Hagler vs. Leonard: The Pre-Fight Hype Has Already Started : Everything Must Be Right Before Hagler Gets Into Ring to Fight

BROCKTON, Mass. — Evening rain washed Brockton, thunder cracked, signs swayed in the wind. Lightning sliced the gothic dark, whitening the worn brick building standing alone amid parking lots. Figures dashed along the sidewalk, and in. Up three steep flights to the light at the top of the stairs and the Petronelli brothers’ gym, Marvin Hagler’s second home.

Hagler wasn’t there--he was holed up at his first home, in nearby Hanover, Mass. There, he had been fighting to reach a decision about retirement since March, when he knocked out John “The Beast” Mugabi in 11 ferocious rounds. A world waited: Sugar Ray Leonard, such hopefuls as James “The Heat” Kinchen, Hagler’s own handlers, money men and less mighty. Had the science lost its sweetness? In July, Hagler said, “I feel as though I’ve been a great champion. I think that I would like to leave the game. . .to walk out as a proud champion.”

Yet in Pat and Goody Petronelli’s gym, where the smells of sweat and liniment are greeters, the feeling about Hagler was as obvious as the thud of body punches and the brittle bell: The man was only gone for a while; he’d be back one of these days. “He’s got to get some things cleared up first,” said Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer.

By that, Petronelli meant that Hagler needed the support of his wife Bertha, “Mrs. Marvelous,” and the rest of his family, before he’d fight again. They’ve wanted him to retire. The result was that Hagler has been far from his fighting frame of mind. And before he fights, his manager, Pat Petronelli, has said, “Everything must be right.”

Everything must be right, said Goody Petronelli, leaning back behind his desk, because Hagler had fought too long and too hard to fight when he isn’t right. He’d learned. Once he went into a fight with bronchitis and, although his record says two defeats in 66 bouts, that was Hagler’s only true defeat, said Petronelli, “and I hate to use an excuse for that one.”

Of course, Hagler avenged it, and the other defeat as well, fought everybody in his way, successfully defended his middleweight championship 12 times. His family said, enough. At his news conference in July, Hagler was uncertain. What’s certain is that if Hagler decides to fight again he will go to inordinate lengths to be ready. “He puts himself in the challenger’s position,” said Petronelli.

Hagler has lived by the Petronellis’ work ethic, written on the wall: “Train till it hurts and then some.” Each fighter in the room--sparring in the two rings, pounding the heavy bags dangling from the ceiling, shadowboxing in front of the mirrors--was merely emulating Hagler. To be out that night, on the tail of a tornado, literally fighting to open the front door against the wind, they had to want to be Marvin Haglers.

“Kids come in, they say they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that,” said Goody Petronelli. “They get a cut lip, a bloody nose, they don’t come back.

“Marvin came in here, he said he was going to do this, do that. He always set his goals high. And he always came back.

“He was a competitor. I’d say, ‘Okay, kid, you’ll be the champ, I’ll be your trainer,’ you know, you kid around. But you couldn’t tell right away. Not until the national amateur championships in Boston, in 1973. He fought up a weight class and was the outstanding fighter and got a trophy this high, which he gave to his mother.

“Then I knew. I says, ‘Pat, we got a potential champion on our hands. . . ‘

“What makes a great fighter? You’ve got to have the ingredients, like the ingredients for a good dinner or a good pie. Marvin’s got all the ingredients. He’s got heart. He’s got a chin. He’s got a chin of iron. You can’t give a fighter heart, and you can’t give a fighter a chin.”

One other thing, too. Goody Petronelli swung his chair forward, leaned across his desk. “He never cheats in training.”

Brockton has a history, its Rocky Marciano. So alike, those two, Marciano and Hagler. Workers, with huge hearts. Marciano quit while he was ahead; 49-0 was his record. Marciano knew he could beat everybody else, why not stop? He had tired of the work, but would never cheat in training. Hagler has known these things, his Brockton history. Would he quit now?

Nothing ever came easy for Hagler. No artiste, he looks at life as a survivor, and that’s the way he has fought. During the 1968 Newark race riots, Mae Hagler had her children sleep under beds so that bullets coming through the windows wouldn’t hit them. Shortly, she took the family to join relatives in Brockton.

Hagler, oldest of seven children, dropped out of school in 11th grade and got a job in a tannery to help support his family. He worked in construction, once priding himself as “the best cement worker in Massachusetts. The man would say to some guy, ‘You think you can work. Let’s see you keep up with Hagler.’ ”

It was then he began to think about boxing. He had heard of Marciano. It’s said, too, that Hagler got into a street fight and lost to one Don Wigfall. Hagler showed up in the Petronellis’ original gym, over there in the next block by the Dutch Boy Paints sign, Goody was saying, going to a window, peering into the storm.

Pat Petronelli once said, “Marvin seemed like other tough kids, a big talker. He was different, though. Determined. He had drive. I’ll never forget what he told me and my brother in the back room, ‘I was born to be champion.’ ”

The Petronellis and Hagler, the tough southpaw, came together. Pat and Goody, two of seven brothers and five sisters, both former fighters, wiry Goody and blocky Pat, friends of Marciano’s. Goody was a champion fighter in the Navy. Pat’s son Tony lost to Wilfred Benitez for the junior welterweight title. Boxing was the Petronellis’ life, and Hagler wanted to make it his.

They took him and they turned him pro the month after he became the ’73 AAU middleweight champion. Hagler didn’t want to wait for the Olympics. He wanted to fight for money.

“We made it the hard way, the American way,” said Goody Petronelli. “Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down.”

Twenty-six fights in three years. Nineteen knockouts. He beat Don Wigfall on a decision, then knocked him out in five. Mostly, he fought for small purses in Boston, Brockton, New Bedford, Mass., and Portland, Maine. He got nowhere fast.

“Marvin’s a loyal guy,” said Goody Petronelli. “He could have gone with someone else. There’s politics in boxing. Pat and I, we didn’t have connections. We could have given up part of his contract, slice it up. But we didn’t take anybody in.

“But we told him, ‘We don’t think we can get you a title shot. You’ve got to go somewhere else.’ ”

But he didn’t. Instead, they decided they’d have to go to Philadelphia to fight. If he couldn’t win down there, he didn’t deserve to be champion. They would fight the “Philly Wars.”

“Briscoe, Watts, Willie the Worm, Eugene Hart. . . “ Petronelli named names. “The ‘iron,’ ” Petronelli called them. The toughest middleweights anywhere, besides Brockton.

First off, Bobby “Boogaloo” Watts, then rated No. 4. Hagler did everything except knock Watts out. Decision, Watts. Hagler’s first defeat. Petronelli called it the “worst robbery since Brinks.” A heist, even in Philly partisans’ minds.

Then Willie “the Worm” Monroe, ranked No. 3. Hagler had bronchitis. Decision, the Worm. Hagler’s second and last defeat. Hagler became a better counterpuncher because of Monroe. In time, Monroe would find a new line of work because of Hagler.

Next, Cyclone Hart. Hagler knocked him out in eight, took his first piece of turf in the “Philly Wars.”

Then Monroe, in Boston. Hagler knocked him out in 12.

Then Monroe, in Philadelphia. Hagler in two.

“Willie had had enough,” said Petronelli. “We had Monroe as a sparring partner.”

Then Bennie Briscoe. In the “Battle of the Bald,” Hagler honed his concentration, shutting out the vocal Spectrum crowd and guarding against being taken out by the dangerous “Bad Bennie,” and won an easy decision.

On the whole, they all wished Hagler had never been in Philadelphia.

Finally, Watts again. In Portland, Maine. In five previous fights in Portland, Hagler had knocked out opponents in the first, fifth, first, third and second rounds. What could Watts have been thinking? He went out in two.

Mephistophelean of look with goatee and mustache, Hagler has boasted an attack to corrupt any defense and sear one’s soul. He has said, “Destroy, destroy, that’s always my only strategy.”

One last barrier might have stopped Hagler. In 1979 he fought Vito Antuofermo, in Las Vegas, for the middleweight championship. Hagler dominated the early rounds but faltered later. The fight was ruled a draw, and Antuofermo kept the title. Hagler had let his long-awaited chance slip away.

Who was the one man Hagler had always wanted most to meet?

Joe Louis, and there he was. In Vegas, in the wake of Antuofermo. Hagler once said, “He grabbed me. ‘You won that fight,’ he told me. ‘Don’t give up.’ I said, ‘I’ll be back in the gym tomorrow.’ ”

To work. When he devoured Alan Minter like a Boston cream pie, in three in London on Sept. 27, 1980, to become middleweight champion, Hagler had done it, as Petronelli said, “the hard way.” He had fought 54 times professionally by then, like a craftsman from another fight generation, as if from Marciano’s time.

“Marvin always did his homework,” said Goody Petronelli. “I saw him make a move once. I asked him about it and he said, ‘I practiced it at home in front of the mirror.’ ”

If it hadn’t been so hard all these years, Hagler might not have been thinking about retirement. At 32, a 62-2-2 record compiled, he has taken punishment--from Briscoe, Marcos Geraldo, Roberto Duran, Juan Roldan, Thomas Hearns while Hearns still stood and Mugabi. It was something to think about, the fights and his five children, before thinking of fighting again.