Sugar Ray Leonard's Toughest Fight

The six-time champ is trying to build a business, promote a new generation of fighters, and clean up his sullied sport. It's not as easy as it sounds.

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Boxing's latest savior is on the move again -- riding down Oklahoma City's dusty I-35 in a rented van littered with used Coke cans and empty sandwich bags. Somewhere ahead, past the ramshackle homes and beat-up cars dotting the roadside, is the Little Axe Community Center, where members of the Shawnee tribe and their children are already gathered, waiting for the six-time world champion turned boxing promoter -- the boxer turned entrepreneur.

Sugar Ray Leonard's arrival ignites happy chaos. The following night, three days into the new year, the tribe's Thunderbird Wild Wild West Casino will be the site of the 19th fight card organized by Sugar Ray Leonard Boxing, the ex-champion's two-year-old promotion company. But right now the action is all here at the Little Axe with its sea of cowboy hats and camouflage, the last stop in Leonard's four-day schedule of meet-and-greet publicity. Everyone, it seems, wants to touch him. Everyone wants to tell him about the first time they saw him fight and how much he means to them. They call him hero and ask for his autograph. Leonard smiles, plays along; he's been dancing this dance for decades. "Gotcha!" he says, flicking the air beside some laughing opponent's ear, his hand coming from nowhere, it seems, still that fast. "Don't drop that shoulder, man, you don't wanna be doin' that with me now," he says. "Gotcha." The grown men around him are silly with adoration. Between hugs from his fans, Leonard turns toward me and whispers, "I know what it takes to be a commodity."

So it seems. At 47, Leonard looks like the same man whose astonishing athletic grace and charisma made him what's called a "crossover" boxer -- the kind of fighter "a mother and daughter would come in from the kitchen to watch fight," as one of the raffish fellows in his entourage explains. He earned $100 million in the ring and millions more outside it. For the better part of 20 years, beginning with a made-for-TV Olympic gold medal in 1976, he transcended the sport and became a mainstream personality, a brand worthy of big-money endorsements: 7Up, Diet Coke, Coors, Church's, Revlon. Some thought he raised the sport up, rinsed it of thuggery, transformed it into art. And now he's back, the self-nominated savior who is out, he says, to "redefine boxing," out to "give boxing back to boxers and bring back some class, some integrity," out to raise the sport up yet again.

The timing is good. Always the notorious red-light district of sports, boxing today is as troubled as it was even in the days when the Mob called the shots. There are too many lawsuits and too few heroes. Absurd mismatches and fraudulent rankings by unaccountable offshore sanctioning bodies have disgusted fans. Revenue from pay-per-view television, boxing's main profit generator, has fallen dramatically. Boxers themselves are suffering. While professional basketball, football, and baseball players make millions and their salaries represent well over 50% of the billions generated by those sports, the spoils of boxing don't often make it to the boxers. Even many of those ranked in the top 20 of each weight division earn less than $20,000 a year.

And now comes Sugar Ray Leonard, the most recent of the white knights -- men from other, more clean-cut rackets drawn to all the flash and cash, who seem to materialize in boxing every decade or so promising messianic intervention, riding in on the horse of business integrity and vowing to clean up the sport (and hoping to score some of the spoils). Trouble is, boxing's would-be reformers always fail. For the past 30 years the industry has been dominated by two promoters -- bitter rivals Don King and Bob Arum -- and neither has appeared to demonstrate an appetite for reform. Presiding over the sport like indefatigable warlords, the two have stamped out any who dare challenge their rule. During his fighting years, Leonard never signed on with King or Arum. It was just him, America's sweetheart, and his lawyer, Mike Trainer -- boxing's moral minority who kept clear of any ensnaring alliances, either with promoters or television networks. Leonard was one of the first independent contractors, open to the highest bidder. He was clean, separate from all the ugliness. But it was one thing to do it as a fighter -- a supremely talented fighter whose skills allowed him to call the shots. His goal now is to forge a competitive advantage out of being better and cleaner, more modern as a marketer, more enlightened as a manager. But who says he can even build a company in the first place -- whatever its principles? After all, in some respects, he's just another former worker trying to make the transition to business owner, just another guy trying to make the journey from employee to entrepreneur. And can anyone succeed in boxing while keeping his own hands clean? A series of lawsuits is already prompting questions about Leonard.

A few years back, when he was getting started as a promoter, Leonard sought out some teachers. "I had conversations with people in the industry," he says. "You know, looking for insights." He was Sugar Ray, and people sat down with him. Even Don King. And did King have any advice? "Sure," Leonard says. Then he smiles that smile. "He told me, 'Welcome to the jungle."

THE SANCTIONED STORY

On March 1, 1997, Leonard suffered his last and most embarrassing defeat as a boxer to the soft-punching Hector Camacho, who floored the great Sugar Ray -- by then a 40-year-old grandfather -- in the fifth round of Leonard's sixth and final comeback. For months after, Leonard underwent a period of harsh reckoning. His boxing career -- the thing that had defined him since the age of 14 -- was over. "I didn't really do much for a while," Leonard says. "But I can't sit back and be idle for long. I need a mission, something that's going to deliver down the road. I've got to be busy. I've got to be productive."

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