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Hands of Stone

Page 16

by Christian Giudice


  Lampkin tested his legs two days after the fight but couldn’t walk. Most men would have taken the knockout as a sign to quit boxing, but not Lampkin. “One thing, I did suffer a concussion because I couldn’t walk. My left leg was paralyzed,” said Lampkin,“from the fall on my head. I was dragging my left leg and I had to go home in a wheelchair.” After being cleared to return to Oregon, Lampkin was met at the airport by the mayor. He was immediately taken to the hospital for more tests and to make sure he didn’t have blood clots.

  “It was a very difficult time,” Lampkin recalled. “I had to go to a neurosurgeon. Then I was under treatment for six months. A woman was working with me so I could walk again. First, I could walk; then I could run again. If you didn’t know it, you would never think that anything was ever wrong with me. I was just as strong as ever.”

  Lampkin continued, “Maybe some would call, but he didn’t. Duran never called or anything. Maybe twenty-some years later, I saw Duran. He and Sugar Ray Leonard came to Oregon to a casino. I saw it in the paper, so I went down to the casino and I walked up to Duran and said, ‘Hey, you remember me, Ray Lampkin? We fought each other.’ He looks at me, ‘Huh, huh?’ But I made him remember. Then we took some pictures together. We got to know each other like good friends. And he had his lawyer call me in Portland to come to Panama as a guest.”

  Even now, when people look at Ray Lampkin they remember the knockout, the trauma. Some wonder how he survived such a beating to keep fighting. “I didn’t get rich or win the championship of the world, because of that fight and the injury that I suffered,” said Lampkin. “That was the fight that sent me downhill into retirement. I had seven more fights after the Duran fight and I was never the same. I never recuperated from the injury. I wanted to make myself believe that I did, but I kept getting hurt. I didn’t want to die, so I left it alone. After that concussion it got to the point that I couldn’t take a good head shot. I didn’t want to be crazy or walking around like a vegetable or something. I’d rather be rich, but have some sense with it so I could enjoy it.”

  Duran, however, felt no remorse. “If I did not do this to him,” he told Plomo, “he would have done it to me.”

  ROBERTO DURAN reveled in his “killer” image but on occasion he also tired of it. “I do not wish by any motive to have this public image,” he told La Critica. “I am human and not invincible. When I was in front of the North American Ray Lampkin and I knew that he was in bad condition after the knockout, I prayed to God that he would recover soon.”

  Yet what he said and what he did were often at odds. After an easy knockout of Jose Peterson in Miami in June, he traveled to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua to face Pedro “El Toro” Mendoza. In Nicaragua, Duran met the despot Anastasio Somoza, who asked him to take it easy on his local opponent. “Somoza, the President of Nicaragua, invited Duran for a fight with another boxer they had at his weight,” said Plomo. “But the President asked [Duran] to let him fight a bit, not to hurt him right at the beginning, so that he can show how he fights. This is what Somoza told Duran when he went to visit him at the presidential residency. So Duran told me what Somoza had told him, not to be too hard at the beginning. He liked to hear what I had to say about things. He knew I was right most of the times. And I told him this was not the right thing to do.

  “In the end, this boxer, called El Toro, did not last long. After Duran had struck him twice, he fell down. Then a woman came to the ring, and Duran thought she was coming to greet him, for she called out his name. ‘Duran,’ she said, and suddenly, PAH, a terrible blow. She was a Nicaraguan woman, and when Duran moved away, she received the impact of this blow and fell down as well. At that moment all the Nicaraguan people outside got on the ring ready to beat us.

  “They shouted that they wanted to get us because that man had hit a woman. The police were not there yet, and Duran and I were fighting against them, our backs stuck together. We fought there against those fanatics for about ten minutes until the police came. They rescued us and took us to the hotel. But then, while we were there, some two hundred people came and started shouting, ‘We are going to kill this Duran, because he hit a woman.’ We did not know what to do, we could only think of leaving. We had to leave using the back entrance at the hotel, hiding, towards Costa Rica. There were always flights leaving for Costa Rica. The people stayed there shouting in front of the hotel. They did not know we had left already. It was total madness what happened there. We could have faced a terrible problem.”

  The story quickly became yet another piece of the Duran legend, like the street fighting, the flattened horse and the “morgue” quote. Don King’s publicist, Bobby Goodman, told a version in Alan Goldstein’s Fistful of Sugar. “He’s just an animal in the ring. I remember the time he knocked out Pedro Mendoza in one round. Some woman, I think it was Mendoza’s wife, jumped in the ring and made a beeline for Duran. He just whirled around and flattened the broad with a right hand, better than the one he starched Mendoza with.”

  La Critica also had a feature on the melee. One of its correspondents in Managua reported, “The woman threw a punch at Duran…and he threw a punch, effectively knocking out the young woman.” Another report named the woman as Eleanora Baca.

  Carlos Eleta, however, disputed the adverse press reports. “A woman came running into the ring after the knockout,” he said. “She started throwing punches and screaming at Duran. At first, he thought she was going to embrace him, but she kept using abusive language and swinging. Roberto put up his arms to protect himself and in the scuffle she fell down. That’s all there was to it and I have the film to prove that Duran didn’t throw a punch.”

  Duran also wouldn’t admit it. “I never hit a woman, never in my life,” he said. “Just swatted her away with the back of my hand.”

  WITH CONTROVERSY dogging the champion, it was perhaps unfortunate that, after next knocking out one of the Acuna boxing family, Alirio, in three rounds in Panama, he had his first run-in with the abrasive Viruet brothers. Born in Areceibo, Puerto Rico, the Viruets had made New York City their home. As quick with an insult as a jab, the cocky brothers – including Dorman, Edwin and Adolpho – cruised through the Big Apple’s amateur scene, using the canvas as their dance floor.

  “I dropped out of the school while in the eighth grade because I was impatient to become a boxer,” Edwin told The Ring. He couldn’t punch, but had a great left jab and a highly elusive, showboating style. He was 21-1-2 as a professional when he signed to meet Duran in a non-title fight in Uniondale, New York, on September 30, 1975. The Panama–Puerto Rico rivalry brought a 14,396 crowd to the Nassau Coliseum, breaking a box office record set by Frank Sinatra.

  The old adage that styles make fights never held more weight. Tall, rangy and tricky, Viruet went through his full repertoire, dancing an Ali shuffle in the opening moments, tying up Duran and shaking his head after punches to show he wasn’t hurt, sticking out his tongue at Duran’s cornermen and generally infuriating the short-fused champion. Several times in the middle rounds he took off around the canvas, strutting like a man in a walking race, and in the tenth even jogged a lap of the ring, to wild applause from his supporters. Duran struggled to find a way past Viruet’s long jab, but each of his punches was worth three of Viruet’s gentle pats, and by the middle rounds he was landing solidly.

  The judges were unimpressed with the showboating Puerto Rican and awarded Duran the unanimous decision. Ring reported that the bout “was a Sunday stroll for the champ once he changed his style and stopped dignifying Viruet’s bag of running tricks by chasing him.” Though the largely pro-Viruet crowd lustily booed the verdict for ten minutes, Duran had won hands-down from the sixth round onwards. Both men had words at the final bell, with Viruet telling Duran, “I can’t even break an egg with my punches but you couldn’t knock me out, and you’re supposed to be a knockout puncher.” Duran responded with a foul-mouthed tirade.

  “Edwin frustrated the shit out of him that night,” said Viruet’s handle
r, Al Braverman. “Afterward, in the dressing troom, Duran came up to me and said, ‘Why did you put that jumping jack in the ring? He should have stood there and fought me?’” But Braverman and Viruet knew what a fighter called Sugar Ray Leonard would later realize too; there was a way to frustrate Duran in the ring, to make him blow his top – and it might be the only way to beat him.

  Duran was not the only person frustrated. A crowd of 7,000 attended the Revolution Stadium in Panama City to watch the bout on closed circuit, but when the picture failed to come through they started to smash up the place and the National Guard had to be summoned.

  As the dominant fighter in his weight division, Duran was now regularly mooted for a possible “dream fight” against either junior welterweight champ Antonio “Pambele” Cervantes or WBC welterweight champ Jose Napoles. However, a rift between the two world sanctioning bodies put paid to the Napoles bout, while Cervantes, who had knocked out Duran’s friend Peppermint Frazer, was deemed too dangerous by Carlos Eleta, thus ruling out what would have been built up as the greatest Colombia-Panama clash since Panama was liberated in 1903. “I didn’t want to put Roberto in with him,” admitted Eleta years later in Panama City. “He was a very dangerous fighter.” Cervantes was a dark-skinned native of Palenque in Colombia, a village that produced an inordinate number of world champions. He was a masterful and highly experienced technician who had beaten Esteban DeJesus, Nicolino Locche and many other prominent fighters. The closest he came to fighting Duran was a run-in in the street when Cervantes was in Panama to fight Frazer.

  “Duran knew he would win this fight, but I do not know why he did not want to fight it,” said the ever-loyal Plomo. “It might have been because of the money. But let me tell you a bit about Cervantes. One day, Duran and I were walking in the street when we came across Cervantes. So Duran said he was going to show me Cervantes was afraid of him. ‘What’s up? When will we be fighting, you and I?’ he said. To which Cervantes said they were going to fight when the fight was signed. Duran told him he was ready to fight right then and there, to which Cervantes answered he did not fight just like that, only for money. Duran, believing he was afraid, told him he was a coward. But this fight was never signed.”

  The Cervantes question surfaced years later in Panama.“Pambele was a very disciplined man,” said Duran at a press conference. “To me, he was a slow boxer. Besides he was a boxer who would open up to anyone. And a man who opens up to Roberto, and who is very slow, I get him out quite quickly. I am not going to stand the beating, and I can hit better than Benitez and Frazer [both fought Cervantes].”

  Given his oft-repeated antipathy towards Puerto Rican opponents, the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Hato Rey seemed an odd choice for his next defense, especially against a local opponent. Unlike Edwin Viruet, whose quick feet stifled Duran, Leonico Ortiz suggested resilience through ignorance. His billboard back was wide and hairy, his legs were thick as a linebacker’s and his nest beard as bushy as Serpico’s. He looked like he’d keep plodding ahead even if you hurled a rock between his eyes.

  Ortiz came into the ring on December 14, 1975 with an alleged 24-5-1 fight record. A southpaw and the father of four children, he adopted a peek-a-boo style and decided early that he would fight with his back against the ropes, perhaps in an attempt to tire out Duran. Even the most accomplished of pugilists weren’t encouraged to adopt such a claustrophobic style. The ropes were best used as a place to force your opponent to. Only the great ones, most famously Muhammad Ali in his epic “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman, could use them to advantage. As though fighting from the back seat of a car with a seatbelt strapped around his waist, Ortiz trapped himself in Duran’s zone. “Occasionally the bewhiskered Ortiz would attempt to fight his way out of his uncomfortable situation,” reported Ring, “but his spurts were short lived as the champion continued to wear his man down by the steadily exerted pressure and power of his gloves.”

  A Duran left hook and right uppercut jammed Ortiz’s head back in the first round, delivering a message that he would pay for his mistakes. Ortiz landed a big left hand of his own at the end of the second round, but returned to his safety-net, the ropes in the third. For both boxers, many punches landed awkwardly on arms and shoulders. As if chopping down a tree, Duran took out a tiny piece of Ortiz in each round.

  Remarkable recuperation bought Ortiz several more rounds, angering Duran in the process. Inside, Duran challenged himself to destroy the man; anything less was inexcusable. Ortiz rarely moved or jabbed. It was his wish to stand and deliver, and as the seconds ticked away in the seventh, a Duran hook along the ropes left Ortiz staring absently at the canvas. Ortiz collapsed and stayed parallel to the canvas, while throwing his hand into the air to locate anything to clinch. Somehow Ortiz survived the round.

  At the bell for the tenth round, Freddie Brown held Duran back, then shoved him into the ring as a master would a fighting cock. Blood seeped from Ortiz’s mouth as Duran’s left hook landed flush. The champ slid away immediately, leaving his opponent’s counter to whistle in the breeze. Although Ortiz showed life in the twelfth, and shoved Duran at the end of the following round, he took nearly twenty unanswered blows in the fourteenth.

  Few men could withstand such a consistent beating. Trying to last the final three minutes, Ortiz couldn’t escape a huge right hook which put him flat on his back. The ropes, no longer his friend, couldn’t hold him anymore. He was counted out with only twenty-one seconds left in the fight; twenty-one seconds for Ortiz to explain to his children that one day he faced a monster and stood up to him. He rose to his feet, but too late to stop the ensuing celebration. Plomo extracted Duran’s mouthpiece and the crowd surged from each corner as Duran leaned over the top rope to point at someone in the seats.

  Some critics suggested that having made very heavy weather of stopping two skillful but relatively harmless men in Viruet and Ortiz, Duran had lost his motivation, and his next opponent was another man it was difficult to look good against. Saoul Mamby was a black Jew of Jamaican-Spanish descent who lived in New York.

  Duran and Mamby had run together in Central Park and even sparred on occasion. “We had worked together when he was getting ready for DeJesus," Mamby later told Boxing Insider magazine. "I knew he was a very good fighter. Very strong, very sharp. He could box and he could punch. I remember he hit me with a right hand and the punch – the pain lasted for about three months, in my rib. And I still had to go and fight Antonio Cervantes after that.”

  Mamby, who had served as a soldier in Vietnam, cleaned windows and drove a gypsy cab in the Bronx to supplement his boxing income. He was the archetypal have-gloves-will-travel journeyman. With his green duffle bag slung over his shoulder, he turned up for short-notice bouts and drew the wrong end of hometown decisions. His cagey style was strictly for the purists, he was never seen on national television and was never in a position to object to the choice of opponent, or how much he was paid. But he could box, had beaten Benny Huertas and Doc McClendon and drawn with Edwin Viruet, and had never been knocked down. “Mamby boxed the way Sarah Vaughan weaved a melody,” said Boxing Illustrated, “economical and exact, without flash.”

  After thirty-two fights, Mamby was a top-ten junior welterweight, yet he weighed in the lighter, at 138¾ pounds to Duran’s 140, suggesting the Pananamian had not trained as he should. Mamby was aware that Duran had already signed to defend his title against Lou Bizzarro three weeks later, and took this as a sign of disrespect, as if Mamby was nothing more than a stepping stone.

  They met in a ten-round non-title affair in front of 2,060 on May 4, 1976 in Miami Beach, Florida. Mamby needled him with a strict, decisive jab that annoyed and stung at the same time. Once again, it was persistence versus resistance.

  Boxing historian Hank Kaplan had a ringside seat. “The turning point of the fight came in the sixth round,” he wrote. “By design, Duran was out to destroy the body. Duran broke through Mamby’s defenses and crashed left and right hooks to the bo
dy, which must have unsteadied him. Mamby made the battle close up to round six, but Duran showed why he is the most respected champion in the second half. The long distance does not seem to minimize his power, an attribute seldom seen….”

  Referee Cy Gottfried scored the bout 48-44, while the judges’ scores of 48-45 and 48-42 also saw it one-sided for the champ. Mamby, however, felt he “gave a good account of myself.”

  “I did that fight,” said promoter Don Elbaum. “Even though Saoul might not admit it, he told me after that fight that he’d never been hit that hard in his life. Every punch hurt, he said. Duran could really hit.”

  Mamby also revealed a rarely seen side to Duran after the fight. “I was supposed to be an opponent and I got paid like one,” said Mamby. “Would you believe I got only three thousand dollars for fighting a champion? When Duran heard about it, he chewed out the promoter and apologized to me.”

  Mamby would go on to win the WBC junior welterweight title and to defend it five times, but ended his long career with little money, partly, he claimed, because of Don King and his stepson Carl, who managed Mamby and for at least one fight managed his opponent too, a clear conflict of interest. US authorities even asked Mamby to participate in phone-tapping King during one of their periodic investigations of the controversial promoter but Mamby refused. He would box until the age of fifty-two and always remained a big Duran fan.

  Four days later, twenty-five-year-old Esteban DeJesus became a world champion at his third attempt when he roundly outpointed Guts Ishimatsu of Japan over fifteen rounds in San Juan to take the WBC lightweight title. Ishimatsu had been tempted to Puerto Rico by a purse said to be $160,000 tax free, a record for the lightweight class, and the decision against him was overwhelming. Puerto Rico’s boxing boom matched that of Panama. DeJesus was now one of four concurrent Puerto Rican world champions, and his win set up the mouth-watering prospect of a rubber match with Duran to unify the two rival versions of the lightweight championship.

 

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