Duran had taken a puncher and made him come after him. “I could have knocked Barkley out in the first round,” he claimed later. “I got him into a really bad state. But Plomo said, ‘No, stay calm, it’s twelve rounds and this guy is big and heavy. It’s going to be a long bout and you’re going to need the extra strength down the road.’ I started studying him and I saw short arms. When he would defend himself, I was too far from him. I had to think a lot to come into him. How would I make him miss to throw mine? What beat him was the necessity I felt to become champion and the fortitude I had to be a champion again. When he would hit me, he would knock me off balance. I would stand there and he would throw his punches so hard that he would throw me to the side. So I could never really hit him as hard as I wanted to.”
When both men would see each other years later they would hug, knowing that their fists had created an unbreakable bond, brothers in blood. “Duran is a great fighter and I am a great fighter and we made one of the greatest fights in our time in Trump Plaza in 1987 in the snow,” Barkley would say years later. But he never accepted that he had lost the fight. “You can’t win a fight on one knockdown,” said Barkley. “It should have went to me. I knew he was a crafty guy. I knew he was dangerous and did dirty things in the ring. He kept a clean fight, and sadly to say it was a great fight that I knew that I won. In spite of the situation, I had to take it on the chin. But that fight made me and Duran best friends. I didn’t get bitter because I knew I won, and I walked away as a champion and that’s what a champion is all about. You walk away with your head up and don’t worry about what is what. Duran didn’t cause that fight for me; it was … the promoters. I got cheated out of it.”
Barkley would subsequently hint darkly that the boxing powers had conspired against him because a Duran-Leonard rubber match was on the cards. He felt he had been sacrificed to build up Duran. Others also had Barkley winning the fight. “I was the scapegoat for him to make that fight with Sugar Ray Leonard,” he said. “They needed my belt to do that fight and that’s what happened. The deck was stacked against me. [Arum] frankly lied and I knew he was lying because he said to me, ‘After you fight Duran you’re going to fight Leonard for the big money.’ I knew that was a lie and I knew that at that point in my career I couldn’t say no because they would have stripped me of my title. Back then Arum had control … and Sulaiman was great marketing for Duran because Duran was Latino. I just went on with the fight.”
Duran headed to New York City and Victor’s for a free dinner for everyone. It would be the last significant victory feast he would have there. “Victor’s kids used to hate it when Duran came because he never paid a cent and he brought all of these people with him,” said Acri. “They never paid for anything.”
The doyens gave their approval. “Duran is a marvel who’s still got head action he always had,” Angelo Dundee told the Washington Post. “He stands on a dime and makes you miss, like Willie Pep did. Don’t count on landing a punch against Roberto.”
The ninety-year-old Ray Arcel exclaimed, “That was the way I knew him.” Another great trainer, Emanuel Steward, was amazed. “I’ll never forget when he beat Barkley, who was so much bigger physically than Roberto. Not only did he beat Barkley, but he also dropped him. He stood toe-to-toe with him in a slugfest.”
Daughter Irichelle concurred: “I know that Buchanan and Sugar Ray Leonard were very important fights, but I was too little to enjoy them. It was Barkley; I was fourteen and it was the greatest fight for me. Here in Panama everyone was going crazy. The people lost faith in my dad and that kind of restored faith. My dad teaches us to give people a second chance in life. And that was a good example for me.”
Ismael Laguna, who in 2001 would be inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame, agreed. “I think Duran redeemed himself with the win over Barkley. I saw him in the gym before that fight and I told the people, ‘Hey, Duran is really coming to train.’ When Duran trains, I know the result. I told him before that fight exactly what would happen and everything I said came true. He trained so hard, when he works that hard, I don’t think anyone could beat him.”
One of his four sons, Roberto Junior, or “Chavo,” had a front row seat for his father’s last great fight. “Iran Barkley was a monster. I was afraid because I saw that guy and he was tall and he beat Tommy Hearns twice. My father demonstrated he was the best.”
Mike Acri added a fitting postscript: “I’ll never forget, at about three a.m. I get on the elevator and I see two guys carrying Barkley upstairs. Barkley just kept saying, ‘The man just got too much heart. Too much heart.’ And he was beat up. Duran didn’t have a scratch on him.”
20
The Never-Ending Comeback
“There’s only one legend. That’s me.”
Roberto Duran
DURAN WOULD FIGHT twenty-seven more times on his I-need-money tour, losing almost as many as he won. His last bout of any historical significance would be the final showdown of his trilogy with Ray Leonard, at super-middleweight, on December 7, 1989. It was billed as Uno Más: One More. Nine years had passed since their last meeting and neither man could conjure up much false bravado during the pre-fight hype. The truth was they were two pugs way past their prime, looking for a final payday.
Leonard had quit the ring with an eye injury in his prime and remained inactive in the mid-Eighties. He abused cocaine and drank heavily, missing the highs of his boxing career. But in 1987 he had returned with cropped hair and a bulked-up frame and had sensationally taken the middleweight title in a controversial decision from Marvin Hagler. The following year he won the WBC super middleweight and light-heavyweight titles, making him a champ in five weight divisions, and in June 1989 retained his super middleweight crown with a disputed draw against Thomas Hearns. Duran, who by now had fought ninety-two times, winning eighty-five and losing seven, was still the only main to have beaten him in thirty-seven bouts.
“I never said I was going to retire during my career. Nunca. I might have said that I might retire, but that was not a fact. I never made it official. One time I’m drinking with these women. I love whores. The hookers told me, ‘You need to screw with us and then go out and beat the living shit out of that black man.’ They start kissing on me and I told them, ‘You’re right.’ I come home and tell my woman that it’s the last time I drink. Then I start to sharpen myself, and by now I’m praying for the rematch.”
The fight was made, strangely, at 162 pounds, six pounds inside the division limit, something Duran did not seem to realize until it was raised at the pre-fight press conference. As ever, Leonard seemed to be calling the tune. “He wanted to fight with me four or five years later, but he doesn’t want to fight with me in the 168-pound division because he knows I’m going to rip him apart. If he fought me at 168 I would have ripped him apart. At 162, I couldn’t. He almost didn’t make the weight himself. He also didn’t catch me in condition. At the time I had a really big problem that was eating away at my brain. I owed some money to the IRS. But I was happy because I paid everything I owed to them.”
Duran was said to be getting $7.6 million and Leonard closer to $15 million. His IRS debt of $1.7 million had come about through an accounting error after the second Leonard bout, according to adviser Mike Acri. “He got a sixteen-thousand-dollar refund coming from 4.2 million. The withholding taxes in Canada and those places, King held onto it and never paid the government, I believe,” said Acri. “When they checked it, he was supposed to get a refund of sixteen grand in the late fall of 1988 before Barkley. He gets one check for sixteen grand and cashes it, no big deal. Next week he gets a hundred and sixty grand, cashes it and a couple weeks later, 1.6 million. The government fucks up. That’s why he had to pay back $1.7 million after the third Leonard fight. He took eight hundred grand of the 1.6 back to Panama in cash and put in on his whole family, carrying cases all over them. He lost one hundred grand in cash one time when he checked it on board. It never got back.”
As he had in Montreal, Duran m
ade sure to include “the people” again. He held daily workouts in the hotel atrium open to hundreds of fans. Leonard kept to himself in locked workouts in the warehouse district. The press hounded Duran about no más, but the angst and disdain had subsided with time. Neither fighter yearned to revisit the baggage that carried over from New Orleans. Duran made the right noises before the bout, saying how he had waited nine years, but the “fight” itself was instantly forgettable. On December 7, 1989 a crowd of 16,305 showed up at the outdoor arena at The Mirage in Las Vegas.
Duran, at thirty-eight, showed all the aggression of a sloth in a coma, while the thirty-three-year-old Leonard was a muscular shadow of his glorious pomp, though he still danced and strutted his stuff. Duran did land a glancing right hand in the first round; his next real punch came ten rounds later. By the second round, Leonard was already showboating and seemed in complete control. He hit on the break, stared down the Panamanian at the end of rounds and even threw low blows. In round three, Leonard side-stepped a Duran rush and rubbed his head against the top rope out of view of referee Richard Steele. Then he let him up and thrashed him with a left hook. The tactics that Duran taught other fighters were being painfully recycled on him.
By the middle of the fight the fans were booing and by the tenth round they chanted, “Bullshit! Bullshit!” The safety-first Duran seemed to be waiting for inspiration or motivation that never came. Before the eleventh, Plomo stood in front of his fighter and pleaded with him to throw punches, but even when Leonard then suffered a bad cut above his left eye, Duran didn’t capitalize on it. Despite his injury, Leonard won a wide twelve-round decision.
Leonard would need more than sixty stitches from the cuts in his mouth and above his eyes, but there was never any doubt about the outcome. Duran had barely even gone through the motions. “The war becomes a bore” and “Leonard beats hapless Duran” declared the papers the following day. Bizarrely, Duran claimed he should have won the decision. “He never could get off,” said Duran’s manager Mike Acri. “It was freezing, his corner wasn’t prepared. There was no blanket in the corner. The next day he was embarrassed and very nervous. We went back to the airport and when he started to hear that Leonard didn’t fight good either, he felt a little better. Someone said it was, ‘One wouldn’t and one couldn’t.’” Duran told a Miami Herald reporter, “Leonard didn’t beat me. The IRS did.”
Leonard would fight twice more in the next eight years, losing both, but like Duran his place in the boxing canon was assured. They will forever be intertwined. While Duran couldn’t balance the excesses of fame and sport for one tragic evening, Leonard shone. However, while Duran lived for the moment, Leonard never took the time to enjoy the jewels of his success. “The thing about life itself is that once you’re in the limelight you’re too deep into it to really appreciate and smell the roses,” said Leonard. “But once you get out of it and see some of the things you could have corrected or taken advantage of. But all in all, I’m healthy; I’m happy; I have a family and a career. I have a vision and life is good.”
Duran ballooned again. “We saw him five, six months after Leonard and he was fat as a pig,” said Acri. “He had just bought a pair of $400,000 diamond earrings. I don’t know if he was ever that extravagant, but these people spend like they had rock-star money. I think his kids and his wife for a long time used to live off the hog. They never thought the money would run out and that’s why he kept fighting: fifty grand here, seventy thousand, he couldn’t turn it down.
“As far as leeches, he never gave them anything. They just followed him and got to eat free and got fat. It wasn’t like he gave people close to him or his family money, no. He’d give a stranger money before he gave his good friend money. That’s just how he was.” Accounts to the contrary belie Acri’s convictions about the fighter not helping those close to him. They would later have a falling out.
The famed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once wrote about a nomadic friend who felt that “getting rid of everything he had as quickly as possible was, for him, something of a religion.” That could have been Duran. While his handouts helped him connect to the people, and distance him from the star label that so many athletes clung to, his generosity tag factored in to his current fluctuating financial state. This state was defined by an ebb and flow of income that contradicted any real consistency.
“Duran always liked to be admired and he actually had an escort of followers,” said Augustin Jaramillo, a Panama City resident. “Whatever he would tell them, they would accept. He never had problems with them because they never contradicted him, in particular after receiving the money he used to give them. I believe he used to do that in order to feel stronger and that he needed people to be constantly flattering him. This made him feel well. It was kind of a necessary expense for him. All these admirers would only tell him good things, and would hide the bad ones, in order not to contradict him. They would always tell him that everything he did was correct and maybe this is what brought Duran bad luck, because they never told him the whole truth.”
Spada added: “The man had such a big heart. But maybe it was too big. He closed my mouth once. I used to ask him why he gave all his money away. He said, ‘Because those people are my friends.’ He closed my mouth.”
Though the performance against Barkley gave Duran the juice for the final showdown with Leonard, his bag of miracles was empty. Those who watched the celebration dinner at Victor’s were privy to the last page of a legend, the last bite of the steak. Barkley represented the last sip of champagne, the final standing ovation for a man steeped in the brutal epithets of fame.
AT 1 A.M. ON December 20, 1989, 27,000 U.S. troops, backed up by Stealth fighters and Apache helicopters, invaded Panama. Operation Just Cause was launched to depose and capture the irascible despot Manuel Noriega, who was wanted for drug smuggling and money laundering. The might of Uncle Sam quickly overwhelmed the 3,000-strong Panama Defense Force, though the military operation continued for several days, mainly against small bands of loyalists. An attack on the central headquarters of the PDF touched off several fires, one of which destroyed most of the heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood in downtown Panama City. Most of the homes there, meant originally for laborers building the Canal, were wooden. The little houses Roberto Duran moved in and out of as a child burned to ashes. Chorrillo was laid waste.
The invasion followed a failed attempt by the George Bush administration to oust Noriega in a general election that May. For all its visible poverty, Panama had for many years enjoyed economic success thanks to revenues from the Canal and its position as one of the world’s major crossroads. But opposition to Noriega, who was strongly suspected of drug running and money laundering, led to American financial pressure that had left the tiny state a shadow if its former self. Many of the banks on Central Avenue closed; people couldn’t cash cheques and every day seemed like a Sunday on the once busy streets.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was given $10 million to funnel clandestinely to the election campaign of Noriega’s main rival, Guillermo Endara, in the hope that the pockmarked military strongman they called “Pineapple Face” would be overthrown. The plot did not work out as planned. Not only did Noriega immediately annul the election result, but the “bagman” entrusted with laundering the money into Endara’s campaign was arrested in the United States and charged with conspiracy to import vast amounts of cocaine. The bagman was none other than Carlos Eleta Almaran, tycoon, political patron, sportsman, songwriter and one-time manager of Roberto Duran. Endara, a wealthy corporate attorney, had worked with Eleta for twenty-five years and was a stockholder in one of his companies. Eleta was arraigned in Bibb County, Georgia, by Drug Enforcement Agency officials who also accused him of setting up dummy corporations to launder projected drug profits.
Questions arose from the very beginning about Eleta’s arrest. Many in Panama have always believed that he was set up by his enemy, Noriega. “Middle Georgia’s biggest drug case ever –
involving an alleged plan to import 1,320 pounds of cocaine a month into the state – has given an ironic boost to General Noriega’s fortunes and added new intrigue to Panamanian politics,” reported the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “This has played beautifully into Noriega’s hands,” said an expert on the political situation in Panama, who spoke to the Journal on condition of anonymity. “It has given him an opportunity to connect the opposition to drug trafficking.”
Noriega-backed newspapers railed at the seventy-year-old businessman and efforts were made to close down his Channel 4 television station. “The general feeling I perceive from everybody I talk to in Panama is that this could be a setup,” said Roberto Eisenmann, editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa. Eisenmann’s paper had been closed by the Noriega regime and he fled to Miami for his safety.
While Eleta sat in a Georgia prison – with partners Manuel Castillo Bourcy, Panama’s former ambassador to Belize, and Juan Karaminides – protesting his innocence, Noriega was enjoying the last months of his rule. Born in a neighborhood called Terraplen, not far from the Canal and home to many port workers, he had grown up fatherless and hawked newspapers at an early age. In his biography, it was noted that Noriega had lived a troubled upbringing. “Growing up among foreign sailors and prostitutes and with a daily life punctuated with drunkenness and violence, Noriega became street smart without becoming a tough. He was small for his age and tended to be the one the rougher kids picked on.” He and Duran became Panama’s most famous, or infamous, sons. Both had a passion for women and drink. Duran loved whiskey and milk; Noriega’s choice was Scotch. Both loved designer clothes, both had wives named Felicidad and both occasionally traveled with personal jewelers.
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