Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“It’s true,” I said. “I should be exulting.”

I said it was certainly the case that many things I had to worry about before 410 were no longer concerns. I have a lot of money I said.

“Of course, now I have a whole new set of worries,” I said. “Like what do I do with that money? Where do I keep it? How do I convert it into a spendable resource? Laundering the money is the term you’re looking for,” I added.

I stood and walked to the mirror.

“Launder as in to make clean what was once dirty. But what if there are things that once sullied cannot be fully cleansed? That notion may be true. True as it is indisputably true that you have done things that cannot be erased or taken back.”

I looked away.

“Then there’s the matter of possibly getting caught with all that entails,” I concluded and silently decided that this last worry was the greatest of all and rendered the others meaningless. I resolved not to think about the future and what it might bring.

Instead I would enjoy that moment, a moment when someone not overly concerned with accuracy could say I was contentedly sitting on top of the world.

The same place Benitez sat after beating Duran in January of 1982.

The natural next move for Benitez was a rematch against Sugar Ray Leonard but barring that — and Leonard showed no inclination to grant Wilfred that rematch — another logical move was a fight with either of the two remaining members of The Quintet (Benitez, Duran, Hagler, Hearns, Leonard) Benitez had yet to face. Rather than move up another weight class to fight Hagler, Benitez decided to make the first defense of his WBC junior-middleweight title against Thomas Hearns. The fight was scheduled for December 3, 1982, marking the longest stretch between fights for Benitez to that point. Hearns was moving up in weight but at over six feet he had always been exceedingly tall for a welterweight and the move was expected to only benefit him. Coming off his loss to Leonard he promised to be highly motivated for the critical championship fight and his two knockouts of admittedly nondescript opponents leading into the fight with Benitez seemed to indicate that the devastating defeat to Leonard had not caused him any irreparable damage or robbed him of his crippling power. The fight would feature these two brilliant fighters at their peak and predictions were pretty much split down the middle.

Developments leading up to the fight only increased the significance of the matchup. After losing to Benitez, Duran returned to the ring on September 4th in Hearns’s Detroit against some Brit named Kirkland Laing. He looked old and meek and, whether he decided to retire or not following the well-earned ten-round decision defeat to a barely capable retread, the fight surely signaled, everyone agreed, the end of Duran’s career as a premier fighter.

After defending his World Welterweight Championship with a third-round knockout of Bruce Finch in Reno, Sugar Ray Leonard began to complain of vision problems or floaters . He was diagnosed with a detached retina in his left eye (the one that had swollen to gory proportions against Hearns) and three months after the fight had surgery to repair the problem. He was warned of the danger of losing his eyesight if he continued to box. On November 9, 1982, during an odd press conference for some reason held in and around the boxing ring where he made his professional debut, Leonard announced his retirement from Boxing, lamenting that he would not be fighting Marvin Hagler in the fight the universe most longed to see.

The loss of Leonard and the perceived elimination of Duran meant the upcoming Benitez/Hearns fight would create a clear challenger to Hagler and make whoever of the three managed to ultimately emerge the biggest star in Boxing. Along with the bout’s significance there was considerable interest in seeing Boxing’s most skilled boxer against its most fearsome puncher; the fight would feature one of the greatest defensive fighters ever against one of the best offensive ones and it wasn’t entirely clear how it would unfold. On a personal level for Benitez, who had accomplished more than Hearns to that point, a decisive victory would all but erase the negative impact of his only loss. Benitez seemed to recognize the importance of the fight as well as the unique threat Hearns presented because he trained as much as he ever did. And good because on December 3, 1982, in New Orleans, in the ring just before the opening bell, Thomas Hearns looked scary. The extra seven pounds he was allowed at junior-middleweight appeared to consist entirely of sinewy but granite muscle. Whereas at welterweight he had looked freakishly thin, against Benitez he looked very much like the human cobra his nickname implied he was. Benitez looked good too, solid, but next to Hearns maybe small.

From the outset, Benitez, like every single human who would ever step into the ring with Hearns, was wary of his opponent’s power, especially from the right cross. As a result he moved a lot and Hearns established a good jab and crisp punches while stalking Benitez and wisely eschewing punches to his elusive head for solid body punches. In that manner Benitez ceded the first three rounds as it became apparent he would have significant trouble getting inside Hearns’s long punches to land his own. In the fourth he seemed to solve Hearns a bit, fighting more effectively to win the round and also benefiting from a point deduction by the ref. He appeared to have weathered the storm that was the early rounds against Hearns and seemed ready to begin winning rounds and imposing his skillful will.

But Hearns was too good and in the fifth he bounced a right cross off the top of Benitez’s head so powerfully that Wilfred seemed to lose his legs for a moment until he fell forward, his gloves landing on the canvas for an official knockdown. He survived, but in the sixth he caught another right cross flush at the end of the round and after bending exaggeratedly at the waist he fell back against the ropes in deep trouble until the bell saved him. After a seventh and eighth round that featured more, albeit less dramatic, Hearns dominance, Benitez had a decision to make.

He was clearly losing the fight. Hearns looked simply awesome that night. He was bigger and stronger. He had hand speed that was at least equal to that of Benitez. In Emanuel Steward he had an all-time great trainer and in accordance with his instructions he was executing a perfect game plan. Worst of all was the inhuman power. Benitez felt all the punches, even the ones he blocked. A Hearns punch that landed on his arm, for example, would deaden that spot for minutes.

On the other hand, as the Leonard fight had shown, if Hearns had any weakness it was his chin and stamina. To have any chance to win Benitez would have to go against his nature by forcing his way inside the reach of The Hitman to try and land the bomb that would change the fight. And that was the decision that needed to be made because the fact was that as great as Hearns was offensively, if Benitez dedicated his efforts principally to avoiding being hit he would not be hit. It was that simple and that certain. It was an option. He could go into a defensive shell and circle the ring. He would lose a decision, true, but he would avoid embarrassment and avoid needless pain. Then he could simply say that Hearns’s particular style was too difficult for him and people would agree and no one would fault him too much.

The other option meant getting inside no matter the cost. It meant throwing punches once inside, which meant by necessity getting hit hard and often by punches that Benitez already knew from most recent experience would hurt and possibly knock him unconscious. And either tomorrow or years from now, thousands or millions, when Time has ground our bones into an ashy mist and the very Earth we now inhabit has drifted into its third-generation sun, let the record reflect that Wilfred Benitez, who had more money than a thousand people needed, who’d been bred since infancy to fight at the expense of all else, who seemed like a perpetual child who did not take his career seriously, understood his responsibilities and chose to fight. Let it reflect that he bounced a left hook off the top off The Hitman’s head and that head fell to the canvas as a result. That he came forward winging his fists like he had done since he was seven and that, as expected, he took ugly shots to the head in return. That some of those shots momentarily disrupted communication from his brain to his legs but he never fell again. That he would take two to land one but that he kept taking them, kept trying to win. That he did not relinquish greatness easily but that it had to be forcefully wrested from his grip by overwhelming superior force.