Hagler wins the title and has to be smuggled out

Alan Minter had won the world middleweight title in Las Vegas in March 1980, on a split decision over Vito Antuofermo that the judges could barely agree on. In June he stopped Antuofermo in the rematch. His next challenger, at Wembley Arena in September, was Marvin Hagler.

In early September, Minter said something that turned a title fight into something uglier. He was reported as saying, "I am not letting any black man take the title from me." He later said the words had been "that black man", and that he had been misquoted. By then it no longer mattered. A crowd of about 10,000 came to Wembley on 27 September, and Sports Illustrated's reporter described many of them as drunk and in the grip of crude chauvinism.

Nine minutes

The fight did not last long enough to become a contest. By a minute and 45 seconds into the third round Hagler had opened four bad cuts on Minter's face, two around each eye. With about 75 seconds of the round left, Hagler landed a right uppercut and the referee, Carlos Berrocal, stopped it. Minter needed 17 stitches.

That should have been the moment Hagler was declared champion. It wasn't.

The bottles

As the fight was waved off, beer bottles, many of them half-full, came flying into the ring. Chairs and glasses followed. Hagler's handlers threw themselves around him in what SI called a human blanket, and helmeted police moved in to form a wall around the corner. "It was beautiful to see them," said Petronelli, from Hagler's corner.

Hagler was taken out not through the arena to his dressing room but through a tunnel under the north balcony, straight into the police security headquarters. In SI's phrase, the new champion was "not proclaimed but smuggled out of the ring."

Afterwards

Minter fought on briefly. In 1981 he lost to Mustafa Hamsho and Tony Sibson, and retired. He had won Olympic bronze in Munich in 1972 and a world title, and he died in 2020 at 69. The night at Wembley is still the thing most people know about him, and the words before it are part of why.

For Hagler it was the night he became world champion, and he spent it being hurried away from his own coronation under police guard.