The boxing fraternity was impressed. “Duran could be the man American boxing so desperately needs to revive interest in the divisions other than heavyweight,” said Boxing International.
Duran’s next bout was on another Don King show that February, this time at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach, on an indoor tennis court in front of just 1,200 spectators. His opponent was Vilomar Fernandez, a short, feisty challenger born in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic but fighting out of the Bronx. Fernandez’s record was an unimpressive 19-5-1, with only eight knockouts, but he was a good boxer. It was the first defense of Duran’s title reign that had not been transmitted to Panama.
Despite his lack of power, Fernandez was deft at pinpointing Duran’s head as the champion bulled in. It was no one-sided affair as Fernandez, a water-bug skirting the ring, often moved to his right, paused, then changed direction. His peek-a-boo, in-and-out style kept him out of harm’s way as the rounds ticked off.
In round five, however, as Fernandez was once again backpedaling, Panamanian referee Sergio Ley interceded and warned him to start throwing punches. Fernandez fought bravely for the remainder of the fight, as if Ley’s warning forced Fernandez to abandon an effective style to stand in front of Duran. Does a referee have the right to tell a fighter that his brand of fighting, although effective, isn’t what the fans want to see?
“The doctor who treated me that fight was Doctor Pacheco, who was a good friend of Eleta’s,” said Duran. “I had a problem with the liver and the spleen and after examining me he said he was going to give me a shot for my liver to prevent damage in the spleen. He gave me the shot and I fell asleep. Then I heard when Pacheco was telling Fernandez, ‘Strike underneath, underneath, his liver is in bad condition.’ And I thought he was telling this to me, so I kept hitting him in the liver. I then knocked him down with two strong blows.”
Although capable of knocking out anyone with his straight right, Duran’s opponents also had to be aware of his left hook and right uppercut. In the thirteenth round, Duran came out with hooks to the body. However, most of the round was a demonstration on the clinch-and-hold tactic displayed by the Bronx challenger. Duran finally released a left hook to the liver followed by a token right to the chest that sat a dejected Fernandez down in a corner. Ley counted him out as he sat there with his head slumped. Seconds later, Duran slung his arm around his opponent’s shoulder, consoling him like a younger brother.
After the bout was stopped in the thirteenth, a group of reporters huddled around Roberto in the middle of the ring. After telling one reporter that Fernandez was a smart fighter who knew how to move effectively, Duran also explained how he was cold until the eighth round when he started to look for the knockout punch.
Then, in a spontaneous act that Duran rarely showed in fight interviews, he started speaking English for the reporter. In the middle of the ring, Duran took the microphone when it seemed to everyone that he was clearly done speaking. “Gracias, thank you, thank you,” said Duran. Then, came a free-flow of emotion that made more sense to Duran than the befuddled commentator. “Too much jab, too much jab for me. Tired for me, needed rest. Move, move, move, me knock him out.” His spontaneity was refreshing. Obviously frustrated with what he wanted to convey to the audience, the fight also elicited similar frustrations.
STILL LOOMING in Muhammad Ali’s shadow, Duran fought Javier Muniz in May at the Civic Centre in Washington, DC. Fighting on the undercard of the Ali-Alfredo Evangelista card, Duran didn’t allow the lack of notoriety to get to him.
“I’m not hurt that much anymore,” Duran told a Washington Post reporter before the non-title affair. “The most important thing is that I perform better than anyone else in the ring.” Muniz, a heavy-machine operator, tried to console himself before the showdown. “I know Duran will come at me with a brick in each hand,” he said. “It’s an eerie feeling, knowing his experience, his reputation, but you can’t back out. You tell yourself that he can’t hit you with a third arm.” Duran won a wide ten-round decision.
Another non-title win, over Bernardo Diaz by one-round knockout in August, set up Duran’s eleventh title defense and a true grudge match. He headed back to Philadelphia to take on Edwin Viruet at the Spectrum, on 17 September 1977. Duran – who was 59-1 with fifty KOs – couldn’t afford to let Viruet mess with his head again. This was the Puerto Rican who had slapped him outside the ring after his bout with Leoncio Ortiz; Duran vomited street curses whenever he neared. This was more than hype to sell tickets; the disdain was real for both fighters. The fight was co-promoted by J. Russell Peltz and Don King and Duran-Viruet was the main event, while Philly’s Matt Franklin-Billy Douglas was the semi-final bout. Viruet, who had lost only two of his twenty-eight bouts but won only eight inside the distance, worked out at Passyunk Gym in South Philadelphia; Duran would train at Joe Frazier’s Gym at the corner of Broad and Elmwood in North Philly and did his roadwork with local fighter Youngblood Williams.
“Duran is cold, like a man with no heart,” Williams told a Philadelphia reporter. “When we run he says things like, ‘I keel that s.o.b.’ or just, ‘Keel him, keel him.’ He says it over and over. Once, a dog was standing down the road and Roberto says to me that if that dog don’t move out of the way, we gonna kill him. He wasn’t kidding man.”
Williams, who served several jail stints, spent time playing dominoes and shooting dice with Duran. He was undefeated at the time and had earned a reputation for inner-city sparring wars with Philly’s elite. “Duran runs for one hour, then stops in one place and, for about ten or fifteen minutes, just keeps throwing some of the fastest damn combinations I’ve ever seen,” he said, two days before the bout. “Closest I ever saw in an American was Tyrone Everett. But I believe Duran is quicker with his hands than Tyrone was. He may be the meanest man I ever saw. I really do believe he don’t mind hurting people.”
More than most, Duran hated to be shown up in the ring. Trainers Paddy Flood and Al Braverman handled Viruet, while Duran had his usual cornermen in Brown and Arcel. Although Viruet had no problem treating Duran with the same contempt with which he treated other opponents, he also was an evasive fighter whose technique drew raves from boxing purists. His skill came not from the blue-collar work of a one-dimensional fighter but from natural instincts, sharpened on city street corners. People either enjoyed or reviled this “cute” style.
The weigh-in heightened the tension. It was held at the Spectrum’s Ovations Club, and the weights were recorded the day before the fight, which wasn’t common at that time; the weigh-in usually was conducted at noon on the day of the fight, and the switch thoroughly upset Viruet’s camp, which was distressed by the fact that Duran would gain his strength back in the hours before the bout. The change was made because the fight was being televised on a Saturday afternoon rather than in the evening. Duran had no problem with the schedule change and weighed in at 134½; Viruet was nowhere to be found. An hour and a half later he supposedly made 135 pounds, dodging a fine by the commission.
“He eventually showed up, but they put him right on and yanked him off the scale,” said Peltz. “Al Braverman did. And I don’t know if he was with King at the time, but he was definitely with Viruet. He had trouble making weight, I remember.”
“Viruet never made the weight,” Duran recalled. “He never weighed in. He went to go lose weight and he never came back to weigh in. Both Eleta and Flacco [Duran’s interpreter and helper] fell asleep on that one. The important thing was that they wanted me to fight.”
Plomo concurred, “He did not get on the scale. Is the champion supposed to get on the scale but not the rival? I believe Carlos Eleta was to blame there. No manager can accept that his own boxer gets on the scale and the other one does not. But Eleta was a terrible guy.”
While the fight officials dealt with the weigh-in, there was another problem. “The most fun we had with that fight was with King’s canvas. He uses the canvas with his big logo,” said Peltz. “We had the Spectrum and
had a reputation for having a great arena. I didn’t want King’s logo in the center. So I decided … I told them to put our logo on the canvas. When they sent King’s logo on that Thursday we had it shipped over to JFK Stadium, and had some guy scribble his initials on it and hide it somewhere. A day before the fight they couldn’t find the canvas and I was like, ‘Geez, we might have to use ours.’ He sent Richie Giachetti down to my office and he stayed there the whole day trying to locate that canvas. He said I got some paper here, but you couldn’t even read the name of the guy who signed for it.
“We finally used our canvas and we got it on national television because that was a touchy subject in those days, what could and couldn’t get on TV. When the show was over, I saw King and he was wearing a crème-colored three-piece suit with all these frills on it like George Washington. He pointed at me and said, ‘I know you fucked around with the canvas. I can’t prove it, but I know.’ We uncovered it the next day and got it back to him.
“The good thing about King in those days was that he could only deliver the main event. Anybody else that he put on the show, he would have to pay for. I expected a decent crowd, but I think we sold like 7,500, but 7,000 in advance. I didn’t understand it because Duran was big in New York and they would come to Philly for the fight.”
The fight was picked up by ABC for home TV broadcast, and King needed a venue. In the early 1970s, Peltz and company had been drawing big crowds at the Spectrum. Peltz would pay King a site fee, and expected to use Duran as the bait. “The day of the fight we thought we’d sell another 7,000 or at least 3 or 4,000 like we were doing,” Peltz recalled. “But we only sold five hundred. The problem with the Duran fight was that something happened with the scale and ABC-TV was going to pull the plug the day of the fight. Jay Seidman came up to me before the fight and told me ABC wasn’t going to televise the fight. He said, ‘They think that there’s some kind of shenanigans going on.’ It didn’t make sense because I didn’t understand why they would care if Viruet made the weight or not. We went into a room with Howard Cosell, Alex Wallau and maybe Chet Forte was in the room. There had to be some big shots from ABC and they just wanted to pull the plug. I was pleading with them they just couldn’t do that. Alex was telling them how I was an honest guy and everything.
“The first fight started and the people were coming up to me, and Alex came up to me and said, ‘We just got it settled.’ I was shaking and I couldn’t even button my shirt. He fixed my tie and was like dressing me at ringside. The card was anticlimactic. I didn’t have Duran losing that fight, but it was a tough fight to get into.”
The fight also had its moments of farce. Viruet would dance, stick his face forward and pull it back, laugh at the disdain on Duran’s face, pull his version of the Ali Shuffle, and hold his left straight out to keep Duran at arm’s length. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but it was the champion who was landing the meaningful punches. “That was the thing with Viruet,” said boxing writer J.R. Jowett, who covered the bout. “He would do all these cutesy moves, but he couldn’t punch worth shit. It just wasn’t a good style to watch and I didn’t give him many rounds against Duran.” Philly sportswriter Ray Didinger called Viruet’s antics the equivalent of a “fly circling a lion’s mouth.”
Viruet did two things that other boxers tried, but didn’t produce the same effects: First, he stood up to Duran following the unwritten Latin code of machismo; then he made him miss. DeJesus did the same thing, but he could also make Duran pay for his mistakes. He talk too much obscene, Duran would say about Edwin.
During the fight, as Viruet ridiculed Duran, another problem arose. “The doctors gave Roberto something before that fight that affected him a lot, trying to reduce too much weight,” Eleta said. “Because of that medicine, he lost energy.” At times it showed. “They gave me this injection to get stronger and faster,” said Duran, “an injection that they gave to horses, and I almost died. I turned red and pale at the same time. I had to do fifteen rounds with Viruet that night. My strength and my know-how kept me from being knocked out.”
Duran took more risks and landed the harder punches. Although Viruet did open a slight cut under Duran’s left eye toward the end of the fight, he was by then a long way behind on points. After taking heavy punishment in the final round, Viruet complained about the decision. Venezuela’s Isidro Rodriguez had it 73-68, Panama’s Sergio Ley, 73-65, and Pennsylvania judge Frank Adams 71-65, all for Duran.
Felicidad had by now become a steady influence as a boxing wife. While some partners detest the fight game, Felicidad dabbled in promotions, understood the boxer’s psyche and knew when to come and when to stay away during training. She often ran in the morning with Roberto and even went into the gym to make sure he was in condition. She also became a loud presence during fights, shrieking encouragement and instructions to her man. “My presence encourages him during the tedious ambience of his rigorous training,” she eloquently told one reporter.
Duran himself was at ringside to watch a compatriot fight for a world title in Los Angeles that November. Jorge Lujan was born in Colon four years after Duran and grew up watching the fighters in the teeming gym known as the Box of Matches. “Colon was the cradle of champions,” he said. “I think so because of the beach, the ocean, the sun, fighting five or six times a day in the streets.” He eventually found himself sparring with the bigger Duran. “Duran would practice like it was the real fight. He was more heavy than me. I told him, ‘Don’t hit me!’ Then, bam, bam, bam, and he hit hard. But I still had to fight against those boxers.”
Lujan’s life would become a cautionary tale and showed the path Duran could easily have followed. Before facing Alfonso Zamora for the WBA bantamweight title, he was stuck in prison on Coiba Island for forty-five days for a drug offense. They had to get him out of jail so he could fight. “I was a flyweight when I went into jail,” he said. “When I left Coiba I had gained weight, so I had a fight at bantamweight.” The brash young Panamanian took on Zamora, a pocket rocket, and tamed him, taking his crown in the tenth round. He noticed that the champion was breathing heavily by the eighth round and knocked him down with a left hook that had all his strength behind it. It paved the way for the finish two rounds later. “I believed that I could win that bout because I was a counter-puncher and Zamora, a Mexican, came to me,” said Lujan. “The place was filled with Mexicans, but I was cool, not scared of anything. I had faith in myself for that bout. I hit him with a right hand, adios.”
People immediately began to treat Lujan differently. “The boxing journalists wouldn’t let me sleep,” said Lujan. “Everybody wanted to talk to me, champion of the world. I was very happy. Before, when I used to fight and win, it was tranquilo or cool. Now, ‘Hey, Lujan, knock, knock, are you home?’ I didn’t want to talk with anybody. I was very tired. I had trouble dealing with the fame. You don’t have any privacy, everyone is like, ‘Hey Champ, hey champ.’ The drinking, the women, there is no privacy when you are champion. They don’t write anything when you are no longer champ.”
Ismael Laguna noticed the difference. “He was doing drugs, cocaine, all the time,” said the former champ. “He was in and out of jail. One time I bought and was working at a kiosk, and I gave Lujan twenty dollars to get change for me. I turn around and I never saw the guy again. He went to buy drugs.
“Another time I had a table at one of the fights, and we were sitting with President Omar Torrijos and Rafael Ortega came up to ask Torrijos for money. Ortega was always like that, asking people to help him out. Torrijos pulled out a hundred dollars and gave it to him. Ortega started to jump up and down, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Lujan had been drinking heavily, and yelled to Torrijos, ‘I never asked you for pinga [dick].’ I was so mad I just walked away from the table. He talked that way to the President.”
These were the pitfalls Duran had so far avoided. Now he was heading into his biggest bout, a date with destiny that would decide who was the undisputed champion.
11
&n
bsp; Esteban And The Witch Doctors
“Duran said he would KO God if he had to.”
Miguelito Callist, boxer
AT THE START of 1978, only two of boxing’s thirteen weight divisions had single, undisputed champions. The split between the WBA and the WBC meant each had its own champion at every weight except heavyweight (Muhammad Ali) and middleweight (Rodrigo Valdes). This unsatisfactory state of affairs often saw two talented “champions” avoiding each other, both content to make money against lesser opponents rather than risk all against someone of comparable ability. When two rival champs did clash, the prospect was usually mouth-watering for boxing fans, but politics and money meant it rarely happened.
Few of these confrontations were more eagerly awaited than a rubber between Roberto Duran, the WBA champ, and Esteban DeJesus, the WBC champ. Both held a win over the other, and since winning his title DeJesus had made three defenses and shown fine form. He was the only lightweight left in the world with a realistic prospect of beating Duran.
The parties finally agreed to do it one more time in the desert resort of Las Vegas. The combination of super-casinos, high-rolling gamblers and major boxing promotions was beginning to shift the sport’s centre of gravity to the desert town, and over the next two decades many of the biggest bouts would be held there.
Before heading to Vegas, Eleta made plans. He knew that his fighter’s worst fault was his occasional lack of training and so duped him into beginning his preparations early. “It was a problem because when he was in Panama, people always wanted to be near him,” said Eleta. “My trick was that I told him there was a tune-up in Panama before DeJesus, so that he would start training hard. When I told him that it had been called off, he just looked at me and smiled.” Duran, already in trim for the non-existent tune-up, was then sent to training camp in Los Angeles. This was DeJesus, and anything less than full strength wouldn’t cut it.
Hands of Stone Page 18