I sat down in front of the microphones. “I came here to fight,” I told the reporters. “I didn’t come here to clown around. Tell Leonard when he fights me, he’s going to have a real fight on his hands.”
I think I got Leonard scared right from the start, and I did everything I could to mess with his head. We had on these oversize gloves with the sponsor’s logo on them, the kind used for publicity shots, and even though we were just meant to stand there, posing with them, I kept hitting him in the head, each time a bit harder. I don’t think he’d been expecting that. They had food for us at the press conference. I pulled fruit to bits with my bare hands, stabbed my fork in my steak, and fell on it. It was all part of the plan—to make him think I was crazy. What was I going to do next? I knew he could box, so if I was going to win, I’d have to get inside his head and break him down mentally. We were going to fight on my terms and that meant a street fight.
And then he started to talk shit. “I’m not just going to beat Roberto Durán. I’m going to kill him.” When the reporters asked him about my dark eyes, he tried to make a joke of it: Eyes couldn’t hurt you, he said—only fists. He said he was too fast for me, that he was king of the division.
Chuleta, que payaso. What a clown. I called him a maricón, faggot. I had never fought a man I liked, and now I hated Leonard, too. He was stupid to say all that shit. I didn’t care about his undefeated record. All he had fought before me were dead people. Now he was going to fight Roberto Durán, and he was very much alive.
To begin with, I trained in New York at Gleason’s Gym, before moving to Grossinger’s in the Catskills. I didn’t know the place well then, but it had a great reputation with American boxers. I was the seventh world champion to train there. It was such a big resort—it had everything: facilities for handball, tennis, skiing, ice skating, and other sports as well.
And it was very quiet there, which was perfect. The only people I came across were groups of elderly Jewish people on vacation and I didn’t see them much. I went to the restaurant twice a day and there weren’t many people in it, which was just as well, because Freddie Brown was being very strict about my diet. All he allowed me was steak and steamed vegetables. And water—gallons and gallons of water. Just to break up the routine, I tried the Jewish chicken soup now and then. I liked it, but what I really craved was some good home cooking.
Brown was working me harder than ever before. His idea was that training camp should feel just like jail. At least in the Catskills the mountain air was cool and refreshing, and I had Kevin Rooney, who would later train Mike Tyson, as one of my sparring partners, and he was a good guy. My salsa buddy Rubén Blades came up to hang out with us, too. We played dominoes, and sometimes he would translate for me when the gringo journalists came to cover the training sessions.
I didn’t like speaking English—it was too easy to say something that could be misunderstood. But sometimes when I spoke Spanish they understood. “I fight for la plata,” I told them one day. Money. But of course this fight was different because I wanted the money and the title.
I kept a large bongo drum at the foot of my bed and at night, after training, I played the timbales to remind me of home and to keep my spirits up. To help take my mind off the fight in the evening, I’d play salsa records, which would make me think about my mother, Clara, back home in Panama, and how much I loved her and wanted to take care of her. I’d bought her a house; now I wanted more—for her, for me, for my family. And then I’d fall asleep until Freddie Brown would come and wake me up to go running in the dark. And then we’d start all over again. I talked a lot to Flaco Bala and some of the others in my camp: I knew what tricks Leonard was going to try and I was going to be ready for them.
In the past, I’d screwed around a lot before fights, spent a lot of money on drinking and women. Not this time. I realized how important this fight was, and I wasn’t going to let anything distract me. This was my chance to make the world take notice, and I wasn’t going to blow it. I was in the best shape I’d ever been since becoming too big to fight as a lightweight.
We traveled to Montreal three weeks before the fight. I worked very hard—came close to knocking out one of my sparring partners. But I made one big mistake. A boxer depends on his legs: they need to be strong, so I started to train in cowboy boots to make them stronger—it made running up and down hills much harder. But it also messed up my back. I was taken to a hospital in New York and made to lie down underneath a contraption that looked like a laser—it was like that scene in the Bond movie Goldfinger! But at least it got rid of the pain.
I thought I was playing some good mind games on Leonard, but you wouldn’t believe all the tricks they tried to make sure he won—even putting the fight on in Montreal, where he’d won his Olympic gold medal and everyone loved him. But when I showed up wearing a T-shirt that read “Bonjour Montreal!” and then signed autographs, I won everyone over. I did all my workouts in public—we set up at a downtown shopping center, and thousands of fans came and watched me train. They loved to see how I jumped rope and hit the speed bag so fast. Even though I couldn’t speak English, I managed to talk to people, and we got along just fine. I was surprised they weren’t more stuck on the American, but in fact, it was the tough guy they warmed to. They loved everything I stood for. The bottom line: They loved a badass.
In Montreal, like in the Catskills, we had a great camp. Even though we were staying in a hotel, Fula took care of my diet, doing all the shopping and cooking for me. She was five months pregnant with our second son, Robin, so we didn’t go out much, just stayed in our room, relaxing. And when I trained, I concentrated on winding Leonard up. How? I knew he was sending his brother to spy on me—I could see him taking notes—so I pushed all Leonard’s buttons. I knew I could turn the fight into a brawl.
I even went after his wife. One day, I bumped into Leonard and her walking down the street with Angelo Dundee, his trainer, and his wife. I gave Leonard’s wife the middle finger. I told Leonard I was going to cut his balls off. I knew I’d gotten to him. He wanted to fight me on the street, there and then. It was all meant to drive Leonard crazy, and it worked. Later I found out that that was when he really started to worry. I was a lot more intelligent than people were giving me credit for, and I knew if Leonard tried to fight me instead of boxing, he’d be in trouble. Angelo Dundee would call it one of the best con jobs in boxing.
Leonard didn’t know how to handle all this shit. He’d always been the pretty boy, the guy smiling in front of the camera, the good guy—the guy who was on top, in control. Not anymore—I made sure of that. Every time I saw him, I’d come up to him and call him a maricón, and much worse. I questioned his manhood, that was the biggest thing. When the press conferences came around, I could tell he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to have to deal with me and my attitude. It was all driving him crazy, and while he was busy getting wound up, wanting to destroy me, his fight plan was going out the window. I was psyching him out and setting the perfect trap. Or so I thought. And now we get to the good part . . .
Three days before the bout, I had to get a pre-fight physical, and they connected me to all these machines, including a heart monitor. And here’s a surprise. An ECG reveals an abnormal heartbeat. (I couldn’t have a heart problem, joked Arcel—I didn’t have a heart.) This is what Dr. Bernard Chaitman, a cardiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute, told the media:
His ECG showed some findings that, in a normal person, might be interpreted as coronary artery disease. This is narrowing of the arteries of the heart. However, this type of ECG pattern is often seen in highly trained athletes. In a well-trained athlete, the heart muscle may be slightly thicker than in an average individual, giving rise to an unusual type of ECG pattern. What happened in Durán’s case is his pattern was slightly more marked than in the average boxer.
What bullshit. I was convinced it was a ruse for Leonard to get out of the fight.
Fortunately, Eleta called General Torrijos, and they brought in a famous heart specialist from Panama. I had to take another test. They put me on a treadmill, turned it up to the highest speed, and got me running—boom! boom! boom! I kept going, for a whole hour. The specialist looked at the graph and got very excited. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me. He ran off down the hall, shouting, “Hay pelea! . . . Hay pelea!” We have a fight!
With only a couple of days to go, and since I’d already run an hour on the treadmill, Eleta said there was to be no sparring that day, just to be safe.
And he was right—I was in perfect condition, physically and mentally. I had my family, the people of Panama, and the city of Montreal in my corner. Torrijos did not attend the fight, because his doctor was scared that if I lost, it would be too much for his heart. He ended up watching the fight at home on television with his doctor at his side.
This was going to be my first contest as a challenger in eight years and the first time ever in my career I’d enter the ring as an underdog. Leonard was a nine-to-five favorite—even Muhammad Ali had picked him to win. But the sportswriters knew better. In a poll of thirty of them, sixteen picked me to win by a knockout and one to win by a decision. They saw what I saw: Leonard was losing his mind because of me. He lost it again at the weigh-in, flipped me the bird, so I told him to fuck off and called him a maricón again. Then I looked at his wife: “Your husband no good,” I said to her. “After I beat him, I fuck you.” That drove him completely crazy! He didn’t know what to do, and he certainly didn’t have a fight plan anymore. It was just: Kill Durán! Perfecto!
The day of the fight, I went to the barber to have my beard trimmed. I took Chavo, who’d just arrived from Panama. He was only seven, and this was his first big fight. My wife had even made him a pair of boxing shorts like the ones I’d be wearing in the ring: red and white, with ROBERTO DURÁN in big letters.
On the monitor in the dressing room that night, I could see Leonard blowing a kiss to my wife. When Leonard’s wife came up, I shot her the bird, and they must have been filming me, too, because it showed up on the live satellite feed in the arena. The fans were laughing their asses off. The scene was set for the biggest upset in boxing history.
“The Fight of the Decade,” they were calling it, and there were close to 50,000 people in that arena, including about 2,000 Panamanians, waving national flags everywhere, beating drums. Chavo was with my wife, about ten rows from the ring, wearing his red-and-white shorts. Ringside seats were going for $500. It was also going to be the largest audience in closed-circuit TV history, with 1.5 million fans watching. As I came out with my entourage, Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s doctor, who was doing commentary for the fight, compared the atmosphere to the first Ali–Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden in 1971.
I entered the ring with not only a Panamanian flag but also the white-on-blue fleur-de-lis, the flag of Quebec. The noise was deafening—it was a madhouse. Ray Arcel and Flaco Bala were the first guys in the ring. It had been raining hard in Montreal, and a lot of people wore plastic bags to keep their heads dry. But miraculously, as I bounced into the ring, it stopped: a good omen. The ovation was tremendous, the noise louder than anything I’d ever heard before. I bowed to the crowd, blew kisses to them. There were so many people in my corner in Montreal, yelling, cheering, and praying that I would beat the American Idol. They were booing him! My people weren’t here to see Leonard; they were here to see Roberto Durán.
“This is unreal,” said Pacheco.
Joe Frazier, who was ringside, was asked by Dave Anderson of The New York Times if I reminded him of anyone. “Yeah,” said Frazier. “Charles Manson.” He was right. You didn’t want to be around me before a fight. I was like a caged lion. Now all the waiting was over, we were in the ring, and it was el momento de la verdad, the moment of truth.
I was fired up. I warmed up by throwing a bunch of combinations, thinking I’d soon get to do that to Leonard, but those punches would be real, and they’d hurt. Then my idol, Ismael Laguna, came into the ring, wearing a handsome white suit, carrying a little Panamanian flag. We hugged—a beautiful moment for me! What a great night for Panama this was going to be!
Now it was time to take down the American Hero. I was concerned that the referee, Carlos Padilla, might be a problem because Arcel knew he always tried to separate fighters quickly, which would prevent an aggressive fighter like me from working inside. Arcel even approached him before the fight and said, “You’re a good referee, but I only hope you let my boy fight his fight inside.” I think the pressure got to Padilla, and he really let us fight inside instead of breaking clinches. And that was the plan I’d hatched with Arcel and Freddie Brown, who thought the best way for me to win was to crowd him from the start. “Don’t let him do anything!” they kept telling me in training. “Crowd him against the ropes like you did Buchanan”: that would allow me to use my counterpunch effectively.
At the start of round one, Leonard came out flat-footed, thinking he could fight and trade punches with me, but he quickly realized I was too much for him. Arcel wanted me to start slow, go five tough rounds, and then wear Leonard down, because he thought a longer fight would be in my favor. There was a lot of feinting in those early rounds, each of us trying to feel the other out. At the same time, I was aggressive, charging him, because that’s what had always worked for me—I came to fight, not dance around—and it worked now: I hurt him with a left hook in the second round that staggered him. I got him against the ropes and he held on to save himself, and the crowd went wild—the American Idol already rocking, and I’d only just started on him. I tagged him with a couple more shots and he kept holding on until the end of the round, which suited me fine since I could concentrate on fighting inside him and wearing him down.
“Did Leonard and Dundee make a mistake?” one of the commentators asked Ferdie Pacheco.
“They made only one mistake,” Pacheco said. “They signed this fight.”
I came back in the third and pounded Leonard hard inside against the ropes. “He’s taking some body shots that are going to kill him later on,” said Pacheco. In the fourth round, another right drove him back against the ropes, followed by more holding by Leonard. At the end of that round, the commentators asked the former welterweight champion Wilfred Benítez who was going to win. “Durán’s not going to win,” Benítez said. “Leonard is going to knock him out in the next two rounds. It’s an even fight.”
Leonard’s wife didn’t see it that way. She was crying at the end of the round.
I kept leaning on Leonard, pounding him. I cut his right eye, I frustrated him. When I went back to my corner, Arcel screamed at me: “Keep him up against the ropes.” As the fight went on, I could hear people screaming, “Arriba, Cholo!” I had him—I knew it. Into the eighth round and it was more of the same. By then, Leonard’s wife had fainted, which was not surprising since her husband was having the crap beaten out of him.
“What Sugar Ray has taken to the body should have caved in a heavyweight,” Pacheco said in the eleventh, and then it was into a wild twelfth round, with both of us trading shots. When the bell rang, I sat down in my corner and told Arcel, “I know I’ve won. I know I’ve won.”
“But Cholo, you’ve got to fight two more rounds!”
“Okay, pops. Okay.”
Before the start of the next round, I got up from my stool and waved at Leonard to come get some more punishment. By the fifteenth, he didn’t want any more. As we touched gloves, I said, “Fuck you!” and then continued punishing him and playing with him while dodging his punches. In the final second, I tapped my right glove on my chin, mocking him, because he knew as well as I did that the fight was mine.
It took a while for the decision to be announced, and it was a majority: 145–144, 146–144, with the judge from Italy calling a 147–147 draw. I had won the WBC world welterweight title. I jumped up and down, up and down, i
n jubilation. Pacheco had come in the ring to interview me. “I knew I’d beat him,” I told him. “I was more of a man than him. I can take more punches than he can. I’m a better boxer. He never hurt me—he hit me hard, but he never hurt me. I am very strong.”
I called Leonard a maricón again, grabbed my crotch in front of Benítez and called him a huevón, dickhead. He was buddies with Leonard, and I’d gotten it into my mind that he’d been spying on me during training and reporting back to Leonard, though I could never prove it. At the post-fight press conference, he’d call me out: “Roberto! Roberto!” he was shouting. “I want you!” Another payaso—I’d get to him later. But right now I didn’t care: back in the dressing room, people were all over me, screaming, “Manos de Piedra! . . . Manos de Piedra!” Don King gave me a $1,000 cash bonus, as usual. I’d just beaten Leonard, and Benítez would have to wait his turn.
Leonard walked away with a lot more money, but a lot more pain. He said fighting me was as close to death as a man could come, that he had never felt so much pain from so many punches. His teeth had been hit so hard, he had to push them back into place at the end of each round. A doctor had to go into his dressing room afterward and drain blood from his ears with a hypodermic needle so he wouldn’t get cauliflower ears. He said he was thinking about retiring, he didn’t need this kind of crap. Maybe Frazier was right. I didn’t know who this guy Charles Manson was, but it seemed we both had a passion for inflicting pain.
I won because I made Leonard fight my fight. He was forced to box flat-footed, and that way, I made him take big punches. He thought he was showing a lot of courage by taking so many. Maybe, but mostly what he was showing was a way to lose. “You never fight to a guy’s strength,” said Angelo Dundee. “You try to offset it and Ray didn’t. He tried to outstrong the guy. Durán was being Durán, and Ray was going with him.” Dundee was right. I was the superior fighter, physically and mentally. Now the whole world knew that Cholo was champion of the world.
I Am Duran Page 9
