Manila,' he recited, his handsome features creased with a mocking smirk.

Then, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a black rubber gorilla and began pummelling it. This is the way Joe Frazier looks when you hit him,' he jibed.

Joe is so ugly! His mother told me that when he was a little boy, every time he cried, the tears would stop, turn around, and go down the back of his head.'

Joe's son, Marvis, (also to become a heavyweight boxer), was fifteen, and saw his father taunted in the build-up and then beaten to a pulp in the ring.

After the fight, this happened:

The great charmer also emerged victorious in the PR war by summoning Frazier's son, Marvis, to his dressing room after the fight and telling him he hadn't meant a word of what he had said about his father.

But Ali never apologised directly to Frazier, and it took him a further quarter of a century to say in public he was sorry.

I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn't have said and called him names I shouldn't have called him,' he told the New York Times in 2001.

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.