While Sugar Ray Leonard was disappointing America, his arch-rival Marvin Hagler was making a new life in Italy.
BOXING: Gavin Evans
`HEY-a Giuseppe – come-a da here.” The Italian-American doing the shouting is Lou Duva, trainer of champions, and when Lou hollers, heads turn because he has a mouth on him, and connections, and a wild temper too.
But who is Lou is calling? The heads turn again, towards “Giuseppe” – a small, slim, tuxedoed, shaven-headed, black man with a whopping big grin aboard in appreciation of the old man’s joke, expansive hand gestures, and plenty of those big open-arm shrugs Giuseppes the world over are inclined towards.
“Hey-a Lou. How-a you doin?” And as he comes over to hug and kiss the dewy-eyed trainer, there is a ripple of dawning recognition among the bemused boxing aficionados who have turned up for the weigh-in of a world-title fight. “Is it? … it can’t be … yes it is.” For 10 years Marvin Hagler – Marvelous Marvin Hagler if you please – has disappeared from sight: sullen, morose, angry at that bum decision against Sugar Ray Leonard. There were reports of drink, wife-slapping, and a messy divorce, which echoed Sugar Ray’s own domestic troubles during his mid-Eighties retirement. But while Ray’s pathologies drove him back to what he knew best, Marvin chose exile.
And now, suddenly, he is with us again – as Giuseppe – all smiles and warmth, lots of touchy-feely, and endlessly obliging to every lounge lizard wanting to be Polaroided with a legend.
When the wave of recall has spread across the floor, everything else stops. All eyes are on one man. “Now there was a champion, a true fighter,” the adolescent next to me gushes, and we all grunt our acknowledgments. His father, picking up on the fight-film lingo of the lad, adds his bit: “Yeah, they don’t make ’em like that any more.” Hagler’s old rivals – Leonard, Duran, Hearns – are still around, diminishing in stature with each final comeback. But Hagler? He may be out of sight and mind, but any time he is brought to the fancy’s attention, respect is evident. He is a throwback to a lineage that to imperfect memories seems purer and harder, with fewer inverted commas and far less pretension.
We are at Mohegan Sun Casino on a former nuclear site on a Native American reservation in Connecticut, the latest gaming paradise conjured up by Sol Kerzner. The idea is to use professional boxing as a way of pulling the punters, and Hagler has been hired to make up the numbers – a bit of garnish for their first bill.
But as soon as the heads turn in his direction, today’s champions are forgotten. He is nearly 43 now, but somehow he looks fresher than before: the nose is straighter than it once seemed, the face smoother and the body smaller. But the main change is the accent and the body language. Seven years in Milan “learnin’ da acting business” seem to have taken the hard edge out of this quintessentially blue-collar fighter from Brockton, Massachusetts.
Later I test out this new congeniality, mentioning the name of Ray Leonard, a name that once made him bristle threateningly. “I’m not friends with him, right,” he says, and he laughs at the idea of it. “But you know, we talk these days. We bump into each other now and then, but we’re not in love. I did resent that split decision but now it’s a thing of the past. Now it’s a thing of continuing, accepting a new challenge and trying to go after that. I’m not looking back.”
Marvin (he has dropped the Marvelous, which was added to his name by deed poll) sees the future in the way he has always done: you learn the business from the bottom; you work harder than anyone else. This time the business is acting, and Milan seemed to him the kind of training ground he needed, though he admits that despite his altered English syntax and pronunciation (he even talks about the “chinema”), it will be another year before his Italian is up to scratch.
“You gotta have the patience. Same way as in boxing. I’m not really in no hurry. I’m doing a lot of work on talk shows and a few movies, but I still need a lot more work and improvement, in my time. I’m going to school over there, in the sense of learning the trade, and when I’ve learnt it I’ll return to America – when I’m a little polished and not so green in this game.”
He tells me how good his life is now, and I sense that despite living in a foreign land with a new girlfriend and in a strange profession, he has convinced himself it’s true. Even if he is constantly reaching for analogies from his old life. “I think I’m very satisfied right now. It’s still a lot of hard work – in the movie industry. I still think that if I can put the same ingredients into this acting game as I did into the boxing, maybe, with a little break, I can make it.
“So my full concentration now is on the acting. For me it’s like starting from the bottom, the way I did in boxing. Starting with the four rounds, to six, to eight, and then reach the main event, and then the big stuff is the championship fight. In this game it’s the same, only the thing is an Oscar.” He takes a step back. “I’m not really looking to make an Oscar or nothing, but to keep me busy and see this as a new challenge for me, and hopefully one day I’ll be co-starring with the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers.”
He winks and gives me a small-eyed, naughty boy, peculiarly Italian smile. “And maybe of the beautiful ladies, you know – I’m not keeping that out of it.” And if so far his passage to glory has been slower than he hoped, well, he has been there before. “Like in boxing there’s a lot of politics in the movie industry, but boxing helped me be very patient, and if you work hard and pay attention to what you’re doing, hopefully you succeed. The whole thing is just finding that break.”
Hagler was the best middleweight in the world for more than three years before he got his break, and then he was given a ridiculous draw against an Italian world champion, Vito Antuafermo, and had to wait another year before going to Wembley to face Alan Minter’s racist taunts, and the bottles of beer of his drunken fans, to lift the title in 1980.
For nearly seven years he reigned supreme, until he was “robbed” by that glory boy Ray Leonard, after which he walked away in disgust. It was the fourth bum decision in his 14-year career (62 wins, three losses, two draws, 52 knockouts), but after that one he had had enough. “It’s a love that is there, and it’s something that just won’t go away. It’s a disease, it’s a drug, boxing, and to be able to walk away from the game you have to be content with yourself and your achievements.”
Which is something it has taken Hagler a while to understand, and despite his protestations it is not clear he has reached that point. The question of course – always, in these days of everlasting comebacks – is what about Marvelous Marvin again? Are you tempted, ever? I mean, the money is still waiting for you and you look in such great shape, and you’re younger than Foreman, Duran, Larry Holmes, Carlos Palamino …
“I’m still working out every day, watching the food, running, swimming, biking – but I try to stay out of the gym. I really don’t want to get that smell, you know. Once you get that smell and start punching that bag, you get tempted to get back into the ring. I’m hoping I’m an example for the younger fighters, showing them there’s another life after boxing, so in a way I’m like a father.”
He feels a need to start reconnecting with the sport, though it will only be when he has “made” it in acting that he will get seriously involved. “Boxing has been good to me. It gave me a lot. I think I accomplished everything I wanted to do, and I want to put something back, but in the future, a bit further along the road.”
His eventual plan is to handpick a hard, ambitious, working-class black youth and nurture him to the world title, but there are no Marvin Haglers out there just yet. “I haven’t seen a fighter who puts in the hard work and the dedication and devotion, who really loves the art of boxing in the way I did. I can’t find a fighter who is hungry enough to have that desire I carried, but it will have to be a kid who is very hungry, from the same background as me, and I’ll teach him the skill.”
Right now he is back at the stage of being a fight fan. Soaking up the adulation of the casino crowd is a gentle way back to the next stage. The more I speak to Marvin, the more I realise the last temptation of the marvellous one has yet to pass.
Without being provoked by a question, he changes gear and the Milanese affectation evaporates. “Boxing is still in my blood, you know. I still like to watch a great fight.” He pauses for three or four seconds and looks me in the eye. “I still love a good fight.”