The former American boxer is unanimously considered one of the strongest of all times. His matches against Thomas Hearns, Roberto Durán and Marvin Hagler are unforgettable encounters
Look at Leonard’s legs, then look at those of all the others: if it is true that boxing was born from there, even before fists, then it was born with him as with very few others, in Wilmington, North Carolina , on May 17, 1956. Ray Charles Leonard, with the features of a prince and a musculature that still today seems refined by Benvenuto Cellini’s burin. Always with the doubt, magnificently unresolved, whether he has crossed multiple ways of existing or multiple weight categories; dancing on the shadow line of the darkest periods of existence as in the midst of the blows of his adversaries, often destined to split the air every time he, provocatively, offered his face with his guard low, only to then make it vanish in the the moment that the other had believed to be decisive. Boxing prestidigitation, that language spoken, or rather sung, in the empyrean of boxing, by Ray Robinson, who wasn’t even called that and who was the first “Sugar” in homage to aesthetics; obviously by Muhammad Ali, who danced among the crawlers; by actors like Nicolino Locche or Teofilo Brown. Very few were chosen for an elective boxing, which rubbed the stem of thorns on the unfortunate person in question while the rose petals remained imprinted in the retina of the public.