World boxing champion Leonard on bitter sweet rise

Only by reading The Big Fight, his uninhibited memoir released this week, can one be prepared for what follows. It was 1971, before Leonard had even coined his own sobriquet out of respect to his idol Sugar Ray Robinson, that his silent nightmare took hold. He was just 16, but already a dancing virtuoso of a young boxer with designs on competing at the Munich Olympics. One of his coaches for the Games, a man “in his late forties”, accompanied the teenager and another fighter to an amateur event in Utica, New York. Leonard soon deemed his behaviour inappropriate when they were told to take a hot tub together while he watched from the other side of the bathroom. “He was a male authority figure,” Leonard, now 55, relates. “We did not question him.” Later, he would encounter the same figure in the front of a car outside his local rec centre in Maryland, ostensibly to hear about how significant the Olympics could be to his career.