I've seen many debates around it,arguing whether Leonard was too arrogant and fell into Duran's mind games,causing him not to be on his a-side. Or... Leonard was capable of brawling and was planning to do it vs Duran,but Duran shocked Leonard and simply beat him in that game.
IMO the answer is the second one. Leonard says the game plan was to box and move against Duran but Leonard's style is more of an aggressive boxer puncher. He really wants to fight guys in the pocket. He could move but that wasn't his main style. So I don't see why his team would think that was necessary against a smaller man. There's no way they thought a smaller fighter would bully Leonard no matter how great Duran was. Now maybe during the fight his corner wanted him to switch it up and box more when their initial game plan didn't work but at that point it was too late. I think after the loss, Leonard realized he couldn't fight Duran the way he normally does and had to move.
Duran shocked him, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco said that the plan was to take Duran out inside 5 rounds as he was too small to fight with Leonard at 147. This whole crap about Leonard fighting the wrong fight in Montreal was manufactured later, Never during the entire fight did Angelo Dundee ever tell Ray to stop what he was doing and run and move because he was doing exactly what they wanted , to engage Duran who was after all a lightweight moving up against a younger, faster ,bigger opponent in his prime.
If we believe testimonies from back then, there was something like that going on. Apparently Duran was an absolute butthole before the fight, insulting Sugar and, even worse, harassing his wife. IIRC, according to some sources, Duran stalked Leonard's wife and confronted her in the street. Truly disgusting behaviour that would land him in jail today, but was kinda "normal" during the 80's macho era. Thus, Leonard was understandably mad at Duran and wanted to beat him to a pulp, therefore he went for a brawl punch to punch versus Duran ... walking right throught the trap.
Neither, IMO. From 14:07 - 14:18 of the vid below, you can see Leonard tries to reestablish himself from the outside, then gets walloped & staggered by a looping right hand, then returns to staying in close w/ Duran in order to avoid getting hit w/ more of those looping punches. The notion that Leonard chose to slug solely out of "machismo" is bs. He slugged b/c he didn't have the seasoning & experience yet to know how to keep Duran on the outside & he resorted to staying in close in an effort to minimize damage. This content is protected
