I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  Back at my house, I made sure no one touched the Frank Sinatra wine I’d brought back from Vegas. One day, though, after all the partying was over, I went to the bar and found the bottles were empty.

  “Who drank these?”

  “I did.”

  It was our cook, a man we called Pechín.

  “Chucha tu madre!” I shouted. “You just drank two thousand dollars’ worth of wine, you son of a bitch!” He used to drink a lot of my liquor, but I didn’t think he’d drink those. That was painful.

  About a month later, Arum announced that the fight with Hagler had been set up for the undisputed middleweight championship of the world, the first time I’d be fighting as a middleweight. The press conference in New York was crazy, with about a thousand of my fans there to support me. That was only the start, as Hagler and I got on separate planes for a promotional tour around the country.

  It was while we were in Los Angeles that I saw this beautiful car I fell instantly in love with. An Excalibur, a 1984 Studebaker SS four-seater convertible, with a powerful eight-cylinder Corvette engine. An exclusive car—if you wanted to get one today, you’d find almost all of them are in motor museums, in private car collections, or with classic-car enthusiasts: they were rare then, but they’re even rarer now. Well, I wanted to be one of those special people who owned one—special people like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Liberace, Sonny Bono, Rod Stewart . . .

  I asked Don King for $700,000 so I could buy it. He was startled that I asked for cash, but eventually he gave it to me, and I went straight to the showroom. “That’s the one I want!” I said. My wife handed over the cash, and we drove from Palm Springs to Las Vegas in that car. When we were finished in the United States with the Hagler fight, I brought it back to Panama on a plane. It felt good to be loaded again.

  We set up camp in Palm Springs, which was hot and dry, perfect conditions to train in for the fight at Caesars Palace in Vegas. There were more distractions, though, with movie stars and musicians around the place—people like Bo Derek, and Kirk Douglas and his kids, would come and watch me skipping rope and hitting the speed bag. Bo Derek had been in both training camps for weeks, shooting photographs. Most days, she looked like a cowgirl in her western outfit, and one day, after a workout, a reporter asked me if I felt anything for her, because I’d put my arms around her for a picture. Bo Derek might be an 11, not a 10, I told them, but my wife was beautiful, too. Some people think all the celebrity that comes with boxing is a distraction, but I disagree. You can’t train all the time, and it was a pleasure to be surrounded by such beautiful people.

  Freddie Brown was back as my trainer, and as usual, he wouldn’t let me eat when we were training. I had to keep sparring on an empty stomach, dying of hunger while trying to get my body into shape. If it hadn’t been for my brother Pototo feeding me slices of bread when Freddie wasn’t watching, I would have keeled over long before the fight.

  Even though I’d been down this road of strict diet and high-intensity training before, I was still enthusiastic. After the Moore fight, I’d regained my confidence and knew I could go toe to toe with the best. I was sure Hagler was nervous about me.

  So were the Petronellis, Pat and Guerino (“Goody”), Hagler’s co-managers. They were going to try to influence the choice of referee: they wanted someone to keep an eye on me and, for a start, were accusing me of using my thumbs on Moore and saying I’d hit him in the balls. At the same time, Hagler was calling me a dirty fighter, which told me he was running scared. He was a dirtier fighter than I was; sometimes he used his head like it was his third hand.

  Hagler had won thirty-two fights in a row and, it’s true, had not lost in almost eight years. He’d had seven title defenses that had lasted only forty rounds, and forty-eight knockouts—but look at the people he’d fought. Muertos. Dead people. Caveman Lee. Norberto Cabrera. Tony Sibson. Alan Minter. No one like Roberto Durán. There was no talent in that division, and I was going to show him things he had never seen in the ring. And I knew that Hagler was finally going to feel what it was like to get hit—and hit hard—to the body. We were going to see just how marvelous Marvin Hagler was. The most important thing, of course, was winning my fourth world title.

  But it would not be easy. I was sparring in Palm Springs and some guy hit me hard and almost broke my nose. I got a fever and my eyes became swollen and I had to skip training for a week. When I came back, I had to wear special protective headgear. Sugar Ray Leonard came to interview me at the training camp. I put my sunglasses on for the interview, but I lifted them up so he could see how swollen my eyes were. I think the fever took too much speed away from me. These may sound like excuses, but all I needed was a couple more weeks’ training. But Luis Spada insisted that I fight, so even though I couldn’t breathe very well, I did.

  At least coming into the week of the fight, Hagler respected me more than Leonard and Hearns and Benítez had. He told George Kimball, the author of Four Kings, that I was a gutsy fighter who’d take on anyone and he admired me for that—the other fighters were all sitting on a fence like vultures, waiting for him to get old. I was never afraid to fight him.

  Five days before the fight, Hagler and I were both doing roadwork, running along the golf course by Caesars Palace, when we crossed paths. Hagler ran his way and I ran mine, but we both reacted in the same way and bared our teeth at each other, knowing that in a few days we were going to get it on properly.

  Fight night came to Caesars Palace on November 10, 1983. I weighed in at 156½, Hagler was a pound heavier. As I was getting into the ring, Bo Derek got up on the ring apron and said, “Let me see your face,” and took a picture. I looked like a movie star, she said. But she wasn’t the only celebrity there that night. I remember seeing Michael Jackson at ringside and, behind him, huge numbers of people waving Panamanian flags and screaming, “Durán! Durán!”

  I wanted to fight Hagler on the inside, which was always my strength, and from watching his old fights, I knew he was always a little slow getting his hands up. When you boxed him side to side, I realized, he was easy. I was able to block his shots and his arms got tired, but I blocked so many shots that my arms lost power, too. And then in the fifth round I hit him in the head and fractured my right hand. The pain was immediate. The only consolation was that I could tell I had hurt him, as his eye started swelling up badly. I knew I had put him in a bad place, but since I now effectively had to fight him with one hand, I couldn’t finish him off. The last round was even, and he was a tough fighter, the kind you could not let up on for one minute; otherwise, he would come at you. It meant you had to use your head to outthink him, and I definitely had him on the ropes.

  But I lost by two rounds. I’m still convinced I should have won that fight, because after twelve rounds I was ahead on all scorecards. I won six rounds on two cards and four rounds on the other. But the final card was 144–142, 146–145, and 144–143, all in favor of Hagler. It was the first time he’d had to go the distance to defend his title. Chuleta! If only I hadn’t fractured my hand! After the fight, I took my gloves off; my right hand was swollen. I went to a doctor to have a cast put on it. “How did you fight like that?” asked the doctor.

  “I wanted to tear his head off,” I told him. It hurt like hell, and when Bob Arum tried to shake my right hand, I winced and offered my left. I had to keep it in a cast for three weeks.

  At least I’d earned the respect of the American writers, and all the fans who kept bringing up the second fight with Leonard. “Durán erased [the] term of cowardice from Panama’s Spanish dictionary,” wrote Will Grimsley of the Associated Press. It was also a good night for me financially, as my payday was a cool $6 million. Hagler got about $10 million, and he earned every penny. “That man’s a legend,” he said after the fight. And of course I still had my World Boxing Association junior middleweight title, because that belt was not on the line.

  It was a shame I never had a
rematch with Hagler, because I deserved it. I couldn’t stop thinking that if I hadn’t fractured my hand and had beaten Hagler, I would have fought Juan “Martillo” (Hammer) Roldán, the middleweight from Argentina, who ended up fighting Hagler in 1984 instead. That could have been millions of dollars for me. And a fight against Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, a bunch more millions. But they ignored me, and they ignored Spada, who agreed that we deserved a rematch.

  But another big fight came from that night. After the decision was announced, I looked down at Leonard, who was ringside, wearing a tuxedo, doing commentary on the fight. “You can beat Hagler,” I said.

  “Why are you telling me that?”

  “Because you’re in the gym every day, I’m not. I only went to the gym to train for this guy. You’ll beat him.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes—all you have to do is box him.”

  And that’s exactly what happened when they fought in 1987. Leonard beat him, even though it was a close fight and a split decision. He could have beaten him more easily if he hadn’t spent so much time on the road running.

  Much later, I heard that Hagler was back in the gym three days after the fight. Me? I partied for three days straight with my hand in a cast. But this is who I am, and I’m not going to apologize for living my life. It didn’t matter that my skills were deteriorating as my career went on, and it was true that my body couldn’t take the punishment as it once had: if there was good money offered, I would chase it.

  Although I lost to Hagler, I would finally get a big consolation prize. A few months after the Hagler fight, I was in a nightclub in Miami with a couple of women when Spada showed up with a Cuban guy, Walter Alvarez. “This gentleman,” he told me, “wants you to fight with Tommy Hearns.” It’s crazy now to think that this is how fights used to get made!

  Alvarez told me he was going to offer me such-and-such.

  “How much? Bring me half a million dollars and I’ll fight him.”

  “Are you crazy? Where the hell am I going to get half a million dollars at eleven o’clock at night?”

  I told him as far as I was concerned tomorrow didn’t exist: it was half a million.

  “Forget it,” I said to one of the Cuban women. “We’ll never see him again”—and I kept drinking my whiskey. An hour goes by; two hours.

  Then, around three a.m., Alvarez reappears. “Look, Durán—I couldn’t get the money. I’ve been talking to my friends, but it’s hard to come by. But I was able to get together a quarter of a million.” He had it in a suitcase and asked me to count it.

  I didn’t have to: I told him his word was good enough for me. I handed over the money to Spada and said, “Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Then I told the girls the party was starting.

  It turned out they were lesbians and around dawn, when I was thinking it was time to call it a night, one of them suggested a threesome. But with all the drinking, I got on top of the wrong one; she got all angry with me and spoiled what should have been a great way to end the night.

  Now I suddenly had a huge amount of cash, however—more than I’d ever had at one time. What a mistake that was! For the next two and a half weeks, I had the best time of my life, burning through thousands of dollars, going from one club to another. It went on so long that, by the end of it, I’d almost forgotten about the Hearns fight, and it was only when Spada sat me down and told me how we were going to do the training that I got on the scale and realized I now weighed almost 200 pounds!

  But the contract was signed, and I was due to fly out to the Bahamas to train. I had one month to make weight. Here we go again, I thought. Shedding the pounds had always been my problem, but this was harder than ever. I went days without eating, and had to do things like sitting in a hot tub, sucking lemons, to sweat off as many pounds as possible. I was dehydrated all the time, but I wasn’t allowed to drink and eventually resorted to letting the water run into my mouth when I was taking a shower but not swallowing it.

  All this was long before training began to be planned based on scientific principles; I was just doing things I’d learned in the gym back home. I had no idea what kind of damage I was doing to myself, but I didn’t care as long as it worked—though I could feel my muscles getting weaker, not stronger.

  My family came to visit me at the camp even though my son Robin was only three. It was good to have them around, but there were times when I was in that hot tub, sweating like an animal, and the kids would come in and start screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” and the noise really got to me. “Fula, please take the kids away,” I said. “I can’t deal with them right now.”

  That was when Fula knew I was going to lose. She just hoped it would be by a decision. I hope he isn’t hurt, or killed, she was thinking. Later, Robin would tell me that he knew, too, even as a little kid, something was wrong and I was going to lose that fight. To this day, he says it is the saddest memory he has of my days as a fighter. As for me, I’d been through this all before and couldn’t tell the difference, but it did seem that everyone was expecting me to lose. My old friend Navarro would have nothing to do with me. “Hearns is younger than you,” he told me. “He’s stronger, and he’s a better fighter than you. He’ll knock you out in the third round. I will not go back in your corner.”

  I’d heard all this sort of shit before, but I can see now that everyone was right. Just to get in the ring was like going through hell. Losing the last three pounds was horrible, like shedding blood, and I barely made it, arriving at the weigh-in at 153¼. After all that, what I needed was a break, not a fight that people were describing as the hardest of my career.

  Caesars Palace in Las Vegas was as hot as hell, maybe ninety degrees. Training in the Bahamas was supposed to condition me for the heat, but this was crazy. It was June 15, 1984, the day before my thirty-third birthday, but this wasn’t the birthday present I’d hoped for.

  From the start, things didn’t go my way. About a minute into the fight Hearns got me on the ropes. He tagged me in my right ear; I wriggled out, got back to the middle of the ring, but then he tagged me with a right. He hit me in the head and drew blood under my left eyelid. This was definitely not the plan I’d been working on. When I hit the canvas in the middle of that first round, what came into my mind was those two lesbians in Miami—I don’t know why, but it made me laugh. I tried to shake that out of my head and got up quickly. Then Hearns got me up against the ropes again and knocked me down with a flurry before the bell rang. I was in a bit of a haze and ended up going to the neutral corner. Jesus—there were still fourteen rounds to get through if I didn’t want to get KO’d. Maybe people were right, I thought.

  From the moment the bell rang at the start of the second, Hearns got me up against the ropes again. I waited and waited for a break to be able to push him away and start boxing and that’s when he faked a left to the body and finally popped me with a big right hand—boom! I went down right on my cheekbone and that was it. Bing, bang, bing, bang—he’d knocked me out and I couldn’t get up. I was paying for the consequences of fucking around too much—it was all the fault of those lesbians! When Fula heard I’d been knocked out, she started screaming, “No, no! I don’t want to know!”

  Hearns became the first man to knock me out, but it had taken eighty-three fights before it happened. He knew what he’d done was special, and later said he’d been fighting a legend, the greatest man he’d ever faced. Although no one believed me, I still think if I’d lasted a few more rounds, I would have beaten him. As it was, I got frustrated by all the questions and when I got back to Panama I told reporters at the press conference at the airport that I was retiring. I didn’t want to think about boxing anymore. I didn’t want to live in the past. “I’m thinking now about having fun,” I told them. “Good, clean fun.”

  It was a relief to tell the world that I was done with boxing. I had money in the bank and could look after my family, which is why I’d gotten
into the ring in the first place all those years ago. I had done everything I had wanted to. I felt I was born again. Whatever had happened in the past, I was going to leave it there and get on with the rest of my life.

  EIGHT

  EL CAMPEÓN

  THERE WAS MORE to life than boxing. Back in Panama, we reunited the salsa band, which hadn’t played since the mid-1970s. This time, we called it Orquesta Felicidad, in honor of my wife. My brother Pototo was back in it again, as well as my friend Marcos and a few others. We toured the country with a few guest appearances, including, believe it or not, Wilfred Benítez, who played timbales. “We were rivals in the ring but not in music,” he said when he asked to join us. I couldn’t disagree with that.

  We recorded another LP and released a single, “Pa la Calle a Echa un Pie,” on which I sang lead vocals. I also played the güiro, a Latin American percussion instrument made out of a hollow gourd. I was not the best singer, I knew, but I was good for business, and everywhere we went the fans loved us, particularly when we toured outside Panama. We went to Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, but one of our most memorable trips was eight days in the Dominican Republic for Carnival, touring the entire island.

  My fame also got me a part in Miami Vice, on an episode that first aired in 1986. I didn’t play a boxer: I was a drug dealer called Jesús Moroto who gets busted. Frank Zappa was in the same episode. In the script, Don Johnson, who played Crockett, comes to see me in prison.

  My line goes: “It takes a tough cop to bust me, Crockett.”

  “You got thirty seconds, before I walk out of here,” Crockett tells me. “Now, what did you want me for?”

  “Payback!” I say, and reach over and kiss him on the cheek. Then I pull a makeshift gun from the back of my pants: “We find out how tough you are.” And I shoot myself.