Hearns: A Hero Fallen

I'm too upset about the outcome of Wednesday night's fight to judge it objectively. I guess it was a great fight. It had all the necessary ingredients: stinging jabs, hard rights, few clinches, a couple of knockdowns, a frenzied crowd. But the wrong man won.

The same picture keeps coming back. It's the end of the seventh round. After winning four of the first five rounds by jabbing Sugar Ray Leonard to death, Tommy Hearns has taken a terrific beating in the sixth and seventh stanzas. The bell rings, bringing an end to Leonard's assault. Tommy Hearns turns and starts towards his corner. But the Motor City Cobra looks more like a newborn gazelle as he wobbles to his stool. Depression.

There was so much fear in the ring that it's hard to say which fighter feared the other more. Leonard ran, ran, ran in the early rounds. He gave away those rounds in exchange for not getting tagged by a Hearns right hand. For his part, the Hit Man didn't seem to fear Leonard at all until he took a beating in the sixth and seventh. After that he was a different fighter. He looked like Muhammed Ali looked each time he fought Kenny Norton. You could almost hear him thinking, "Can't let this guy close. Can't let him near me. Just four more rounds."

It could be that Hearns was too light at 145 pounds--he hadn't been that light in over two years--or that if he had risked looking wild throwing some rights in the opening rounds, one would have landed and put Leonard in Never-Never-Land. When he could have thrown the right he was reluctant. When he was willing to throw the right, in the later rounds, he was unable.

I suppose Hearns showed a lot of heart in the fight. He was battered around the ring in the sixth and seventh rounds, and came out in the eighth circling steadily, firing his long left jab to keep Leonard off him. In the thirteenth he was knocked to the canvas for the first time in his career--not once, but twice. He got up both times, once extracting himself from the ropes. All this from a man who said before the fight that he had never even been stunned in his entire career. Hearns learned quickly.

The end came in the fourteenth. A huge right hand from Leonard seemed to miss, but all of a sudden there was Hearns, wobbling to a different set of ropes. Leonard, always a great finisher, threw 40 punches or more. Hearns offered a weak left jab. Thirty more punches. The end.

Hearns was leading on all three judges' cards when the referee stopped the bout. If he had survived, he would have won the fight. But even to a Tommy Hearns fan, that wouldn't have been fair. Hearns won ten rounds, yes, but only because Leonard didn't throw any punches. Whenever Leonard wanted, he controlled the fight.

In the end, justice was done. But it would have been a better justice if big Tommy Hearns' right hand had landed on Leonard's chin in the thirteenth round, with Hearns' arms raised in the fourteenth while Leonard sagged in the ropes.

Sugar Ray Leonard was the better fighter this night. I still think Tommy Hearns is the better man.