I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  I eventually met a street performer and hustler named Chaflán—that’s what everyone called him; his real name was Cándido Natalio Díaz. Everybody said Chaflán was crazy, but he was a good guy and, for me, he was a legend. He wore a sailor’s hat around town, dancing at the cantinas. There would always be ten or fifteen kids with Chaflán, including me, following him everywhere. We’d jostle around him, making faces while he danced, doing flips in the air, handstands, hoping people would throw money at our feet. He knew what it took to get the nickels and dimes—that’s why we stuck with him.

  It was spending so much time with Chaflán that made my arms so strong. Every day I’d be performing—standing on my arms and doing flips, performing tricks and hoping passersby would throw us a dime or two. We were still street urchins—they called me Cholo or Cholito, because of my mixed Indian and white heritage; I had my father’s nose as well as his blood. Sometimes when he’d made enough money Chaflán would take us to the beach and buy us lunch. Afterward, he’d make us wrestle until we were covered in sand. Back then, wrestling was very popular, and a lot of wrestlers would come to Panama. We’d wash the sand off in the sea and then go to a Spanish restaurant called El Gato Negro, where we’d have shrimp, yellow rice, and a glass of water, and we were good to go.

  We figured out ways to make ten cents here and there hustling in the streets. Chaflán would gather seven or eight kids to sell newspapers on Avenida 4 de Julio, and we’d get up really early and go with him to where La Estrella de Panamá would come rolling off the presses around five a.m. There was a window where you picked up the papers, and the first kids to get their bundles would sell them fast, but it was harder for little kids like us. The bigger kids always outmuscled us and got to sell more.

  When we weren’t selling newspapers, Toti and I would shine shoes in a place called Calle Gota. When the American soldiers working on the Panama Canal left to go party and chase prostitutes, we would hustle them. The first English word I learned was “shoeshine.” That’s what I used say to all the gringos to hustle a dime or a quarter: “Shoeshine? Shoeshine?”

  It worked like this: I shined shoes while Toti kept a lookout, because there was always a guard at the corner of the street, even at midnight. If the police came, he’d shout, “Cops!” and we’d go hide behind a building. Sometimes we’d get caught and have to go to juvenile court, maybe spend the night in jail, before they released us the next day. The cops were always harassing us street kids, putting us in jail for petty offenses, but we didn’t care: as soon as they let us out we would go shine shoes again. Same shit, every day. We’d get our ten cents a pair, and every so often when I’d gotten five dimes together I’d go to the movies. The rest I’d always give to my mother, because she had mouths to feed and needed it more than I did.

  I’d take the money and go to our local church, the Iglesia de Santa Ana, to light candles for my brothers and sisters and ask the saints to protect them. If I had the money, I would light a candle for each of them, a dime at a time. I would honor all saints—I didn’t have a favorite until my mother made me honor hers, the Virgen del Carmen. She is patroness and protector of all seamen and fishermen. Years later, I remember, I was going to a pre-fight press conference in Cleveland with my former manager, Luis de Cubas, when the flight got really, really rocky. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “When I was small, I shined shoes every day to help out my mother and brothers. But before I went back home, I always went to church to light a candle for my family so God would help them. God is always going to do right by me. We’re not going to die.” And I was right.

  When I was growing up, nothing much changed from one day to another. I hustled for small change. I sold the newspaper. Sometimes I worked in a store, cutting ice and distributing it. Thank God I wasn’t a thief, and I’ve never smoked in my life. Even then I liked a drink now and again, but, though I saw them every day, I never went in for drugs—I am proud of that.

  When I wasn’t shining shoes or selling newspapers, I’d wake up at five a.m. and wait for the market to open. The elderly people who shopped there were often frail, so Toti and I would hold their bags for them while they did their shopping, and when the bags were good and full, we’d carry them to their cars or back to their homes. Then we’d get tips, five or ten cents. There was a lady who sold chicha, a drink made from corn, and arepas, a flatbread made from ground maize. Once I’d made my first ten cents, I’d buy an arepa and a drink.

  My other treat would be movies. I loved the pictures and went whenever I could. I’d watch anything—action movies, Blue Devil cartoons, King Kong, cowboy movies, horror movies like Zombie Versus the Mummy, and movies featuring my favorite Mexican wrestlers: El Santo, El Vampiro, Huracán Ramírez, and Black Shadow. Even if the movies were in English and I didn’t understand a word, I still loved them! The theater would open around one p.m., and it cost twenty-five cents to get in. After the first screening, I’d ask the person in the box office if I could go out and get back in, and then I’d go to a restaurant and beg for bread and water, which I could get for free. I’d go back to the theater with the bread in a bag and watch another movie. There were a couple of places I loved going to: Teatro Presidente and Teatro Tropical. At the Teatro Presidente, I once met Miguel Manzano, a famous Mexican actor. He came out and I said, “Can I clean your shoes?”

  “How much?”

  “Ten cents.”

  So he reached into his pocket, pulled out some Panamanian coins, and I pointed to the right one.

  At the Teatro Tropical, I met Demetrio González, a film actor and singer of ranchera music, and I met another famous actor at the Teatro Apolo. I paid thirty-five cents to watch the show, and I asked him if I could wear the big Mexican hat he had on.

  “Put it on, son,” he said. I thought that was very cool. I must have been ten years old—I’ll never forget it. To us these guys were proper stars, and for weeks I’d boast about seeing them.

  There wasn’t much in the way of fun and diversion. There was a pool in the neighborhood that all the pelaos loved to go to. One day I jumped in during a practice for a swim meet. All I wanted to do was take a dip and cool off, but I didn’t know how to swim and started to sink, and everyone could see I was drowning. All these people jumped in to save me.

  “Hey, pelao, we can’t have you here,” the lifeguard said as they kicked me out.

  So I started going to the beach to learn to swim and eventually came back and told the guy who ran the pool, “Señor Toto, I am ready to compete.” He put me in the middle lane. When the starter’s gun went off—boom!—I dove in. My main competition was a bigger guy, but I tied him.

  “You can come and practice every day,” Señor Toto told me. But I never got into it. I didn’t want to swim. I didn’t want to compete—any of that nonsense. I just wanted to show him that I could win if I wanted to.

  By the time I was eleven or twelve, Toti and I had found work doing odd jobs at the Roosevelt, a hotel owned by a guy named José Manuel Gómez, who was called “Viejo”—old man. Toti had actually stayed at the hotel, living in a storage facility there, and he asked me to move in with him during that time. The hotel was popular with Americans, especially soldiers, and we worked with the maintenance crew fixing it up and doing the jobs no one else wanted to do, like throwing out the garbage. We did a good job, and Mr. Gómez took a liking to me, so I got hired to repair chairs, clean the bathrooms, paint walls, sweep floors, pick up garbage.

  One day I saw a bicycle in the storeroom. “Don’t even think about it,” said Mr. Gómez, who’d seen me eyeing it up. “It doesn’t have any brakes. If you try to ride that, you’ll kill yourself.”

  I wasn’t listening, of course. I took the bike out for a spin around eight o’clock, and I’m hurtling down this hill, scared out of my mind because all these cars are racing past me in the opposite direction. Chuleta! I put my feet on the ground to try to stop the bike and they got all tangled up. The b
ike went flying and so did I. When I finally landed, I was all banged up. My head was bleeding, my arms were all scraped, and I walked back to the hotel with that beaten-up bike and put it back, hoping Mr. Gómez would never notice that it now looked like crap. Of course he noticed, but he just laughed at me for not listening to him. “Told you so!” he kept saying. He was right, though, and I hurt for weeks afterward.

  We’d also go to La Zona, the exclusive district where gringos and rich Panamanians lived, and steal mangoes. It was a restricted area—only workers with permits were allowed there—but the best mangoes were in La Zona. We were breaking the law and in danger of getting arrested for trespassing, but there were no mangoes in El Chorrillo. We’d go three at a time and cut through the fences to get the best mangoes where the other kids didn’t dare go. Some kids stayed at the fence to look out for the cops while the others went for the mangoes. It was then that all the swimming practice came in handy, since we had to swim two miles to get there, load up our sacks, and then swim two miles back with the sacks floating on either side of us. Then when we got back to El Chorrillo there’d be a bunch of older kids waiting for us. They’d jump us, beat the crap out of us, and steal our mangoes. If we managed to avoid them, we’d sell the mangoes and buy food for the house. One day, I got arrested after one of these deals—not a problem, it wasn’t the first time—and it turned out to be a big mistake for the cops, because when my mother came to bail me out they decided we were so poor that they gave her five dollars. Five dollars was a fortune to us, so I figured I’d better go steal some more mangoes. Then I’d get arrested again—bam! another five dollars, thank you very much. From then on, I got arrested every day! It was great!

  We found other ways to make money. There was a place called Tiro al Blanco, a shooting range where we’d watch the gringos practice. When they’d gone, we’d collect up the lead shells while someone kept a lookout for the cops. Then we’d take them to a guy who’d weigh them and give us money for the lead. Whoever got to the shooting range first would pick up the most shells. They’d weigh a ton, but sometimes we’d walk away with six or seven dollars.

  When we weren’t stealing mangoes, my brother Toti and I used to deliver ice on a cart. At Christmas people would buy more ice for all the drinking they’d be doing, and I could make as much as twenty dollars, which would set us up for Christmas, too.

  There was one gentleman who didn’t have any money. “What can I give you instead?” he asked me.

  A pair of roller skates, I told him.

  “Count on it,” he said.

  The next day, at the Roosevelt, my brother said, “Look, this gentleman dropped a present off for you.” That’s how I learned to skate. I remember them so well because they were the most expensive thing I’d ever owned. I didn’t grow up with things like that—my mother would say I didn’t grow up with anything.

  I did everything I could to help my mother, because she was looking after eight children by several different fathers. Three years after my father left, my mother met another man, Victorino Vargas. She’d fallen in love and had five children with him—Victor, Armando (“Pototo”), Chavela, Navela, and Niami. My stepfather was a musician who played guitar for a group called Sindo López. It was at a baile típico, a Spanish dance, that they met. My mother did find a job babysitting, but it was about forty minutes away, so she’d take some of us with her, and I’d go along with my shoeshine box and try to hustle for more money outside a restaurant while my mother took the children to a nearby park. But then she was fired—she wasn’t even a very good babysitter—so I’ve ended up supporting my mother practically all my life, still do!

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten into boxing at all if it hadn’t been for Toti. He was a boxer before me and used to train at the old Neco de La Guardia gym. He’d have this little gym bag with him. It couldn’t hold much: just the wraps, gloves, and the mouthguard. It was more like a lunch box—even his boxing shoes wouldn’t fit in it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Someday, I thought to myself, I’d like one like that. I was still only eight when one day Toti said, “Roberto, come with me.”

  So we show up at the gym, and Toti says, “Wait here, I’m going to the changing room.” I went and sat down in the stands. And then out he comes in his boxing shorts and robe! There was a professional boxer who trained there, Adolfo Osses, a bantamweight, and he says to Toti, “You going to help me train?”

  “Sure.”

  As I watched the trainer put the headgear on my brother, then the protective cup, I was spellbound. I wanted that.

  When Toti had finished sparring I asked him how I could get all that stuff.

  “Become a boxer.”

  So that’s what I did. I went to the gym every day. But nobody wanted to work with me—I weighed eighty-four pounds. They thought I was a little pelao, too short and too light, and way too young. “When am I going to get a shot?” I asked Toti one day.

  “You need a manager,” he said.

  “A manager? What’s a manager?”

  “A manager is somebody who could help you.” But I could never find one.

  Finally, when I was thirteen years old, one day I went with Toti to his weigh-in and this guy didn’t show up—a 105-pounder. “I’ll fight!” I told them.

  Since I weighed only eighty-four pounds, the trainer put a rock in each pocket of my shorts so I could make weight. I made it to a hundred pounds exactly! Toti didn’t want me to fight, because the other guy had a lot more experience—four, five, six fights—but I didn’t care. I just wanted to get in the ring, even though I’d only been practicing on the bags and hadn’t done any proper training yet. “I am going to beat the crap out of him,” I told the trainer. I thought I would win.

  And so I had my first amateur fight. I lost by decision because one of the judges was the uncle of my opponent. And the other judges were related to him, too. I actually lost my first three amateur fights. The opponents were from El Marañón gym, and they would bring the best fighters.

  But at least I got three dollars out of the deal. A dollar went to my trainer, I gave a dollar fifty to my mother, and I kept fifty cents so I could go to the movies. This was the greatest thing ever, I thought—a lot better than all the crap I had to do on the streets to hustle money. No more shining shoes or selling papers for me. I was going to become a boxer.

  I wanted better competition, so Toti and I would go train at El Marañón gym, which also had a basketball court. We’d show up at noon and have to wait outside for them to finish playing basketball before they’d open the doors, and then I’d train by myself. This was where I met Plomo, who would become my longtime trainer and friend. His real name was Néstor Quiñones, and he was a former amateur fighter. I went up to Plomo and told him, “I want you to be my trainer.” I was still thirteen then.

  “Okay,” he said. “Show up at noon tomorrow.” From then on, he was my trainer, and in those early days more like a father. We called him “Plomito.” Plomo was special—he was tremendous at massage, for example. His brother Saúl also worked with me. Plomo taught me some things, but when you are born to box, you work things out yourself, and that’s what I did. But I would stay with Plomo until his death.

  Although it was Toti who got me into boxing, he wasn’t my idol. That was another man, Ismael Laguna, who was Panama’s greatest fighter. He was known as “El Tigre Colonense,” and he had become the Panamanian featherweight champion back in 1962. When I started to learn about boxing, I realized he was the person I wanted to be. The first time I saw him fight was in 1965, when he faced Carlos Ortíz for the world lightweight title in the Estadio Nacional in Panama City. I would have been about fourteen. I traveled to the fight by jumping on a cattle truck, but I had no money to get into the stadium, so I waited. During the last three rounds they opened the gates, and you should have seen the people rushing to get in—like a swarm of ants! There were so many people charging in, it actual
ly broke the gates. It was the end of the fourteenth round by the time I got ringside, but I was mesmerized by the whole spectacle. I remember the trainer screaming, “Hit him with a jab. Left hook! Counterpunch!” I was still a kid, but I knew then this was what I wanted to do.

  Laguna won, and they gave him a giant trophy. When he came out, I followed him to his car. As they zoomed off I looked up at the sky and told myself, I am going to be just like that man—in fact, much bigger than that man. And I meant it. Because two years later I was training with him.

  I was fifteen or sixteen and at my usual gym training every day. Laguna was still world champion, yet one of the guys at the gym got hold of me and asked me to come train with the great Ismael Laguna. I wasn’t overawed. It didn’t worry me that he was my idol. I stayed focused in my head, knowing I had to box him. It was just another sparring session, and by then I knew what I was doing.

  More important, I knew what the other guy was doing. I learned to fight inside. It worked in my favor because it reduced the distance between me and my opponent and I was able to get in powerful combinations. I had power and I was short—I wasn’t going to jab anybody to death. Not a lot of guys know how to fight inside; they think it’s all going-for-the-knockout bullshit. I learned ring strategy, and I taught myself how to cut off the ring. I learned those skills by myself—they’re not the kinds of things someone can pass on to you. You could jab me once, but not twice. You could hit me with a left hook, but not two. You could rock me with a right, but it wouldn’t happen again. I also learned, at an early age, to sense fear in my opponents. I could smell it.

  Maybe it’s because I never spent much time at school, but no trainer I had ever changed me. The best lesson I got was getting kicked in the head, because then I really did learn to make sure it didn’t happen again. Some people think this is the hard way, but for me it was the easy way, perhaps the only way, I was going to learn.