Silence bit into the Las Vegas humidity for several seconds. Then, the late Colin Hart, The Sun’s veteran fight scribe who was working as an analyst for BBC Radio, let out a shriek.

“That is the greatest round of boxing ever,” he yelled.

He had finally broken the long pause left for him by co-commentator Ian Darke, who had just done everything in his power to describe a frenetic first round that was one of the finest in the history of the sport.

Darke teed it up for Hart, but was met with silence.

“It was just like dead air for three seconds until he kind of gulped and just said it,” Darke recalled.

“But it was brilliant radio because his voice captured just how spellbinding it had been.”

There was another five minutes of Las Vegas mayhem to go, too.

*

‘I’ll have a war with you’

It was exactly 40 years ago, April 15, 1985, when Hagler and Hearns tore into one another. Ian Darke covered hundreds more big fights and made his way back to Las Vegas dozens of times, but still nothing compared to that except for possibly, Darke says, the 12-round barnstormer Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales shared in their first fight.

Of Hagler-Hearns, Darke said: “I’ve often been asked what was my number one fight, and that’s it.

“It only lasted eight minutes, but it was eight minutes of just drama and fury played in this really high-octane atmosphere on a balmy night in Las Vegas outdoors. It was, in every way, sensational, and of course, the first round you can argue, but I think the greatest round of championship boxing you’ll ever see.”

The fight featured the career-middleweight Hagler, fighting out of Boston but from Newark, against Detroit icon Hearns, who had laid waste to many welterweights in the most shocking fashion. It was, in part, down to the lore around Hearns’ power that Darke feels he might have sided with the man from the Motor City.

“I think I went towards Hearns, you know?” Darke explained. “And it doesn’t make sense now, but at the time, there was a feeling Hearns’ power looked something from another planet almost at times. And I think we all underestimated just how big a factor the sort of natural weight of the two fighters were, because Hagler was the natural middleweight, and I think he took great umbrage at the fact that a lot of people saw in Hearns’ favour and that Hearns might blow him away.”

And with that stubbornness in mind, Hagler bit down and fought Hearns with every ounce of pent-up frustration and aggression he possessed. 

“He was basically saying to him, I think, in that first round, ‘Look, I’m the king of the middleweight division – you are just a blown-up welterweight, light middle coming up into my territory. If you want to have a war with me, I'll do that with you, because I’m going to win that’.”

**

‘He thought he’d blow him out of there’

There was a big-fight feel in Las Vegas, but Hagler was not one for the media. Darke, who had previously had doors held open for him – figuratively speaking – by the likes of Muhammad Ali, found the door to Hagler closed.
“Hagler was a nightmare to cover,” said Darke, who had covered the Brockton southpaw before. “If you turned up in the week of the fight, and of course everybody did, because we’ve all got jobs to do, he wasn’t, basically, available. He just locked himself away in the week of the fight. The American journalists, particularly American boxing writers, used to take great umbrage at it.”

Once, when Darke covered Hagler’s fight with Britain’s Tony Sibson, Hagler’s team – specifically the Petronelli brothers – informed him that Hagler refused point-blank to do an interview, despite Darke’s meagre request of two minutes having travelled thousands of miles.

“He goes, ‘I don’t talk to anyone before a championship fight’,” Darke was told. “‘I’ve got nothing against you, buddy, but I don’t talk before a championship fight.’” 

The Petronellis apologized and promised Darke he would be the first one to get Hagler after he’d battered Sibson, and they came through for him.

“The only stuff you’d get from him was like a set-piece press conference, and the set-piece press conferences back then weren’t kind of like they are now, they were slightly more muted affairs – now it's all kind of, um, showbiz and hype, isn't it?” said Darke. “I think you were allowed to go and see him work once before the fight. Hearns was a bit more accessible. I got a one-on-one with Hearns in the week of the fight, and he was full of bravado; I think he genuinely thought he had too much for Hagler and would blow him out of there.”

***

‘I’ve just watched something for the ages’

Hagler and Hearns was such a ferocious affair, and hauled the viewer in with such intensity, that when Hearns finally succumbed in round three, there remained a thirst for more rather than a feeling of satisfaction over what those present at Caesars in the parking lot had witnessed.

“Exactly that,” Darke added. “I think everybody was disappointed that there wasn’t going to be more of it, because it really was edge-of-the-seat stuff. You wanted more of it, but and of course, at the end of the second round, Hagler had that cut, didn’t he? And famously, [referee] Richard Steele went over to him and said, ‘Marvin, Marvin, can you see okay?’ And Hagler reportedly said to him, ‘I ain’t missing, am I?’. Which is brilliant. I can just hear him saying that. Steele would not have dared stop that fight at that point – second round. It was eight minutes, and even if you’ve been around loads and loads of big fights, sometimes that really did just take your breath away, and everybody was like kind of open-mouthed at what they’d seen. Sometimes when something finishes, you think, ‘My goodness me, I’ve just watched something there for the ages’. And of course, now you’re doing a feature on it now on the anniversary [40 years later].

“It’s still talked about, isn’t it? Still is. It had that crazy intensity about it.”

****

‘That sounded something pretty special’
Darke’s incredible story-telling was played out later than anticipated owing to a delay with the fighters coming to the ring. As such, when the magic took place, it happened early in the morning the next day rather than ridiculously late the previous night, even catching some early-bird commuters on their way to work.
When Darke returned to England, he was at the sportsdesk of the Today show, and the esteemed presenter Brian Redhead said to him: “Mr Darke, you kept me royally entertained the other morning on my way into work.”

“He’d listened to it and he wasn’t remotely interested in boxing normally. Even he said, ‘That sounded something pretty special’.”

It was so special that Hart’s three seconds of silence that started this brief tale stayed with Darke as much as the three rounds of violence.

“It was probably only about my fourth trip to America,” Darke recalled. “Colin did the fight because not all the newspapers would pay to do a fight like that if there was no British boxer involved, so it wasn’t a crazy big British contingent of fight writers as I recall, so that’s how we ended up, and BBC Radio would only pay for me and my producer to go – they didn’t pay a color commentator. Colin was good at doing it, and it’s the only time I can ever recall speaking to Colin in his whole life and career where he was literally speechless at the end of the first round.”

Everything has been said and written about The War over the years, but sometimes silence is the best way of delivering a message, and Hart’s still speaks that way to Ian Darke four decades on.