The truth is that he just couldn’t take it anymore. At any minute I thought the referee was going to stop the fight. Buchanan was fast, but I was faster, and I wanted it more—to win the title and bring it back to my idol, Ismael Laguna.
What is true is that if Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown hadn’t been in my corner, I wouldn’t have become world champion. Because, as I understand it, they knew a number of the judges and the referee for that fight. I don’t know how things would have gone if it had just been Plomo in my corner, because of our limited English. I remember Arcel asking the referee in English, “What are you going to do now?”
But Buchanan said I should have been disqualified—for what, hitting him too much?—and of course there were people making excuses for him, including the American journalists. Red Smith of The New York Times wrote that LoBianco had to award the fight to me, since in boxing “anything short of pulling a knife is regarded indulgently.”
I was disappointed because I didn’t want there to be doubt in anyone’s mind that I was the world champion. What no one could dispute was that I’d done it at the age of just twenty-one. The point of boxing is fighting for world titles, so perhaps that night is my first great memory. There weren’t as many boxing associations back then as there are today—nine or ten these days, but only three at that time. You had to work hard to get there, fight the best—not like nowadays. I earned that title with my fists.
Felicidad had stayed in Panama for the fight, and when I called her afterward, she told me everyone had taken to the streets. It was a new world for her—she had never seen anything so extraordinary. Now I was getting a lot of stuff for winning. Eleta had promised me a car if I won. Before the fight, I’d been to visit the Panamanian ambassador and he’d said, “If you become world champion, I will have an outfit made for you, whatever you want.” A gentleman who worked on the Avenue of the Americas offered to make me a white suit, and it cost some $200.
General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s military ruler, sent his plane, stocked with champagne, to bring me back, and I walked off that plane in that suit and a white Panama hat—there are lots of pictures of me celebrating in that suit and hat—into mayhem. At the airport I was completely mobbed: there must have been several thousand people, although it felt like half the country had turned out. They had yellow tape to keep the crowds back, but when they saw me they rushed through it, screaming, “Durán! Durán!” My wife still gets goose bumps telling the story.
General Torrijos had laid on a government limo to take us to Via España for a parade. You couldn’t walk anywhere in the city because people were out on the streets, cheering, crying, fainting. They weren’t used to something so spectacular. Ismael Laguna had been Panama’s hero, and my hero and inspiration, and now one of the first things I did was take the championship belt to him and say, “Here—this is yours.” But Laguna didn’t want it: “I’m happy enough that you won,” he said. Now this worship was on another level. Panama had a new hero. Rich or poor, people loved Durán.
After the parade, Fula and I went to the presidential residence to drink champagne and eat with General Torrijos. The president noticed I was sweating and gave me one of his shirts. I told him I was tired and I’d better get home. “No,” he said, “you’re staying here tonight. I’m going to my private residence and you can be president for a day.” So that’s where Felicidad and I stayed.
There were tears of pain around this time, too. Fula hadn’t come with me to the Buchanan fight because she was pregnant, and one evening, while I was in New York, my mother accidentally took a chair out from under Fula as she went to sit down, and she landed in a heap on the floor. Later that evening when they all went out to see a Bruce Lee movie, Fula felt blood trickling down her legs. She was a month and a half pregnant and she lost the baby.
She didn’t tell me while I was training, so of course I brought a cuddly toy back from New York for her, thinking we were going to celebrate the birth of our first child. That’s when she finally told me what had happened. “If that’s God’s plan,” I told her, “we have to accept it.” Seven months later, she was pregnant with Roberto Jr., known as Chavo. We were building a life together.
The reaction to my victory was immediate and huge. It started at the top with Torrijos, of course. The Panamanian government was very active in promoting all of the country’s great fighters, starting with me. I wasn’t the only champion: Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer had won the WBA junior welterweight title in March 1972. And there were two other very good fighters, Enrique Pinder and Ñato Marcel, a featherweight contender. In 1970, Torrijos had set up the National Institute of Culture and Sports, mostly to promote boxing, and from then on whenever one of us fought outside Panama, the government would help pay the cost of showing the fight nationally on live TV. That’s what they did for the Buchanan fight. Torrijos even promised a lifelong monthly pension of $300 for every Panamanian boxer who became a world champion. Ismael Laguna was the first, of course. Then came Frazer. I’d be next.
Winning the world championship only made my friendship with the general stronger. I’d known him since I lived in El Chorrillo, when he was still a lieutenant in the Panamanian Army living close by, and his kids Martín and Dumas also wanted to practice boxing. His job meant he couldn’t take them to training, so Plomo got me to pick them up—I was twelve years older than Martín—take them to the gym to train, and then bring them back home. I was given five dollars for the week to cover their meals, and by the weekend I had a couple of bucks to give back, saying, “Señor Torrijos, here’s what’s left.”
“You’re a decent pelao,” Torrijos said. “I’d like you to do this every week.”
The kids kept growing, and then one day Martín Torrijos, the general’s own son, announced that he was going to the United States to study at a military academy, and later at Texas A&M. In 2004, he became president of Panama, after winning the election with the support of singer and politician Rubén Blades—who’d also become my friend—and everyone from the old days started circling around him looking for favors, but we never asked anything from him. After the Buchanan victory, though, a friend of mine kept bugging me to ask General Torrijos for a car. So I did. I was at his office, and he calls up a colonel and yells over the phone, “Go get Durán a car!” I’d asked for a Volkswagen—that was all I wanted—but the colonel got me a luxury model with all the extras. And that’s the only thing I ever asked for.
The world had certainly changed for me and Felicidad, but we tried to keep things simple. We stayed in the same apartment because I had an endorsement deal with the Super Malta beverage company and it paid the rent, which was only $125 a month, fully furnished. But eventually Eleta would buy me a house in El Cangrejo, a neighborhood with palm trees and an outdoor courtyard. It was a long, long way from where I had come from. El Cangrejo, literally “the crab”; it’s called that because its streets are spread out like a crab’s claws. In the 1950s it was a Jewish neighborhood, and one of the most modern and fancy in Panama. It was a twenty-minute ride from El Chorrillo, close enough for me to go back and see my old friends.
The son of the lady who lived in the upstairs apartment across from our new house happened to be Martín Torrijos, whom I hadn’t seen since I used to take him to the gym. It turned out that the general, who was now the most powerful person in the country, had had an affair with this woman and Martín was the result—in fact, he was the only one of his sons who did look like him. It was as though his head had been cut off and given to Martín, or the other way around. Because his mother was terrified that something would happen to him, the only place she would let him go was our house, so he’d come and eat with us, even do his homework. I had a pool installed, and he’d go for a swim while Felicidad was cooking for him, and then he’d be back home in time for bed.
Sometimes the general would arrive at one, two in the morning with all his bodyguards, and because he trusted us he’d get them to l
eave his guns at our house. “How are you doing, son?” he’d say to me. “Is everything okay? I’m going upstairs—do you have any whiskey?”
“Yes, Chivas Regal.”
He’d go upstairs for some you-know-what, and I’d sit drinking whiskey with his bodyguards. He’d drop by twice a week, so we got to know him pretty well. He’d come back down around five or six a.m., asking for whiskey. The woman upstairs would eventually be godmother to one of my daughters.
Who would ever have imagined all this back in the days when I was training his kids? The general never thought I was going to be champion of the world, and I never thought he’d end up a general of the Republic of Panama. And I never, ever thought that later young Martín would grow up to become president of the Republic of Panama. But these are the kinds of things that can happen in life.
The Volkswagen I got from the general after beating Buchanan soon got me into bad trouble. I was in love with a woman named Silvia from Puerto Armuelles in Chiriquí province, and one day I was on my way to see her in my new car. The trip took us up into the hills, and just as we were approaching David, a town way out in the countryside, it started to pour. The road turned to mud and I couldn’t see shit. I tried to slow down as we hit a bend, and I thought I’d crossed over into another lane. Suddenly a car flashed its lights in front of me. Bam! I slammed on the brakes, the car spun around, and now we were hurtling downhill. The car crashed into a big tree trunk, and that’s what saved me from dying. I busted my right elbow, and my lip was a real mess. The hitchhiker I’d picked up along the way had a head injury.
It was still pouring down rain as we walked back up the hill to get help, and by that time, I was bleeding badly from my mouth and arm. Plodding up, up, uphill in that downpour. When we finally reached the top, the rain stopped, a car came out of nowhere, and the driver recognized me and stopped.
He gave us a ride to the hospital in San Félix, but I was getting more and more worried about how I was going to explain this to Felicidad. And I wasn’t the only nervous one. The doctor who was stitching me up, his hands were shaking. “Why are you trembling?” I asked him.
“Durán, I’m afraid you’re going to die here.”
“Doctor, if I didn’t die out on the hill, I’m not going to die here.” I was still forty minutes away from David, where there were a bunch of people waiting for me, and I told the doctor I had to go. He tried to stop me, but there was nothing he could do.
When I got there, we started drinking and met a few girls, and apart from the pain where they stitched me up, it was a great night. Word got out about the accident and lots of fans came by to see me—even the local chief of police, an old friend, came by to wish me well. When the bars closed, we kept partying at the Hotel Nacional, and the next day we went on to Puerto Armuelles. When I got back to Panama City, my arm still bandaged up, I had to explain it all to Fula. She was not happy.
But that was nothing compared to my horror when I found out that Eleta had signed me up to fight Esteban de Jesús. He was considered one of the top lightweights in the world, with twenty-seven knockouts—ten in the first round. Eleta and General Torrijos wanted me to make my first title defense in Panama, and when a deal could not be worked out, they’d set up this non-title fight in New York. “Why, Eleta?” I asked him. “My mouth’s all swollen. My elbow’s busted.”
“I’ve signed the contract,” he said. “You’ve got to fight.” The fight was set for November 17, 1972. It was time to get ready for my return to Madison Square Garden.
Even though the pain affected my workload, I went into training. I ended up weighing five pounds more than for the fight against Buchanan (137½). De Jesús weighed 138. The odds were stacked against me from the get-go. Ten thousand people and every one of them Puerto Rican. But I was Durán: I’d come through hell to get here—I could deal with anything.
First round, inside a minute—boom!—he catches me with a left hook and dumps me on my ass for the first time in my professional career. The referee, Arthur Mercante, starts counting, “One, two, three . . .” I get up right away, shake my head, and smile.
Now I rallied. I was bleeding through my mouth—they’d taken the stitches out, but it was still swollen. My elbow still hurt. I hurt him in the eighth with a right. If I hadn’t had that car crash, I would have put him on his knees. The only thing he did was knock me down. I knew I’d won that fight, but they gave it to him by unanimous decision. In thirty-two fights it was the first time I had lost, and after the post-match press conference, which I don’t remember much about, I went back to my hotel room, cried, beat my fists against the wall, and promised myself I would never lose again. I told Eleta I wanted revenge, and they had to give it to me. But I’d have to wait awhile: it would be fifteen months before I faced him again.
I was pissed that I lost. I got a lot more pissed when the Panamanian press turned on me for the first time in my career, questioning whether I’d trained properly and suggesting that I partied too much. That was bullshit, but they loved to dump on me when I was down. This would be only the first time.
Two months later, I knocked out Jimmy Robertson in the fifth round in Panama City to retain my WBA lightweight title. It was in front of a capacity crowd of 18,000 people at the Gimnasio Nuevo. They saw a good show, and for good measure, I took out a couple of his teeth with a right cross in the fifth round.
After that, we went to Los Angeles for two fights, against Juan Medina and Javier Ayala. The first one was scheduled with Medina on February 22, 1973. Fula came with me, but only for the first fight—this pregnancy with Chavo was so difficult, she was vomiting constantly. She’d feel so dizzy that eventually she told Señor Eleta she would make me worry too much if she stayed, and so she flew back to Panama and went straight to the hospital for a month. But before she left, she was at the gym the day I finally met my father.
I’m doing heavy-bag work when one of my handlers comes up and says: “Durán, I’d like you to meet your family.” First I was introduced to a man and a woman who said they were my aunt—my father’s sister—and uncle—her husband—and that my father wanted to come see me. I had my father’s nose, they told me: a big nose (which I’ve since had cosmetic surgery on). We arranged for me to meet him at the gym the next day.
I was more nervous than I thought I would be. After all, I hadn’t seen him since I was one and a half—why should I care about him? Eleta introduced us.
“How do I know you’re my father?” I said. “Prove it.”
“I know your uncle Moisés, your uncle Chinón, your grandmother . . .”
When he described to me where my mother used to live, I knew then he was my dad. He took me to his house to meet the rest of the family, and after that we came back to my hotel and talked some more. It hadn’t been his idea to leave when I was only eighteen months old, he said; he’d been posted from Panama to Arkansas. He’d been born in Arizona, of Mexican heritage, and had stayed in the army until he was thirty-nine. He’d also served in Vietnam. This was all very interesting, but it meant nothing to me. I just kept thinking he was making excuses for abandoning us.
In the early seventies, he said, he’d picked up a Mexican boxing magazine that had me listed as the number 6 contender in the lightweight division. That had made him feel proud, he said. But perhaps he didn’t feel anything more, either, because we quickly ran out of things to say.
The one person I immediately bonded with was my grandmother, Estelle, my father’s mother. My father had named me Roberto after his brother, and she looked at me and said: “This is Roberto Durán. This is my blood.” She was eighty-five and a Cherokee Indian, and she used to put her long hair up in braids. She had heard about me but, until I came to Los Angeles, hadn’t been able to make contact. “This is my grandson!” she’d say proudly, and she wanted to enjoy her final years with me.
From then on, my grandmother and my dad started coming to my fights—and of co
urse, they wanted the best hotels and tickets for everyone. I went along with it—I was making good money and had no reason not to. My dad came to three or four fights, then got bored and stopped coming. After that, I never saw him again. But my grandmother kept coming, no matter where they were, almost until she passed away. She was my biggest fan. “I am not leaving my grandson behind,” she would say. A good, good lady. I adored her.
Eventually, so many years after the last time I had seen my father, one of my relatives in Los Angeles called to say that he was doing very poorly and it was his wish to be taken off life support. They asked me what I thought. I didn’t feel anything at all. If they want to kill my father, that’s fine, I thought, but I’m not going to do it. His death was not going to be on my conscience. They had lived with him all their lives, let them make that decision. A week later I got a call saying that he’d died. I felt no emotion. I respected him as my father, but as for love, remember that a child who grows up in poverty, who has no father, only a mother, is always going to think, Why did my dad abandon me? All he did was make me, see me, and then leave me. That’s all. May he rest in peace.
• • •
IN THE RING, I was still dominating like a champion. I was killing everybody I fought since losing to de Jesús, winning ten fights in a row, eight by knockout, and everyone knew it. And finally, in March 1974, I got to fight de Jesús again. Forget the rest, this was the one I wanted—the chance to avenge that defeat, the fight I knew I would have won if it hadn’t been for the car crash. De Jesús had won eight straight fights, with three knockouts, including Ray Lampkin twice, Johnny Gant, and Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer, the former champion from Panama. I didn’t give a shit about any of that. He wasn’t going to beat me. And the boxing people knew it, too. I was a two-to-one favorite.
I Am Duran Page 5
