Marvelous Marvin and me
GARY KEOWN ON HIS SPORTING HERO
EIGHT minutes of malevolent, blood-soaked mayhem in that shimmering dreamland in the heart of the Nevada desert. One 12-year-old boy transfixed, in his bedroom, in a scheme, somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow.
Marvin Hagler’s three-round demolition of Thomas ‘The Hit Man’ Hearns remains the most terrifying, exhilarating, electrifying streetfight in boxing history.
It still snakes its way through my life to this day, the contest against which all must be measured. Just recently, for example, I got Bob Arum — promoter of that explosion of stardust and venom at Caesar’s Palace on April 15, 1985 — on the phone from Vegas to talk about signing Scotland’s Josh Taylor to his Top Rank stable.
It took just short of five minutes before Hagler and Hearns came up. An exercise in restraint on my part. Everything, you see, comes back to Hagler and Hearns in the end.
From memory, it took a week or two for the pictures of ‘The Fight’ — ordinary handle, extraordinary event — to travel across the Atlantic. But, when they did land — on ITV’s
World of Sport, I am sure — everything changed.
Life wasn’t just about football any longer. It was about finding out everything about this shaven-headed destroyer in those incongruous long white socks, replying to classifieds in boxing magazines from folk who would put together compilations of fights from any period in history and post them to you on three-hour VHS cassettes.
Footage of Louis, Marciano, Robinson, Ali, Frazier and Buchanan would eat up my pocket money through time. At the start, though, it was all about Hagler and his battle for supremacy with Hearns, Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard.
There was the face-off with Duran for the undisputed middleweight title. The taking-apart of Tony Sibson and Alan Minter. The thunderous right that ended his third meeting with Willie Monroe.
Hagler wasn’t really a one-punch knock-out merchant. He sucked out his opponents’ souls and clubbed them to death, the blue-collar antithesis of that fast-talking showboater Leonard.
Leonard was the Olympic golden boy. Hagler had made it the hard way, fighting for scant reward for so long, taking defeats, avenging them, feeling disrespected, waiting for his chance.
When I started my journalism apprenticeship, just over two years had passed since he’d been robbed by Leonard in 1987.
Talked into 12 rounds rather than 15, Hagler lost on a split decision to a guy who held on to him throughout and conned two of the judges with his bolo punches and flashy flurries. He walked away from the game after that. Embittered, eaten up by the injustice of it all.
Don’t ask what madness made me think he would ever want to share that hurt in The Sunday
Post with a wee laddie fresh out of school, not even 17 yet, on a page somewhere between Oor Wullie and that column I put together every Friday about readers catching trout?
The whole concept was a melange of keenness, rawness and zero self-awareness. Yet, I ploughed on with the zeal of Greta Thunberg sabotaging an oil and gas convention. Just with a greater sense of purpose.
Hagler had split from his trainers, the Petronelli brothers, taking up acting in Italy instead, but I rang their gym in Brockton, Massachusetts, anyway and asked them to pass on my details if the great man ever called by. For the hell of it, I got in touch with the famous Kronk gym in Detroit as well. If I was going to talk to Hagler, I might as well interview Hearns too. Just to complete the set.
It seems ludicrous now. Not so much reaching for the stars as floundering around in the dark, throwing darts at a board too high and too far away to ever hit.
Still, sending your ambitions, your enthusiasm and your unsophistication drifting out there to be shredded by the brutality of the adult working world is, I suppose, what it is to be young and naive.
You have to get all that starryeyed nonsense knocked out of you somehow, don’t you? Don’t you?
THE bar in Graziano’s, in the small town of Canastota in upstate New York, has been going like a fair all week. Alexis Arguello was the centre of attention last night. Couldn’t get him off the dancefloor, birling around with all and sundry and rarely taking ‘no’ for an answer.
Joe Frazier pops in most nights with his crew, too. They sit in the corner. Punters approach now and again to get gloves or photos signed, handing over dollar bills in the process.
One of my drinking cronies, an American radio host, advises me that auctioning these items over the internet is about to become the next big thing. That Frazier is right to get a bit of the action for himself. Says I should get into it, too.
I smile politely and order us a large one. I’m a newspaperman, for crying out loud. Whatever it may be that this internet carry-on has to offer, I can say with perfect certainty that it is never, ever going to have the slightest effect on the way I make a living. I wouldn’t demean myself by asking for autographs anyway. Journalists are impartial observers. Asking their subjects to sign all sorts of tat is ridiculously unprofessional.
Hugely unbecoming. A sacking offence, no less.
Carlos Ortiz, the two-weight world champion from Puerto Rico, turns up. He nods over. First night here, I ended up between him and Ken Buchanan as they squared up, raising their guards, before descending into laughter.
Afterwards, I asked if they knew each other. Knew each other? Buchanan only ended his career, making him quit on his stool on the undercard to the second Muhammad Ali-Floyd Patterson fight at Madison Square Garden in September 1972.
It’s now June 2000. Ortiz is far too nice to wonder aloud why his nemesis is now hanging around with a nincompoop. He is simply here, with the rest of fighting royalty, to laud Buchanan on his inauguration into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Day after day, I note down their recollections of Edinburgh’s finest in his pomp and, sent here to craft his diary for one of the tabloids, blend them with Buchanan’s now well-kent tales of bossing Ali around at the Garden, badmouthing Duran and dancing with Princess Anne.
That’s where Graziano’s comes in. We usually sketch out the day’s copy here. The barstaff also let me hog the payphone to dial it back to Scotland while kindly siphoning my wages into the till.
The only fly in the ointment is that Ken hasn’t trapped today and I’m going to have to nick down to his hotel to see him.
When I get there, the foyer is packed. Still, at least there’s only one bloke ahead of me at reception, an older man, dressed in a golf shirt and cap. He looks vaguely familiar, like I should know hi… Hold on a minute. Noooo? I edge closer.
Jesus Johnny, it’s him. IT’S HAGLER!
My heart thumps. What do I do here? How do I introduce myself?
I remember hearing him say that Frazier once told him he had three strikes against him. ‘You’re black, you’re southpaw and you’re good’.
That brooding attitude still seeps out of Smokin’ Joe up in Graziano’s. Maybe Hagler is still like that too. Maybe this isn’t much of an idea, after all, but I’m an arm’s length from my favourite sportsman ever. I can’t let the moment pass.
I extend my hand, explain I’m here covering Buchanan’s big day
and ask if he has a moment to tell me what he remembers of him. Then, I clench my pelvic floor muscles and hope for the best.
Hagler smiles, wide as the Clyde, and lets the recollections tumble out. He could not be nicer.
And with everything all loose and friendly, I drop my guard. I tell him what that fight with Hearns did to me, careering into some kind of clumsy round-byround commentary — as if he didn’t know how the night panned out himself.
I’ve crossed the Rubicon into Destination Fanboy here — and there is even worse to come. There’s an invitation to a golf tournament in my pocket. It’s the only thing at hand with any Hall of Fame branding.
Am I really going to say this? Am I really going to… oh, to blazes with it.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but would it be okay to get your autograph?’
He signs the ticket, squeezing his handwriting between the letters with levels of accuracy previously used to dismantle people’s faces with his jab. I scan the hotel lobby, just in case any of the gang who’ve been listening to me let my belly rumble up in Graziano’s are around. The coast is clear.
‘Erm, Mr Hagler,’ I enquire. ‘Could I please get my photo taken with you as well?’
OF course, Hagler never did return that silly phone call from my teenage years. It didn’t seem right to bring it up when I was busy scrabbling around for something he could scribble his name on. I’m blaming the Petronellis now, anyway.
There was one evening back then, though, when I did think — for a fleeting second — that the message left at his old gym might, somehow, have made its way through.
Still living with my parents, we were finishing dinner when the phone rang. My father, a bricklayer whose life on building sites had left him able to put opponents away verbally in the same way Hagler took care of his physically, went into the hall to take the call.
‘Hello… Eh?.. Who is it?’ he shouts into the handset. Silence. ‘Whit’s that, pal? America? I canny make ye out. Who?’
He pauses again, giving the voice on the other end a last chance to clarify things.
‘Aye, that’ll be right.’ The phone gets clattered onto the receiver.
My old man comes back into the living room.
‘Whit wis that?’, I ask, the butterflies in my stomach starting to settle.
‘Wan ay they funny phone calls. Some guy sayin’ he wis Tommy Hearns, the boxer. Ah jist tellt him tae…’ RING, RING… RING, RING… ‘Leave it, da,’ I bellow, jumping off the sofa to get my hands on the phone before pops goes back in for round two. It’s Tommy Hearns, the boxer, all right.
He’s a few months from fighting for the WBO super-middle title. It’s other big nights I’m fascinated by, though.
Specifically, that one in ’85. His broken hand. The leg massage in the dressing room that supposedly sapped his strength.
When I put the phone down an hour later — at my insistence, not his — I’m indescribably happy. Exactly the same way I felt when I said goodbye to Hagler in Canastota.
Even now, writing this in my office, I’m looking at that photo of us with his autograph in the frame — sadly, the only time in 30 years in papers that I asked for a signature or souvenir — and see the excited schoolkid who obsessed over that slugfest with Hearns, becoming absorbed in boxing and later travelling the world to cover fights in Vegas and elsewhere himself. It still amazes me my job allowed me time with the two men who produced perhaps the greatest bout of all time.
I still laugh with my dad about him slamming down the phone on one of them.
In their own little way, they helped change my life for the better.
Proved the kind of heroes that are really worth having. Made me see that foolish, youthful dreams can have legs.
Aye, everything comes back to Hagler and Hearns in the end. Particularly Marvin. A most ‘Marvelous’ fellow, indeed.