Q&A: Boxing Expert George Kimball On His New Book Four Kings, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray and Oscar De La Hoya

In his new book Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing, noted boxing expert and ESPN contributor George Kimball examines the history behind the greatest era middleweight boxing, and perhaps the entire sport, has ever seen.
Contributing Editor John DeSio spoke with Kimball about the quartet, where Roberto Duran fits in the group, and the oft-discussed comparisons between Oscar De La Hoya and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Machochip: What made you pick this era to focus on in the book?
George Kimball: Well, for one thing, it’s an era with which I was very familiar, because I covered all of these fights, actually. I didn’t even realize this until I started working on the book, but somebody had done a video of all four guys. Somebody had thought of these guys as sort of a self-contained quartet before I had really looked at it that way. But as I got into looking over some of this stuff, looking over the material that I had written, it occurred to me how neatly it all tied in. The nine fights between the four guys took place within a particular decade, between 1980 and 1989. It was something with a beginning and an end.
We look back at it, they kind of appeared at about the time that Ali was being eclipsed on the world stage. Generally, the heavyweight champion dominates boxing. But once Ali slipped over the horizon, these guys were pretty much the face of boxing for that decade. You have [Mike] Tyson coming along towards the end, but that turned out to be a quick burning comet rather than the bright star that we expected it to be. The more I got into writing it the more I realized how particularly special this was. This was something that really hadn’t happened before and will never happen again.

MC: I was actually going to ask you if there was any historical precedent or similar time period in any division in boxing?

GK: I don’t think so. You had some truly great rivalries. I mean, you could make a case, I suppose, for the fights in the decade before, the heavyweight fights between Ali, [Joe] Frazier, [George] Foreman and [Ken] Norton, where actually the same thing happened with those guys. In other words, every one of them beat at least one of the others and they all lost to at least one of the others. It didn’t last as long, I don’t think it was the same kind of thing. So, no, and certainly not among middleweights. There have been great middleweights, there have been great rivalries, but you never had four guys on the stage at once who were able to sustain a rivalry over a decade.
MC: How do the four fighters rank in your mind? Where does Roberto Duran fit in?
GK: I did a lecture on Duran out at the University of Kansas the other night, and this hadn’t even occurred to me but I got some heated reaction from a couple of Panamanian citizens. Some of it was almost confusing because these were sort of young guys who couldn’t have even been alive back then, who were saying, “Oh, you’re absolutely wrong. Panamanians never turned their backs on Duran even after the ‘no mas’ fight. We always loved him.”

It’s like Holocaust deniers in Germany or something, this never happened. I said, “I have pictures of some of the signs I could show you.” No, no, no, this never happened. That’s one thing. The other thing is, someone had written an Amazon review I didn’t see until last night, where he thinks I gave Duran the short shrift. I think they’re missing the point. Duran, in the context of this rivalry, he had five fights against the others and only won one of them. But he certainly belongs in this company. On the other hand, Duran’s appearance in this company was really the second chapter in his boxing career. If he had never fought any fights against Leonard, Hagler and Hearns, he would be a hall of famer nonetheless and would be remembered as one of the two or three very best lightweight champions of all time. So although he ranks pretty low among these four guys, it’s within the context of this rivalry and not within his historical context as a boxer.
I think, just along the record, Hearns has to be just above Duran. He dominated Duran in their fight, although in the rivalry he only won one and drew one against the others. The fight for the top two, as far as I think, has got to be in the eye of the beholder. Even now, boxing experts are probably divided 50-50 over who actually won the Hagler-Leonard fight. My response to that is, whichever guy you think won that fight is on top and the other guy is a close second.

MC: So who do you think won that fight?
GK: I think Leonard narrowly won the fight, because he understood the rules they were playing by better than Marvin did. I think if this fight had been half a century earlier under the old rules where the referee was the only scoring official, at the end of the fight the referee would have just held Hagler’s hand up. But that wasn’t the system that was in place when these guys finally did fight in 1987. There were three judges scoring, each of them scoring each round independently, and handing in the scorecard after the round. You can’t go back and change it. I think Ray understood they way that worked much better than Marvin did.
MC: How do you think Leonard and Oscar De la Hoya compare?
GK: They’re similar fighters. I think there are a lot of truly valid comparisons, in terms of skill level, in terms of their fights against their rivals, the fights they had against the best fighters of their era. In public image they’re very similar, in that they’re both very handsome, very articulate, made for TV kind of guys. They not only looked pretty on TV but they were great interviews who knew all the right things to say. And also, they’re both very shrewd businessmen, in that they knew how to play the system and maximize their earnings.
Oscar’s still doing it. Think about this: Oscar has lost three of his last six fights, and he’s going to make $20 million at least for his next fight, and probably more than that.
MC: Does it surprise you that he’s going to keep fighting after the Manny Pacquiao fight, after he had said he was going to retire?
GK: No. I think, once again, the outcome of this fight could change that. But I think he’s learned never to say never. It was starting to sound like the little boy who cried wolf. How many last fights can you have.
Ray did the same thing on a number of occasions. There were several of those fights that were going to be his last fight, including the Hagler fight. And it finally got to the point after a while, he finally started hedging his retirements. He started saying, “Well, I think this is my last fight, but you know me.”
Buy “Four Kings” at Amazon.com