EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPT: "Sorcery At Caesars"

Sugar Ray Leonard's forced retirement after eye surgery in 1982 was followed by a three-year period of substance and domestic abuse.  This dark episode was unknown to the public when he fought Hagler in 1987. Details emerged only later, in Leonard's 1990 divorce. 

Chapter 10 from the new book “Sorcery at Caesars,” by Steve Marantz, recounts the hell into which Leonard dragged himself, and his family.

                                                                                  Chapter 10-Down the Toilet

      ONE NIGHT, IN THE latter half of 1984, Sugar Ray Leonard returned to his turreted stone mansion in an agitated state. At a glance Juanita saw that he was strung out, and erratic. She watched him rummage through a drawer, then wheel on her.

         “Where is it?”

         “Down the toilet. Where it belongs.”

         In a fury, he pulled Juanita from their bed, slapped her, and flung her like a rag doll across the spacious master bedroom. She tumbled across the floor and rolled up against a chest of drawers, ears ringing, half-dazed. Juanita slowly rose to her feet and gathered her dignity as Leonard screamed profanities and waved his gun in the air.
      
       “I’m going to kill myself,” he said.

         She stared.

         “You don’t believe me, do you?”

         Juanita did not reply. She knew that whatever she said he would turn it against her. But her silence was inflammatory, too, in his deranged state. He threw a lamp against the wall, smashing it into tiny pieces of metal and wood. Now his bloodshot eyes glowed a demonic hue. He kicked a mirror and watched its jagged shards drop onto the carpet.

         She tried to walk away, to get out of the bedroom, but he stalked her with mounting rage. She turned to face him  just in time to see his fist whistling through the air, just in time to duck. The blow glanced against her forehead, and his ring opened a cut. As she felt the damp warm blood with her fingers, Juanita drew herself up and calmly walked out of the bedroom. Leonard, suddenly overcome with horror and shame, trailed behind.

         “I’m sorry,” he shouted. “Please.”

         She knew what she had to do. She pulled the two terrified boys from their bedrooms, carrying the baby, and hurried toward the front door. She intended to leave – and never come back. But when they scuttled across the gleaming front foyer she saw he had gotten there first – blocking the door. The gun was gone. Now Leonard held a can of kerosene.

         “We’re leaving.”

         “No.”

         “We’re leaving. I’m afraid of you.”

         Leonard lifted up the can, unscrewed the cap and matter-of-factly poured kerosene on the wooden floor.

         “If you leave,” he said, “I’ll burn this house down before I let you get it. Or anything else in it.”

         Juanita stiffened. He wasn’t holding a match – not yet, anyway. No time for negotiating. No time for goodbyes.

      She shielded Little Ray with her body, and pushed him out the front door. Cradling the baby, she followed  into the brisk night air, and as she fingered her car keys, Leonard ranted in the foyer.

         Leonard’s cocaine habit and domestic violence, as described in Juanita’s divorce deposition in 1990, reached their apex in the year after the Hagler-Duran bout.

         Though Juanita testified that it occurred as late as1987, Leonard said he used cocaine only between 1983 and 1986, and associates said it became most problematic late in 1984.

         After the bout, in late 1983, Leonard had returned to the gym. He ran and exercised, and every two or three days he jumped rope and hit the bags. “I’ve been drinking and need to sweat it off,” he told associates.

         But there was more to it. The longer Leonard was out of the ring the more his celebrity dimmed. He still worked as a commentator and had a few endorsements, and he was in a commercial with Little Ray for a hot cocoa mix, but in general, ovations were quieter and autograph requests fewer. To Leonard, the relative silence was deafening.

         “It was cruel and unusual punishment,” Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote later. “He had to sit there and ooh and aah and gush and exclaim over a fighter he knew wouldn’t give him much more trouble than a heavy bag or his shadow.”

         The antidote, Leonard concluded, was a comeback.

      “The man inside of me is saying: ‘I have to come out,’” Leonard explained. His alter ego, Sugar Ray, had spoken.

         Assured by physicians that his surgically repaired left eye was sound, he chose as an opponent journeyman Kevin Howard, whose record was 20-4-1. Leonard-Howard took place on May 11, 1984, in Worcester, Mass. The choice of location, in Hagler’s backyard, foreshadowed Leonard’s obvious intention. Hagler, who had knocked out Juan Roldán in March, was at ringside with his wife, Bertha.

      Tentative plans for a bout, worth $10 million to each fighter, were to be announced the following day. Hagler told a reporter, “If he’s foolish enough to step in the ring with me, I’m foolish enough to rip his eye out.”

         But Leonard had underestimated his physical attrition. Though he had gone “clean” to prepare for Howard, his body was thin and relatively frail at 149 pounds. Shockingly, in the 4th round a straight right by Howard sent Leonard to the canvas for the first time in his pro career. His face registered indignation as he clambered to his feet. He continued, though every round was a struggle and he was in pain. Leonard managed to stop Howard in the 9th round.

         Minutes later, in the dressing room, he asked himself, “If this guy can do this to me, what could Hagler do?”

         Then he told Juanita, who was eight months’ pregnant, “This is it, I’m giving it up.”

         “You can’t retire,” Juanita said. “People will think Kevin Howard made you retire.”

         “Sweetheart, he did.”

         To the media Leonard said, “There’s no sense trying to fool myself or anyone else – I just don’t have it anymore,” he said.

         Word of Leonard’s decision reached Hagler at ringside as he watched another fight. “It’s the story of my life,” Hagler said.

         Leonard soon fell back into his self-destructive habits.

      The birth of his second son, Jarrel, in June barely interrupted his routine, and his mood gradually became uneven and volatile, according to Juanita’s testimony. Some days were better than others. On the good days Leonard got high, shot pool with his buddies, usually Joe Broddie and Julius “Juice” Gatling, and spent the night with a girlfriend.

      Juanita had long ago accepted his infidelity as an occupational hazard. When Leonard stayed out, at least she and the children were out of the line of fire.

         On the bad days, Juanita feared for herself, Little Ray, and the baby.

         Juanita later said that while she received counseling during this period, Leonard refused it.

         “He was in denial – he didn’t think he had a problem,” Juanita recounted. “He didn’t think it was a problem in doing drugs and alcohol, and the drugs and alcohol turned him into a person that he really wasn’t. It turned him into a kind of a monster.”

         Years later, Leonard blamed his behavior on his hangers-on.

         “My wife said, ‘The drugs are killing you, you shouldn’t hang with those guys.’ But then I’d be with my guys, so who do you listen to, the guys or your wife? I listened to the guys.”

         Leonard’s problems were largely concealed from Washington Post reporter William Gildea in March 1985, when Gildea visited Leonard’s Potomac mansion. Gildea’s feature for the Post’s Sunday magazine depicted domestic serenity and marital harmony, with Leonard and Juanita describing one another as “best friends.” Leonard told Gildea he had accepted his retirement and had no urge to fight again.

         “I could sense this palpable emptiness in his life at the time I wrote that piece,” Gildea recalled. “He hadn’t done what he wanted to do.”

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Steve Marantz covered boxing for the Boston Globe from 1979 to 1988, when he became a full-time news reporter.  He picked up Marvelous Marvin Hagler's career early in 1980, when Hagler won tune-ups in Portland, Maine against Loucif Hamani and Bobby Watts.  Over the years he enjoyed a cooperative relationship with Hagler, except for the time he wrote that Hagler should go after Michael Spinks' light heavyweight title.  Hagler refused to speak with Marantz for a couple of weeks, until Marantz showed up at Hagler's Provincetown training camp waving a white flag.
     Marantz picked up Leonard's career in his first bout with Roberto Duran, in June 1980.  For awhile he thought he enjoyed a special rapport with Leonard because Leonard winked at him, until he realized Leonard winked at most writers.  When Ron Borges was hired by the Globe in 1982 he brought a wealth of boxing knowledge and experience, so much so that when Marantz decided to move to news he had no doubts that the boxing coverage would improve.  It did, and within a week or two no Globe readers even remembered that Marantz had covered boxing. But Marantz had the City Hall beat, which wasn't too much different than the boxing beat.