Sport: Everything I've Done Is Unique

At 26, pretty Sugar Ray could no longer summon the desire

The first time that Sugar Ray Leonard retired from boxing, in Montreal after winning a gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, he said, "My journey has ended. My dream is fulfilled." No one doubted that he meant it or that he would fight again.

Like Decathlon Winner Bruce Jenner, Leonard imagined his place on the Wheaties box was secure. His error, confusing the commercial opportunities awaiting white heroes and black heroes, was soon revealed, along with a paternity suit, a sadly overblown welfare department formality. Leonard never denied he was the father of Juanita Wilkinson's boy child. But the mean publicity that followed was the clincher: if Leonard hoped for his own 7-Up commercial, or anything else, he would have to fight for it.

In February 1977 he turned pro and began beating his way through the welterweight thicket on a course Manager Angelo Dundee had carefully laid to the championship. It started with Luis ("the Bull") Vega at the Civic Center in Baltimore. Most boxers start in four-round preliminaries, but Leonard's debut was a six-round main event and a $40,000 payday. It was televised nationally.

So descriptions of him as a media creature, even creation, were unavoidable. Sometimes Dundee even referred to him poetically as "prime time," and said the first sign of Leonard's greatness was "just the way he raised his arms and filled the screen." He had an irresistible smile, an appealing way. He could also fight. After 25 victories, no losses and almost three years, Leonard stopped Wilfred Benitez in the 15th round for the welterweight championship of the world, or at least of the World Boxing Council. At the moment of victory, he flew to a corner of the ring and jumped onto the ropes as if into the arms of everyone.

Roberto Duran bullied him and took his title in June of 1980, but Leonard retrieved it five months later. Duran, after shivering all his great lightweight career in the shade of Muhammad Ali's shadow, came into the spotlight as if out of a cave and was greeted by an Ali just his size. He rubbed his eyes. Later he rubbed his stomach. When Duran quit in the eighth round of the return match, a Leonard tour de force, nobody could believe either the alibi—the little wolf had wolfed down too much lunch—or the truth: an uncivilized man took a civilized way out.

So it was not until the Thomas Hearns gladiator in 1981, for both the W.B.C. and the World Boxing Association titles, that Leonard proved himself a gladiator beyond any discussion: a media child and corporate man (his purses had come to $35 million) but a fighter first. Hearns was finished in the 14th round, though Leonard was battered bubble-eyed. Eight months later, with only one small fight in the interim, the retina of that left eye detached. For six months Leonard brooded. Then last week he called assembly in Baltimore, where he had started. He had an announcement.