I was comfortable in the ring now, but in my heart I was still a street fighter. Around that time, there was a guy in El Chorrillo, Chicafuerte Ruiz, a professional boxer who’d had more fights than me, and there were problems between our family and his, particularly involving my sister Marina. One day, at home, I was told what was going on, so I went around to the guy’s house to sort things out. Out came Chicafuerte, the more experienced guy in the ring, and a street fight broke out, with people urging both of us on: “Chicafuerte!” “Durán! Durán!” “Chicafuerte!” I knocked the crap out of him; people were cheering like crazy. It was the first time my little brother Pototo had seen me in a street fight, although I’d already been in plenty. That was when he realized, he told me later, that I was a great fighter.
My amateur career was going quite nicely, and given my track record, I fought some very good fighters, including Catalino Alvarado, who was considered one of Panama’s best boxers. Of course I beat him. I also beat Buenaventura Riasco, a top fighter from one of the top boxing clubs in Panama—I knocked him out with an uppercut. I thought I was a shoo-in to represent Panama in the Pan-American Games in 1967 in Winnipeg, Canada, and beforehand I was set to compete in a Golden Gloves qualifying tournament.
But right before the tournament, I ate something that made me sick—I’d bought something from a street vendor and they were fumigating the streets, and some of that stuff maybe got in my food. I felt really rough.
“Don’t worry about it,” Plomo said. “Take two Alka-Seltzers and it will go away.”
I did, and at last I was ready to go. Then I drew the top two boxers in my division, who were trained by the police—at the time, the police department in Panama had all the best boxers. But I beat the crap out of both of them, and that meant I was going to Winnipeg. Or so I thought. Then one of the colonels came up to Plomo and says he’s going to send someone else.
“I won the fight!” I screamed. “I’m going!”
“Shut up, unless you want to end up in jail,” the colonel said. That was Panama for you.
All this left me very demoralized and I didn’t want to fight anymore. Screw this. All politics. Bullshit. “Plomo, if this is the way it’s going to be, I’m done with it.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got a fight for you.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“No, I mean a pro fight. You don’t need to fight as an amateur anymore.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Who do I have to kill?”
“One of the guys who didn’t want to fight you as an amateur.” And just like that, I turned professional.
Carlos Mendoza was from Colón and he’d already won three or four fights. He thought he was marvelous, but I’d seen him fight and knew I could handle him. But then while I was training I broke my hand hitting the heavy bag, and when we got to Colón, the doctor said I couldn’t fight.
“Please let me. I need to, for my mother, to put food on the table.”
So the doctor gave in. I met Plomo for a pre-fight meal of steak and salad, which would become my ritual for the rest of my career. I won my first professional fight on February 23, 1968, a unanimous four-round decision. I was still small, only 118 pounds. I was sixteen years old.
I loved to hang out with my brother Pototo around that time. It was tough for him living at home—there were a lot of problems. When he was six, our mother gave him away to some woman, exactly the same shit she’d pulled with me. He didn’t even know who she was. He cried because he didn’t know the family, and eventually, a few days later, my stepfather came to get him. I’m glad I didn’t find out what had happened until years afterward; I would have been very pissed off. When I was on my own, I’d pick him up and we’d go out to eat, which he really enjoyed; he knew he was getting a good meal.
We always had good times together, although one time I got really scared that I’d seriously injured him. He was recovering at home after being hit by a car, and even though he was bedridden, we ended up wrestling on the bed—we were still just kids—and he hit his head on the corner of the headboard and blacked out. Fortunately, I was able to revive him by putting alcohol under his nose.
I made sure I always brought something home for my brothers, my sisters, and my mother. I still do. Because, whatever happens, my family comes before everything.
By now, my boxing family was growing, too. My first manager was a man by the name of Alfredo Vázquez. His friends would lend him money so he could continue to be my manager and look after me. Shortly after the Mendoza fight, though, he said, “Durán, I have to tell you the truth. You’re maturing as a boxer and I can’t be your manager anymore. There’s a gentleman named Carlos Eleta, and I’m going to have to sell my interest in you to him. It wouldn’t be fair to you otherwise. I don’t have the money to take you in the right direction, much less feed you properly. Every day, you’re growing, and eating more.”
Eleta had been impressed by me—I’d been on a preliminary card with Jesús Santamaría, one of the fighters he managed, along with a number of other good fighters in Panama, including Sammy Medina and Federico Plummer. But I had a lot more potential, Eleta knew, than any of those other guys. He asked Vázquez how much he wanted for Durán.
“I’ve spent, oh, a hundred and fifty dollars on him. Give me three hundred.”
I was staring at them. Eleta gave Vázquez $300, and then he gave me $20. That was a lot of money then. “I will always be there for you,” Eleta said. “I will always have your back.” And that was that. Vázquez sold me for a miserable $300.
“We either sign a contract,” Eleta told me, “or we shake hands like gentlemen.”
“I’m a man of my word,” I told him. “Let’s shake hands.” I was seventeen—I didn’t have a clue about money and contracts. All I wanted to do was box, and if I could do that and put food on the table, I was happy. So we shook hands like gentlemen, but we never signed a contract. The only contract I signed was when I fought, and then I would sign it and Eleta would cash the check. Of course, Eleta would go on to say that that $300 was the greatest investment of his life. If I had known, I would have asked for more money, but I had no idea then how much money I’d go on to make for him!
Eleta was a rich man already—the owner of a TV station, Canal Cuarto, and some distribution companies around Panama. He’d already seen one of my early fights in Colón, watched me win with courage and heart, and then he remembered who I was. It turned out we’d met previously when I was about twelve, when he’d caught me stealing coconuts from one of his trees. He told me I’d been so funny and gracious, he’d invited me to lunch instead of calling the police. I don’t remember the lunch, but I do remember stealing his coconuts.
After three or four fights, Eleta told me he knew I was going to be something special, but in the beginning the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing. At heart, I was still a street kid. My mother loved to go dancing at a restaurant in Chorrillo, near where we lived, and I’d usually go with her. On the way home one night, I ran into two women having an argument—one of them I knew from the restaurant—and I got between them to try to calm them down when all of a sudden some guy jumps on my back and starts choking me. Since I knew a little wrestling, I was able to flip him over, and when he stood up—bam!—I hit him in the face and broke his jaw. The police turned up, arrested me right away, and it turned out the guy I’d hit was a cop. I showed up in court in front of a judge who didn’t like juvenile delinquents and was friendly with the cops, and the cop tells the judge that he went to break up the fight and I sucker punched him. I didn’t say a word, so the judge sends me to jail.
But he didn’t send me to juvenile jail: I found myself in Carcel Modelo, the men’s jail, where there were a lot of tough guys. I got put in a cell in the corner of the prison with no toilet: I’d have to yell “Key, guard, key!” every time I need
ed a piss. They made us do chores like sweeping the floors and looking after the police horses. I had no shirt, because the buttons had been ripped off in that fight, and I’d given it to another prisoner to sew on new ones. I was the youngest guy in the jail.
One of the two other guys in my cell, who went by the name Taras Bulba, was a professional wrestler. He’d heard of me and knew I was a fighter with great potential. I asked him why he was in prison. The police wanted to take all of his jewelry, he told me—he wore lots of it, gold—and they’d accused him of stealing it. “I don’t care,” he said. “They can keep it. All I want to do is get out of here.” The other one was this crazy black guy—something about him wasn’t right—who looked like he wanted to start something with me. “If you touch Durán,” Taras Bulba told him, “I will break both of your hands.” The black guy kept being a nuisance, but thanks to Taras Bulba, he never messed with me.
Three days later, I was outside cleaning the yard when an officer came and asked me why I was in jail. I told him about the women’s fight, the guy jumping me from behind, and how the guy lied in court about what had happened.
“Where are you from?”
“El Chorrillo.” I told him my mother’s name, my grandmother’s name, and my aunt’s name.
He told me he was going to look into it, but if I was lying, I’d end up doing more time. Half an hour later I was called into an office. “Okay, you’re done here,” said the officer. “You can go.” It turns out the officer had grown up with my mother and aunt—had gone to school with them. My story checked out. But because of that nonsense, I ended up spending five days in jail.
I went to see Eleta, who told me he knew exactly what had happened but had decided not to bail me out. “I wanted to teach you a lesson so you won’t do things like that.” I took in what he was saying; I knew I couldn’t become champion without him on my side. He had money—he was a millionaire—and I knew he’d do everything in his power to help me become champion of the world. He believed in me and I believed in him. I started calling him Papa. He wasn’t my father, of course, but he was someone who looked out for me and had my best interests at heart. He became the most influential man in my life. We were in this together.
After the first fight against Mendoza, I won my next eight fights, all by knockout or TKO. Only one of them lasted more than one round. Eleta kept setting them up and I kept knocking them down.
And not just boxers—horses, too. In November 1969, I’d just fought this guy Luis Patiño from Panama City. He’d been the Panamanian bantamweight champion, but now he was getting on a bit—twenty-eight—and it was my first scheduled ten-rounder. It didn’t go all the way, but it was still a hell of a fight, perhaps my toughest yet. The problem for my opponents was that I hit hard with both hands, and eventually he made a mistake. He got too close. He got a little off balance on his right foot and—bing! bang! tell me about it—and he didn’t have a clue what had hit him. I won by TKO in the eighth. It was an extraordinary fight, and he fought only once more afterward.
After the fight, I went with my uncle Chinón to Guararé, where my family comes from, to be treated to some food, drink, and good music. Around midnight, I noticed a bunch of horses belonging to other guests tied up outside the bar. That’s when this country guy comes up to me.
“Are you Durán?”
“Yes.”
“I bet you a hundred you can’t knock down that pony.”
“No, I don’t want to bet.”
“How about a hundred bucks and a bottle of whiskey?”
“Are you crazy?”
But the girl I had with me starts egging me on. “Vamos, papi.” You can do it.
“Take it,” my uncle says. “I know you can knock this horse over.”
I was a little drunk, but no way could I back out now. So I walk up to the pony and start looking into his long face. “Tío, where am I going to hit this animal?”
“Easy. Hit him behind the ear and he’ll go down like a sack of spuds.”
Boom! I knocked him down, but I didn’t knock him out. Everyone is falling over laughing, the girl’s kissing me, hugging me—“Oh, Papi, you knocked down the horse! You knocked down the horse!” But I’m sweating so badly, I can’t concentrate, and now I realize my hand hurts like hell. One of my fingers is out of place, all dislocated, doesn’t look good at all. But I was so drunk, I didn’t feel a damn thing—I’d been drinking aguardiente, which is really strong, and slowly my whole hand, then my arm, went numb.
My uncle wanted me to go to the hospital, but we didn’t, even though the bone was sticking out at an angle and looked pretty disgusting. I don’t remember if it was a clinic or a house where we ended up, but the nurse told me she didn’t have any anesthetic to use. I didn’t care—I was still drunk. While she stitched me up I was swigging whiskey from the bottle I got from winning the bet. I didn’t feel a thing. The next day, people kept asking me to tell them the whole story, which was pretty cool, and that’s when I knew that the legend of Roberto Durán had been born.
My first fifteen fights were either in Panama City or Colón, and after I beat Mendoza, I knocked out the next six opponents in the first rounds. The competition got a little better in 1969, but I still won six more fights—five by TKO. There was no one in the country who could handle me, and my reputation was spreading far and wide. That’s when I knew I would have to start looking outside Panama for a decent fight. I wanted to have a shot at being world champion, and there was no way I was going to do that just by destroying everyone in Panama.
My first fight outside the country was Felipe Torres in Mexico City. He was the first man to take me the distance—ten rounds—but I still won. Then I went home again to fight in front of my fans. I was 16–0, with thirteen knockouts, when I fought Ernesto “Ñato” Marcel in May 1970 at the Gimnasio Nuevo Panamá in Panama City, with about 7,000 people in the stands, and I came in at 128 pounds. Marcel thought he was tough—he’d lost only twice in twenty-seven fights—and he was the favorite to win. I knew it was going to be my hardest fight yet and the training I did for it was brutal. I’d get up really early, at five a.m., to run, and there were times I didn’t have any money for breakfast and would have to go sell newspapers before more training in the afternoon.
None of these obstacles mattered against Marcel. I hurt him in the fourth round and he started bleeding around his right eye. The ring doctor checked him out and let him continue, even though the cut was pretty deep. It was a slugfest, but I did most of the slugging, and nobody who was ringside thought the fight would go the distance. In the seventh round I tagged him hard with a right to the head and followed up with a flurry with both hands. He was in big trouble and knew it, and from that point on I dominated the fight. All he was doing was running, not wanting to get hit. The referee finally stopped it in the tenth and final round, and I won by TKO.
The trouble I did have around that fight had nothing to do with Marcel. One of Eleta’s companies manufactured vitamins, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I took some to build me up a bit. I didn’t know any better. I thought, If I take one, it’ll make me strong. So if I take three, I’ll get even stronger. I ended up just before the fight with a bad reaction, running a fever and with a lesion on my ass. For three or four days I couldn’t run. “Don’t give me any excuses,” I remember Marcel taunting me. “I don’t want to hear that you’re sick, because I’m going to knock you out.” I didn’t tell Eleta anything, I didn’t want the fight postponed.
A week before the fight, my buddy Chaparro took a look at my ass. “If you want, I can lance it and get all that crap out and you won’t have a fever anymore,” he said. After he’d drained out all the pus, I thought I was fine, but he said, “No, I have to take the root out,” so he dug deep in there and forty-five minutes later my fever was gone, the pain was gone—everything. Next day I was able to run and tell Plomo I was fine, even though I had a hole in my
ass.
In March 1971, I stopped José Acosta in the first round, and then Lloyd Marshall, and it was then I knew I was really on my way, because I started getting introduced to American celebrities. I’d met loads of famous people from Panama and South America, but now I was introduced at ringside to John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the dead president, who was ten years old back then. I gave him my gloves from the fight as a present.
I was fascinated by the United States of America—in love with it, even. It was a huge, strange country, but now I wanted the whole world to know who I was, and Eleta started making plans for me to fight there.
“Chuleta, vamos!” I told him. Of course I had aspirations of becoming a champion, doesn’t every fighter? I wasn’t dreaming big, but I wanted to win a championship so I could buy my mother a house and get her out of that shithole. That was it, nothing else. After that, I was going to retire.
It didn’t work out that way.
TWO
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
I ONCE READ A BOOK that described the skyscrapers in New York as touching the clouds. There was something magical about that city. And now I, Roberto Durán, a pelao from El Chorrillo, who’d spent the first four years of his career mostly fighting in Panama, was finally going to get there.
Eleta had set me up to fight Benny Huertas, a journeyman pro, in New York in September 1971, but as I flew from Panama to New York my mind wasn’t on Huertas. I was looking out the window, amazed at what I was seeing, staring at Manhattan and the Empire State Building, and wondering if those skyscrapers really did touch the sky. It seems crazy now, but I really thought the plane was going to hit one of them and we’d crash.
We stayed at a hotel near Madison Square Garden, and I walked the streets in awe like a pelao with a bunch of new toys, so full of life. It was a little overwhelming, too, especially since I didn’t speak any English, so Eleta brought in Luis Henríquez to do the translating and order food for us while we were in camp—breakfast, lunch, dinner, he took care of pretty much everything. Everybody called him by his nickname, Flaco Bala, and he looked good at ringside in his tuxedo.
I Am Duran Page 3
