Duran refused to leave his house. Locked in like a caged animal, hiding from the world, he slumped into a depression and railed bitterly at his critics. “Hypocrites, all of them,” he said. “I came home and I wouldn’t leave. My wife was telling me to go out and have fun with my friends. I just didn’t feel like going out because people were going to start talking stuff and throwing cheap shots at me. I didn’t feel like hearing that.
“What most affected me was that my people turned their backs on me. I was always in the house. I wouldn’t even go outside. I would stay three weeks up to a month right here and I wouldn’t go anywhere. I told Eleta to give me the rematch. My birthday was coming up and my wife had a party for me. I got drunk but I never left the house.”
Duran had a lot of time to enjoy the toys that his new life afforded. Already a millionaire, the huge payday in New Orleans had given him money to burn. Exempt from paying taxes in Panama, he already owned eleven cars, including a pair of Pontiac Trans-Ams, a Lincoln Continental, a Fiat, a Mercedes from Eleta, and a $25,000 van equipped with a stereo, TV and telephone. General Torrijos gave him the van after he knocked out DeJesus in 1978.
According to Eleta, Duran’s share of the purses, after taxes, was $6 million, and this had been put in an account in Panama. At least one-third of the money was ring-fenced for Duran’s future. “When I came back to Panama, I put two million dollars in the bank. He has ten per cent interest on that money. I knew that he would spend all that money quickly so I made him sign with his wife a document so that all the money goes to the bank and he couldn’t touch it for ten years,” Eleta told this author years later in Panama.“What happened was, [Colonel] Paredes went to the bank with Felicidad and the bank handed over the millions of dollars. His wife bet thousands and thousands of dollars daily. His friends took money away from him. I just lost control of him. With all those people around all the time, I couldn’t control him anymore and that was it.” Ruben Paredes was a high-ranking National Guard officer who came to power in a coup in March 1982.
Duran found some sympathizers. “I felt sorry for him,” said Budd Schulberg, author of On The Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, who was in the press row at the fight. “The whole culture of Latin fighters and Mexican fighters is to come to fight. They don’t come to dodge and miss and duck, they just come to fight. And so it was sort of a culture clash that night between a predator who only knows one way to go, one gear, and Leonard who had discovered a whole set of gears. Some cars have five gears and some cars have three, and Sugar Ray had five that night.”
Schulberg’s soft spot for Duran is evident. One of the few writers who saw both Benny Leonard and Duran fight live, Schulberg always put the fighter first. “I felt sorry for him because I understood him and it simply underscored for me one more time what a mental game boxing was. In spite of that night, I will remember him as one of the greatest lightweights that ever lived. Duran never had the power at welterweight that he did as a lightweight, and he never had that power as a middleweight that he did as a welter.”
No más became a universal phrase. Do you want anything else with dinner? No más. So you don’t want to stay at this job any longer? No más. Hey, it’s funny, you don’t even have to know who or what a Roberto Duran is. “The no más thing? It’s like being in love with a girl then being betrayed and devastated, but you can’t get her out of your system,” said Las Vegas oddsmaker Herbie Lambeck.
“I didn’t speak with Duran about no más,” said Leonard. “He has to deal with that and live with that. I’m sure there’s not a day that goes by when he’s out in public that someone doesn’t say, ‘No Más.’ It also became the butt of jokes for a while. I didn’t sympathize directly. But looking back on it, naturally I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, to make a decision in the ring that is going to make you the butt of jokes throughout your life.”
Duran wouldn’t return to Panama for weeks after the fight. Judging by the anger and even looting that followed the result, it was a wise decision. However, before he left the parking lot that evening in New Orleans, Duran was waiting in the passenger’s seat of his van. As Leonard walked through the lot he noticed a Panamanian with a blank stare. After getting Duran’s attention, he gave him a quick wave.
A reluctant wave where a middle finger used to be.
15
King of the Bars
“Sometimes I look like a dragon, sometimes I’m radar.”
Wilfred Benitez
NO ONE TOOK the debacle harder than Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown. Arcel would be asked about it for the rest of his life, but even the man who had seen almost everything in boxing and in life was at a loss to explain it. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he later told an interviewer. “Something happened, and we don’t know why he did it. To this day I don’t know and the kid himself doesn’t know. You know, we’re all human beings. Unless you’ve boxed, you don’t know the physical and mental torture. I mean it’s torture. It’s like a guy waiting to be electrocuted.”
According to the author Ronald K. Fried, in his book Cornermen, Freddie Brown fell into a lasting depression. Randy Gordon, editor of The Ring, told Fried he returned to New York on a plane with Brown. “Freddie cried like a baby on my shoulder,” said Gordon. “Because he had seen them all. Jack Johnson and Benny Leonard. And Harry Greb. And he was always saying Roberto Duran could probably beat any one of them in his prime … And then he went out and quit – something that Freddie Brown really could not understand any real fighter doing, much less Roberto Duran.” The old cutman locked himself away at home, refused to take calls, stopped even watching fights.
Brown and Arcel also fell out. There had been tension between the two for some time over who did the most work in the camp. Arcel, an articulate and considered interviewee, tended to draw press attention while Brown felt that he was Duran’s true conditioner, dealing with the fighter’s tantrums and moods until Arcel swanned in a week or so before a fight from his day job to “oversee” things and run the corner. Brown also felt Arcel was wrong to tell reporters he had no idea why Duran quit; to Brown, you covered for your fighter no matter what. That was why he had put out the story about stomach cramps. “If they knew in Panama he’d quit, they’d have murdered him when he got back,” Brown told Dick Young of the New York Post in 1984. “So I made the alibi.”
Eleta went back to Panama, and berated his fighter through the press. Never one to hold back, he pleaded with Duran to lose the hangers-on. Another of Duran’s mentors, Omar Torrijos, also took no más badly. “After Roberto did that, Torrijos never talked to him again,” claimed Eleta. Duran claimed that he and Torrijos had resolved their differences concerning the bout. “The General said that many Panamanians are hypocrites, and he knows the people better than I do,” Duran told reporters in Panama. “The General had considered this case like that of Judas. These people, that were with Duran before the fight, had abandoned him after it.”
The country’s mood of gloom deepened when Torrijos died in a mysterious airplane crash on 30 July 1981, on a flight to the town of Colecito. The tragedy was related in the book Our Man in Panama by John Dinges. “It was said that Torrijos had no sense of danger and forced his pilots to fly no matter what the weather. That day, he chose to fly despite the storm front shrouding the mountains around Colecito, and heedless of the relative inexperience of the pilot. The plane struck the top of a hill while the pilot was maneuvering for a landing. All aboard were killed.” It ended a twelve-year reign in which compassion for the poor had made him the most revered figure in Panama since independence in 1903. The country had lost the head of the National Guard but also a calming figure who acted as a rational mediator between other Latin American countries. It affected Duran as deeply as the death of Chaflan.
It would also mark a decline in Panama’s fortunes. Inevitably a military power struggle followed the President’s death. Many thought the crash had actually been engineered by his understudy, Manuel Noriega. The country fell into a polit
ical quagmire as various factions competed for supremacy. Colonel Ruben Paredes, who had promoted himself to head of the National Guard, forced out the incumbent President Aristides Royo and set his sights on the 1984 presidential elections. However, Noriega, who took over as National Guard leader in 1983, had other plans. He undermined his colleague, and after a period of factional strife emerged as the most powerful figure in the country. With the violent Noriega at the helm, Panama was soon tagged internationally as a drug-trafficking, corruption-filled country that was both politically and financially unstable.
Duran, meanwhile, wallowed in self-pity. Moves were made to match him with undefeated junior welterweight sensation Aaron Pryor, and Pryor told a New York Times reporter in late February 1981 that he had signed a contract for $750,000 to face Duran in New York, but the fight was pushed aside for the heavyweight contest between Gerry Cooney and Ken Norton. A ferocious prospect who few wanted to face, Pryor offered to spot Duran ten pounds in weight. “Duran needs me,” Pryor said. “I think he’s got to prove to a lot of people that he’s not a quitter and what better way to do it than fight an undefeated world champion.”
Finally, nine months after holing up in his palatial home, Duran ended his exile and took a fight against a much easier opponent, his former sparring partner Mike “Nino” Gonzalez. The bout was staged by Don King in the promoter’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Duran’s public workouts in Cleveland’s Union Terminal drew large crowds and surprisingly they cheered his every move. His optimism began to return.
“The Comeback,” as King inevitably billed it, took place on 9 August 1981. Gonzalez, from Bayonne, New Jersey, was for some reason dubbed the “Storm Cutter” and came in with a 24-1 record. He had traveled with some other Jersey fighters to work with Duran before he faced Leonard in Montreal and felt confident enough to stand and trade punches. Duran’s body looked soft, not taut, and he fought like a man who had been locked in his home for months, coming in at 155 pounds. He won clearly on the scorecards but Gonzalez showed bravery, especially in a grueling ninth round, and cut Duran’s eye. “I haven’t fought in nine months,” Duran said afterwards. “I felt strong with the weight, but I got a little tired near the end. That was because of the layoff. I couldn’t make my body do certain things.”
People expected more. On September 26, Duran took on European light-middleweight champion Luigi Minchillo, who had won thirty-five of his thirty-six bouts. They fought in Vegas in bright sunlight and near-ninety-degree temperatures before a crowd of about 2,000. Duran suffered a cut over his right eye in the third round but it was staunched by veteran cutman Bill Prezant, renowned for his patchwork with heavyweight Chuck “the Bleeder” Wepner. Minchillo bored in and tried to pressure Duran but the Panamanian bossed the fight from the start, slamming in the harder punches, especially to the body, and rocking the moustachioed Italian several times. Minchillo finished the bout with his left eye almost shut, his right eye swollen and blood coming from his nose. Duran, who weighed in on the light-middleweight limit of eleven stone, said afterwards he felt strong and was punching harder then ever.
IN 1982, WILFRED Benitez was The Radar. He could slip punches with his senses and made opponents feel lonely in the ring, jutting out his chin then retracting it before a glove could touch skin, standing within punching range yet avoiding shots by fractions. On March 6, 1976, he made the great Antonio Cervantes miss for fifteen rounds to win the WBA junior welterweight crown and confirm his precocious genius. At just seventeen, he was the youngest boxer ever to win a world title.
“People went crazy in Puerto Rico when Benitez became champion,” said Jose Torres. “I was there and that fight was spectacular. Punch and move, punch and move, body and head, he never got tired. What he had was impossible to learn, nobody could teach you that. He was so perfect. He was so young to understand that; he just did it instinctively. He didn’t say, ‘I was smart, that’s why I win.’ He was not aware. He just knows that he punches when he has to punch.”
Benitez was the youngest of eight children born in the Bronx, New York City, where his father and mother, Gregorio and Clara, had moved in the early Forties to work. When Wilfred was seven they moved back to St George, seven miles from San Juan. Two of his brothers, Gregory and Frankie, became boxers and young Wilfred followed. He was easily the best and his rare talent saw him included in the Puerto Rican team for the Central American and Caribbean Games at the age of just fourteen. Pitted against men, he had the misfortune to draw Olympic champion Orlando Martinez of Cuba, one of the best amateurs in the world. Astonishingly, he lost only by split decision. After more than 100 amateur contests, with just six losses, he turned pro at fifteen, with his father doctoring his application form to disguise his real age.
Benitez made his debut in 1973 and took down Hall of Famer Cervantes three years later. Nobody was supposed to be so good, so soon. Cervantes had seemed unbeatable; indeed Duran’s manager had apparently avoided him. “Back in 1974 when Duran was lightweight champion there was a good opportunity for him to fight Antonio Cervantes,” said former manager Luis Spada. “It would have been a very, very good fight in Latin America. But Carlos Eleta thought that it was a dangerous fight because Cervantes, who was a great fighter, was bigger. I am sure, though, that Roberto would have had no trouble beating him.”
Benitez, who beat Carlos Palomino to win his second title, liked to call himself “the Dragon,” but the Radar tag was far more apt. Matchmaker Teddy Brenner called him “at one time the best fighter in the world.” Yet the young prodigy with the veteran mind was still a child outside the ring. He womanized, skipped training, partied hard and generally gave his authoritarian father fits. Before he was stopped with six seconds left in the fifteenth round against Leonard in 1979, he lost his way to the gym. The lack of discipline forced his father to take a stand. “Even if they gave me $200,000 to work in his corner, I would not,” the elder Benitez told a Ring journalist. “I refuse to be in his corner … I am not a hypocrite. There is no fighter who can be inactive for seven or eight months and then compete in a fight such as this one and hope to be sharp. It is not important that he is starting to train well now. He has not listened to anything I have told him. But Wilfred is a boy who just refuses to listen.”
It was common knowledge in the fight game that Benitez trained a little over a week for Leonard. Yet his brilliance was undeniable. “Benitez is a ghost,” Leonard said. “He anticipates your moves and almost makes himself invisible. I never met a better defensive fighter.”
Benitez jumped up to light-middleweight. He was too good to remain contender for long, and in May 1981 challenged Britain’s Maurice Hope for the WBC title. Hope was a decent champion, but Benitez was in a different class and cold-cocked him with a blistering right hook in round twelve, knocking out two of his teeth. “He can put his teeth under his pillow,” remarked Benitez later. “Duran is dead. He is afraid of me. He knows me. When somebody talks about me to Duran, Roberto tells them don’t talk to me about Benitez, I am afraid of him.”
Benitez had been winding up Duran for several years. The Puerto Rican often sat ringside at his contests and shouted abuse, something to which Duran would respond with crude gesture and threats of his own. Their animosity spilled over at the post-fight Duran-Leonard press conference in Montreal. “I just told Roberto, give me a chance, give me a chance,” Benitez said. “He said, ‘Get out, I’ll kill you.’ I said to him, ‘Let’s do it right now, right here.’”
With Duran now campaigning at light-middle too, and both men promoted by Don King, a bout between two Latin kings was a cinch, especially given Duran’s oft-declared antipathy to all things Puerto Rican. Contracts were signed for a title contest to take place at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, on 30 January 1982. In the pre-fight interviews, Benitez showed more of a willingness to speak in English, while Duran used Luis Henriquez and other translators as his mouthpieces. Duran understood most of what was being said in English but did not feel confident enough to speak it; h
e was never going to sit still long enough to perfect a foreign language. Benitez’s co-manager Jimmy Jacobs – who bought his contract for $75,000 from Gregorio – admitted that his boxer also unintentionally alienated the American audience by not conversing in English “but when he tries to express himself in English, so many thoughts are misunderstood and misrepresented. But it’s a calculated risk to communicate in English when he’s infinitely more superior in another language.” The refusal of Duran to learn English meant he was unable to market himself effectively to the U.S. public and probably cost him millions in endorsements.
To make certain that his fighter arrived in prime fighting condition, Eleta sent him to training camp on the penal island of Coiba, off the coast of Panama. A kind of open Alcatraz, Coiba housed Panama’s worst criminals, on a godforsaken island surrounded by strong currents and shark-infested waters. Duran was permitted only to fish, eat, train and rest. “Wow,” Duran told Sports Illustrated. “I was a prisoner among prisoners. To make a telephone call you had to climb a mountain. You called by shortwave radio. There were many murderers there; not many thieves, mostly pure murderers. I was scared. The prisoners walked around with machetes because they used them for work in the mountains. Whenever I went into the streets, I had a guard with me. At three a.m. roosters would be crowing. I couldn’t get any sleep. I was pulling my hair out. That was a disgrace. It was a big mistake, a bad decision to go there.”
Eleta wanted Duran’s trip to be so dull and lonely that all he had to think about was destroying the young Puerto Rican who had often badmouthed him. It was also the only way to ensure that the hangers-on would stay away and Duran would stay faithful to his training regimen. No women, no beer, just steak, water and sweat. Eleta wouldn’t let Duran and new trainer Panama Lewis off the island until he got down from 167 pounds to 156. The strategy seemed to work as Duran had no trouble getting to the 154-pound limit by fight time. Even Ray Arcel, drafted in by Eleta as an “adviser” for the bout, claimed, “He’s in the best shape, physically and mentally, that I’ve seen him since he knocked out DeJesus four years ago.” Arcel also complimented Benitez, whom he said knew everything there was to know about the ring.
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