[ad_1]
Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who became one of boxing’s greatest middleweight champions, wielding awesome punching power while shrugging off opponents’ blows, died on Saturday in New Hampshire. He was 66 and lived in Bartlett, N.H.
Hagler’s wife, Kay, announced on his fan club’s Facebook page that he had died “unexpectedly” at their home, but did not provide details.
Hagler made 12 successful title defenses in the 1980s, 11 by knockouts along with a unanimous decision in 1983 over Roberto Duran when the middleweight division featured a host of outstanding fighters. Fighting from an unorthodox left-handed stance, his head shaved, he was perpetually bearing in on his foes.
Hagler’s knockout of Thomas Hearns at 2 minutes 1 second of the third round of his title defense in Las Vegas in April 1985 had been hyped as “war,” the single word on a baseball cap Hagler wore on a 23-city promotional tour with Hearns.
It became one of the most famous bouts in memory for its furious and virtually nonstop exchanges of blows from the opening bell.
Midway through the third round, Hagler, his face smeared with blood from cuts on his forehead and under his right eye, delivered a right hand that put Hearns on his back.
Hearns arose wobbly, apparently at the count of nine, and the referee, Richard Steele, stopped the fight.
“Once I see the blood, I turn into the bull,” The New York Times quoted Hagler as saying. “I had to get serious and get it done quicker.”
“The reason I started out punching,” Hearns remarked, “was that Marvin started coming in and I had to show Marvin I deserved some respect.”
“His awkwardness messed me up but I can’t take anything away from him,” Hearns told The Associated Press upon Hagler’s death. “He fought his heart out and we put on a great show for all time.”
Following an outstanding amateur career, Hagler turned pro in 1973. He captured the middleweight crown in London in September 1980 when he scored a technical knockout of Alan Minter of Britain, a bout in which the excitement did not end in the moments that followed. When the referee stopped the fight in the third round because of Minter’s facial cuts, the crowd at Wembley Stadium pelted the ring with debris.
Hagler’s Marvelous nickname was bestowed by a Lowell, Mass., journalist when he fought there as an amateur and preened in the ring, emulating Muhammad Ali. He legally changed his name to Marvelous Marvin Hagler in 1982.
Hagler won 62 bouts (52 by knockouts) with three losses and two draws. He maintained that the only time he was ruled to have been knocked down, in a title bout against Juan Roldan of Argentina in 1984, in fact, resulted from a slip. He won the fight on a technical knockout.
Hagler fought Vito Antuofermo of Italy to a draw in 1979, Hagler’s first bid for the middleweight title. As the champion, Antuofermo retained his crown. But after gaining the title in 1980, Hagler got his revenge, defeating Antuofermo on a fifth-round technical knockout in 1981.
After a knockout of John Mugabi in 1986, Hagler lost his championship in Las Vegas in April 1987 on a controversial split decision that went to Sugar Ray Leonard, who was making a comeback after almost three years away from the ring.
Hagler retired afterward amid disagreement over terms for a rematch.
“Why do you want to hang around after all your hard work and let someone get lucky and destroy your record,” he told Ring magazine in 2014. “After I had nothing to prove to myself, it was the best thing to walk away.”
Marvin Nathaniel Hagler was born on May 23, 1954, in Newark, one of six children of Robert Sims and Ida Mae Hagler, who were not married at the time. His father left the family when he was a child and he took his mother’s surname.
After the Newark riots of the late 1960s, his family moved to Brockton, Mass., the hometown of the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, to be with relatives.
A social worker in Newark had given Hagler a taste of boxing when he was 10. He dropped out of school at 15 to pursue boxing at a Brockton gym owned by the brothers Pat and Goody Petronelli, who became his trainers and managers.
Hagler was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1993. Ring magazine named him fighter of the year in 1983 and 1985.
He had four children from his marriage to his first wife, Bertha, which ended in divorce. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Hagler moved to Milan in 1989 to seek a career in movies. “I like the country, the culture, the people,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1990. “And I knew Milan had people who could help me get into movies.”
“People said I wouldn’t last a week here, and, I’ll tell you, this was a challenge,” he said. “The first day I was here I got locked in my room because my landlady didn’t speak English, and I had to jump off the balcony, and then I had nothing to eat and no lira, and I’m this Black guy who doesn’t speak Italian, and, you know, I stuck it out because I’m a survivor. Now I love it here.”
He appeared in the action films “Indio” and “Indio 2.”
Hagler said he had been conservative with the roughly $40 million in purses he earned and was saddened by the poor financial state many great fighters had faced.
“I saw Joe Louis at the door at Caesars Palace, just shaking hands, and that left a bad taste in my mouth,” he told Sports Illustrated. “Then I saw Jersey Joe Walcott doing the same thing in Atlantic City. Great champions. That keeps me moving.”
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.
[ad_2]
Source link
