Sugar Ray Leonard fights off demons

When Leonard stopped in at Gant's gym on Friday, neither man was thinking about dancing or literature. Leonard remembered when, as a youngster, he admired the older Gant, who dressed in sharp suits during his days fighting in the Washington, D.C., circuit. Gant made the game look sophisticated. "I emulated that," Leonard said.

Gant, in turn, praised Leonard's trim physique. "You're staying in shape. You could fight middleweight again."

Neither man mentioned the night in 1979 at the Capital Centre in Washington, when Leonard knocked Gant down twice, winning the fight in eight rounds on the way to taking the welterweight championship from Wilfred Benitez.

But on the wall of the gym Leonard spied a two-color poster from that fight, the paper wrinkled with age. The old-fashioned red and black letters advertised the bout between the undefeated Olympian, Leonard, and the regional champion, Gant. And ringside seats were $30. Leonard laughed at that. "It would be $3,000 now."

As Gant fetched his camera for a souvenir photo with the star, Leonard reflected that the meeting was all too rare. "Boxing is dangerous. Fighters don't hang out much. But this is endearing to me. You know, Tommy Hearns calls me every now and then, and I'll visit Benitez in a convalescent home."

Leonard is one of the lucky ones. He doesn't have to live in an extended care home. He hasn't suffered brain damage -- no more, he says, than the usual absent-mindedness of a 54-year-old. He hasn't been crippled with arthritis, and though he suffered a detached retina, it was repaired and stayed put.

But there was other damage. Leonard writes of a life of abusing cocaine and alcohol between fights, and of being sexually abused as a teen by an Olympic boxing coach and by a rich boxing fan. He says now that boxing helped him conquer these demons, and that he only ran into trouble between fights, when he would slip between his two personalities, "Sugar Ray" and just "Ray." "I was dying, man," he said. "I wasn't suicidal, but I had to get rid of one of those guys, either Sugar Ray or Ray."

Each time he came back from retirement -- and he retired four times before it stuck -- it was to use boxing to straighten out his life, he said. Now he uses a 12-step program.

Moving between the boxing gym and an interview at a radio station to promote his book, Leonard was recognized by a group of construction workers repairing a pipe on Spring Street. They shouted to each other, "Hey, it's Sugar Ray, the guy from the dancing show!" "I'm a big fan," said one, striking the classic, clenched-fist pose with Leonard. "Class act!" hollered out another.

In the radio station studio, Leonard confessed: "I would rather fight Tommy Hearns, Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran all at once than go on ‘Dancing with the Stars' again. I'm glad I did it. It's on my resume, but I lost 12 pounds doing that."

He said he also lost sleep, and his feet would restlessly follow the paso doble patterns under the sheets.

Unlike dancing, boxing has entered a low point, Leonard said. Mixed Martial Arts has stolen its thunder, and kids don't care about Golden Gloves competition as much anymore. "It's deteriorating," he said. "We don't have a heavyweight champion from America? What's wrong with this picture?"

But he is optimistic about its future. "Boxing is resilient," he said. "It always comes back."