I was in the middle of feeding the kids dinner on Thursday, June 9, 2011, when my Blackberry rang. The call was coming from Boston’s 617 area code. Please let this be Valerie Swett. And please let her be calling with good news.

Swett was an attorney from Deutsch Williams, the firm that provided U.S. representation for the primarily European-based “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler. I can’t say exactly what Ms. Swett’s formal job description entailed, but unofficially, my impression was that one of her duties was to run interference on all non-paying requests of Hagler’s time. For nearly two months, all I’d gotten out of her was one variation after another of “talk to the hand.”

Well, it was indeed Valerie Swett calling from that 617 number. And it was indeed good news. “Marvin is available for 20 minutes at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning in Canastota,” she informed me.

Since that April, I’d tugged on every possible string in pursuit of an interview with Hagler, an interview that was essential to completing a major assignment I’d received, an assignment that felt essential to my hope for a continuing career in journalism, a career that was on the ropes, to use pugilistic parlance. I was “between jobs,” trying to make ends meet as a full-time freelancer — with a mortgage, a wife, and two kids under five — after the magazine I’d previously edited went belly-up while still owing me several weeks’ worth of salary.

In other words, I had a lot riding on this interview. And here it was, offered to me on about 16 hours’ notice. I’d have to leave my house at 5 a.m. the next day to make sure I was at the International Boxing Hall of Fame, ready to take advantage of my limited window to interview the former middleweight champ.

Not the most convenient conditions I’d ever encountered. But clearly the best offer I was going to get.

Marvin Hagler died four years ago today, on March 13, 2021, far too young, at just 66 years of age. This was the backdrop for the one and only time I met him.

He was 57 then, one of the true living legends of the sport, and a man who could still cut an intimidating presence more than two decades after his career as a fighter ended. And to go along my nerves over my personal stakes attached to completing this interview successfully in about half the time I felt I needed, there was the small matter of our interview topic being the one fight Hagler hated talking about: his April 6, 1987 split decision defeat at the hands of Sugar Ray Leonard.

That was, I presumed all along, part of the reason this interview had been so difficult to line up. I’d traded emails over the previous few weeks with veteran Boston boxing writer Ron Borges, one of the few journalists Hagler trusted, and he told me in his experience Marvin had rarely been willing to talk about that fight or about Leonard. It was a “touchy subject,” Borges regretfully noted, as he did his best to act as a go-between with Swett and help me land this interview Hagler obviously was not terribly eager to do.

But it was an interview I needed. A couple of months earlier, Bill Simmons had contacted me out of the blue to gauge whether I was the right guy for an oral history of Leonard-Hagler. Well, if I didn’t land both Leonard and Hagler, I didn’t have a viable oral history article to submit and I didn’t have a foot in the door with Simmons’ soon-to-launch Grantland.com.

Leonard was going to be easy. He was generally media-friendly, I’d met him before, I knew some of his handlers. But Hagler was proving to be a stiff challenge. All efforts to line up a phoner got stonewalled. I figured, though, that he’d be in Canastota for IBHOF induction weekend that June. So I pleaded with Swett: We’ll do it in person, I’ll come to him, please just get him to carve out a little time for me while he’s in Canastota.

On Friday, June 10, I finally had “The Marvelous One” cornered after two months of trying to cut off the ring. International Boxing Hall of Fame Marketing Director and Event Coordinator Jeff Brophy met me on the Hall grounds. He took me up to Hagler’s room at the Days Inn across the street, where Marvin and his wife Kay greeted me.

Kay was warm and inviting. Her husband was difficult to get a read on. He wasn’t un-friendly. Certainly not at all impolite. But he was poker-faced.

And there was no time for an ice-breaker. The clock was running.

From the jump, Hagler made it clear that he wasn’t overly thrilled to be revisiting this particular chapter in his career. Before I could ask my first question, simply in response to my clarifying what the topic du jour would be and explaining the oral history format, he said, “I’ve been talking about this fight over and over and over for almost 25 years. It’s like we just can’t get away from it.”

Gulp.

Despite that comment, he was a dream interview subject from that point forward. He didn’t shy away from any topic. He was highly opinionated. And, conveniently for the purposes of the article, he still held a grudge — against Leonard, against the judges, against the business of boxing.

And he let me stretch our allotted 20 minutes into 25 before he started giving me the “wrap it up, before I have to make you wrap it up” stare.

Most of the best material Hagler gave me made it into the oral history, naturally.

I’ll never forget the disdain in his voice as he discussed Leonard’s strategy and execution. “People say his movement gave me problems. Movement? You mean running?” Hagler said, still offended 24 years after the fact that anyone scored the fight for his opponent.

Then there was this incredibly profound comment, as we discussed the Leonard fight being the last of his career: “I never put on a pair of gloves again. Never had one gym workout. If you get that taste in your mouth, it never goes away.” That became the closer for the oral history article.

And there was this one, putting a positive spin on the split decision loss with a line that became deeply sad to re-read when Marvin died four years ago: “If I would have knocked him out, I probably wouldn’t still be living this thing 24 years afterwards. But it’s probably a good thing that people still talk about the fight, because in a way, boxing keeps you alive.”

Looking back through my old transcription, I also found a couple of quotes that didn’t make the oral history that now stand out to me.

I asked Hagler how many times he’d watched the fight in those intervening 24 years. “I haven’t,” he said immediately. Then he backtracked a little: “No, I watched part of it, but [stopped] because I realized I’d probably throw the TV out the window.”

Another quote that was cut from the final product shows Hagler fully grasped the permanent place in boxing lore held by the “Four Kings” — him, Leonard, Roberto Duran, and Tommy Hearns:

“I think each one of us kind of made each other,” he said. And then he beamed with pride at his role among the quartet as the defending middleweight champion as he added, “I gave them all an opportunity to dethrone me.”

Hagler’s death shook the boxing world, even as it came about a year into the most deadly pandemic of our lifetimes, when so many of us had grown accustomed to the non-stop flow of tragic news. It was sudden. His son James told TMZ he was having trouble breathing and experiencing chest pains, was taken the hospital, and died a few hours later.

Almost all great ex-fighters see their approval ratings go up after they retire, and again when their lives end. Hagler didn’t need any such bumps. His approval always seemed nearly unanimous (even if the scoring of the Leonard fight was anything but).

Seriously, have you ever heard anyone — fan, fighter, or otherwise — talk smack about Marvin Hagler? Heard anyone claim his fights were boring, or he was overrated?

Hagler finished his career 63-3-2, with at least one loss and one draw considered all-out robberies. The only fight everyone agrees he lost was his unanimous decision defeat on March 9, 1976, against Willie “The Worm” Monroe at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. Hagler evened that score and then some with a 12th-round knockout in the rematch and a four-minute, 46-second destruction in the rubber match.

His boxing career was backloaded, as he spent almost the entirety of the ‘70s waiting for his opportunity and most of the first half of the ‘80s as the middleweight king in search of a mega-fight. It was only over his last three fights that he became a crossover superstar, gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated and starring in deodorant commercials. He went mainstream with his instant classic against Hearns, he showed signs of slowing down against John Mugabi, he fought Leonard in one of the biggest sporting events of the decade … and then he was gone.

My personal experience with him took a similar path. There was a long period of waiting, a lot of frustration, then finally, an opportunity, with a few concessions required. Our conversation was intense and, at least for me, thrilling, and before I knew it, it was over.

“Boxing keeps you alive,” he said.

Marvin Hagler has been gone for four years now. But Marvelous Marvin is forever.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.