I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  “No way, I can’t make that.”

  “If you fight him at 154 and beat him,” Arum told me, “I promise I can get you a world title fight with Marvin Hagler.”

  “Well, if that’s the case,” I said, “fine.”

  Arum put the fight on in the Sports Arena in Los Angeles and we sold it out, and the closed-circuit venues, too. Arum called it “Super Sábado”—Super Saturday—because the Super Bowl that the gringos love so much was being played the next day. Ahead of the fight, I made a big deal about my Mexican heritage, which appealed to the local crowds, who loved a good fight.

  I kept hearing how Cuevas was going to kill me, that I had nothing for him. “He’s going to knock you out. He’s going to retire you.”

  I laughed. “I am going to knock him out and turn him into a salad so you can eat him.”

  Ray Arcel didn’t have much faith in me, either—he’d even posted some advice for me in The New York Times, though I didn’t see it at the time: “Life is like a book. There is a beginning, there is a middle and there has to be an end to the story. And so must a career come to an end. I hope you will see fit to end your career.” The night of the fight, he was in Los Angeles, but he wouldn’t be at ringside because he was being inducted by the Maccabi World Union into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

  As always, my family came to support me. Fula was very well dressed and would have looked great at ringside, but as usual, once the bell rang she disappeared into the dressing room.

  The good thing is, I punished Cuevas. The first two rounds were even, but then I started getting to him with a couple of good lefts. We were both going hard at each other, and it felt good to have my power back. It was going to be a war, and I don’t lose wars. At the beginning of the fourth, I hit him with a solid right, and that was the beginning of the end for him. I started pounding him against the ropes and he went down. He survived, but I got him against the ropes again and kept punishing him. He tried to hold and hang on, fouling me, landing low punches. But—boom!—I took him down again.

  He got up in time, but his corner stopped the fight, which was good for them. All I was going to do was punish him some more. The Mexicans wanted to lynch me, so I stood in the center of the ring and raised my hand as a show of respect and they started to applaud me.

  I was jumping up and down for joy—I’d trained well and was ready to go fifteen rounds with Pipino. “This is for my people in Miami!” I told the ring announcer. “I told them I would be champion again!”

  Back in the dressing room, I found Fula had locked herself in the bathroom because she was so worried I’d been hurt. When I got into the limousine with Spada, I burst into tears. “I’ve got it again! I am a hero in Panama again. I can be world champion again.”

  That opportunity would come with my next fight.

  SEVEN

  “NO MOORE”

  THAT NIGHT I FOUGHT CUEVAS, I wasn’t thinking much about a guy named Davey Moore. Why should I? Right then, he was not important to me. But after I beat Cuevas, the situation changed. Moore was a junior middleweight champion in the World Boxing Association, so he had something I wanted: a championship belt. It made sense that we should fight.

  The negotiations began with José Sulaimán, president of the World Boxing Council. He loved me so much, he wanted to help me, even though the fight involved another sanctioning body, so he talked to Moore. “If you want to be as great as he is,” he said, “you have to fight him and beat him. Then everyone will love you and respect you.”

  “Who is it?” Moore asked.

  “Roberto Durán.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Originally, Arum scheduled the fight for Sun City, Bophuthatswana, in South Africa, as a championship double-header, with WBA lightweight champion Ray Mancini fighting Kenny Bogner. There was a Frank Sinatra concert scheduled for after the fights, too, so Bob Arum decided to call the show “The Chairman and the Champs.” But two weeks before the fight, Mancini broke his collarbone and had to pull out; Sinatra was doing the show only because he was a big Mancini fan, so he pulled out, too, which was a shame: that would have been a night to remember. So Arum moved the show to Madison Square Garden.

  In the meantime, I went to Washington, D.C., for Bob Hope’s eightieth-birthday party at the Kennedy Center, which they were filming for his TV show. The idea had been for “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler to appear on it with Leonard in a pretend fight, with Howard Cosell as the referee. But the day before, Leonard was taken to the hospital with appendicitis, so the TV people had called Arum and asked if they could get Ray Mancini.

  “Are you crazy?” said Arum. “Mancini is so much smaller!”

  “Well, can you get someone?”

  That’s when Arum thought of me. I was training in New Jersey, so he put me on a plane to Washington. But Cosell didn’t like the idea. “Fuck it,” he told the TV people. “I’m not doing it for that quitter.” Finally, they convinced him to go through with it. So I found myself in the dressing room, looking at Hagler. “He’s not so big,” I told Arum and Spada. “Beat Moore, then him next.”

  The show was great, and there were a lot of famous people there, including President Ronald Reagan, Lucille Ball, George Burns—and Cosell. One of my buddies had brought a skip rope along, so after the show I started jumping rope, and the crowd went wild.

  I did meet Frank Sinatra later, at a press conference in Las Vegas. I gave him an autographed glove, and so did Davey Moore. Sinatra told his people that the next time I fought there, he wanted to fix it for me to stay in his penthouse at the hotel. For the first time since the Leonard fight, I felt people were accepting me. If Frank Sinatra was taking me seriously—even wanting me to stay at his penthouse—then everyone else was going to have to as well.

  Then Dean Martin dropped by and invited me over to the Sands. He had all this liquor—“Take whatever you want,” he said. I think he knew I liked to have a good time and was trying to get me drunk, but I was wiser now and managed to play along with him without touching the booze.

  The next morning, someone at the hotel told me he had two bottles of Frank Sinatra’s favorite wine for me to take back to Panama. Great, I thought—each bottle was worth $1,000—but I’ll save them for the celebrations after I’ve beaten Moore. It was a nice gesture, though, and showed that these guys understood I was still a legend even after all the mistakes I’d made.

  Before we met in Vegas, I didn’t know much about Davey Moore. But he was strong, heavily built, and cocky as hell. He’d started to fight professionally in 1980 and won all of his first eight fights before knocking out Tadashi Mihara in the sixth round in Tokyo for the junior middleweight title. He fought well, and maybe he thought that gave him good reason to be cocky. He thought he had the advantage and behaved as if he had already won the fight. He said he’d watched my fight with Batten in Miami but left after the third round, he was so unimpressed. “Durán was a great lightweight, a good welterweight, and a mediocre junior middleweight,” he told reporters. “There’s a big difference fighting people at 135 pounds and fighting them at 154. Not only can’t he be as physical, he’s a lot older now and he’s not as strong. I don’t think it will be all that tough a fight. He passed his peak a long time ago and I’m still getting close to reaching mine.”

  From then on, I just saw him as another fighter I was going to punish for being wrong. Forget about those last few fights before Cuevas—I wasn’t the same person; even Arum could see that now. I’d worked hard for the Cuevas fight, and I was working even harder for this one. I was taking everything seriously.

  Moore was the five-to-one favorite, but his opponents had been nothing compared to what he was up against now. He’d be fighting Durán in New York. I knew from my work in the training camp that I hadn’t lost my punching power. As for getting down to the right weight, previously I’d tried to do it too quickly, which had left me weak. This time, my w
eight had been down around the right level for a while, and I felt very, very strong. This was what I had been like back in the very beginning. I was going to be in the form of my life. I knew right from the start I would beat him.

  “I can’t find words to express how I failed in the past,” I told reporters before the fight. “There are no excuses. Once, I thought I was a man; now I am a man and I know it. In truth, I have such enthusiasm, like it was the first time I came to New York to fight for the title and the people were with me all the time. I’ve prepared very hard for this. I’m the old lion. I don’t fight for the money. I want to show myself that I’m a champion. I do this in search of glory.” They loved that—it gave the fight something more than just pitching two men against each other. It was about sealing my place in history.

  Even though Davey Moore was a New Yorker, tickets sold slowly at first—because of the Leonard fight, fans still looked on me as a disgraced fighter. Arum met up with a Cuban friend of his who ran a Spanish-language radio station: “How the fuck,” he asked, “am I going to sell this fight?”

  “Don’t waste your money with the American media,” the Cuban replied. “Just advertise with the Latin media.”

  But there was some drama beforehand. I had a friend, Chema Toral, who came to all my fights. I used to give him some of the really expensive tickets, ones that cost $3,000 to $5,000 on the market—two or three for each fight—and he’d come over to my hotel and pick them up so he could take a few friends.

  “Eleta wants to come to the fight,” he said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want him here. Don’t even mention his name.”

  “But . . . but . . . Let me talk to Mr. Spada.”

  “We don’t want him,” Spada told him. “We don’t even want to see him.”

  And that’s how it was. I’d known Eleta for nearly fifteen years, but when things got rough, he dumped me, and I never did business with him again.

  And then, before we knew it, it was fight night. My son Chavo stayed with me at ringside, but my brother Pototo went back to the dressing room with Fula, praying that everything would go all right. It was the first time he’d been too nervous to watch, although I tried to reassure him that this time I was in control. He didn’t believe me and told me he couldn’t work my corner. He paced up and down the dressing room, turning the TVs off so he couldn’t watch, which was too bad, because he would not have been disappointed.

  It turned out that in Panama people were starting to believe in me again: the government closed schools and offices early that day so everyone could watch the fight live on television. I was going to put my name back on the map, and I loved every minute of it. For the first time in a long time, I was enjoying boxing. The date worked out perfectly, too: June 16, 1983—my thirty-second birthday.

  The Spanish-language radio station guy had been right. It was a sellout, the first for a fight at Madison Square Garden since Ali–Frazier in 1974, and the gate receipts broke all records for the Garden at the time. There were more than 20,000 people there, and I felt they were all supporting me. Sixteen former and current champions were presented in the ring, including Leonard and Hagler, my idol Ismael Laguna, Jake LaMotta, Ray Mancini, Rocky Graziano, Carmen Basilio, Eusebio Pedroza and Gerry Cooney, Bobby Chacon and Floyd Patterson, Vito Antuofermo and José Torres, and Donald Curry. Arum called it “the return of big-time boxing” to the Garden.

  I pounded Moore throughout the fight. I caught his right eye in the first round with a left hook, even though Moore would say it was a thumb. “A lot of thumbs,” he’d say later during the post-fight news conference. “Those thumbs were coming from everywhere.” But that eye was going to give him trouble, and almost six minutes into the fight, it was closed.

  Bam! I kept working him, ripping short blows to the jaw and ribs. He was getting soft and I could feel it. I also felt better than I had in years. Durán was back, I knew it now.

  “It looks like a master against a kid with twelve fights,” said Gil Clancy, one of the commentators at ringside. “He’s taking him apart.”

  In the seventh, things really went from bad to worse for Moore. With sixteen seconds left in the round, I sent him to the floor with a big overhand right to the face. He managed to get up at nine, but he should have stayed down.

  In my excitement, I went to Moore’s stool and had to hurry back to my own corner. Moore should have stayed in his corner, too, but his manager allowed him to continue. He later said that he’d discussed stopping the fight in the previous round, but Moore wanted to go on, and they both hoped he would recover and come out of it.

  There was no way I was going to let that happen. He was done. “Finish him off now!” Plomo screamed at me before the start of the eighth, and that’s exactly what I did. I hit him with a stream of head and body shots and he had nothing in return. I could hear the people screaming for me again—“Doo-ran! Doo-ran!”—a chant I hadn’t heard in a long while. It was my night. I knew it, the crowd knew it; it was just a matter of time. People were calling for the fight to be stopped, including the New York State Athletic Commissioner, José Torres. Later I heard that Moore’s mother and girlfriend had fainted. But the referee, Ernesto Magana, kept things going. “This is disgraceful,” said a TV commentator, Tim Ryan. “I cannot understand or condone this referee’s activity, and Moore’s corner should stop the fight.”

  I hit him with another right, this one flush to the face. I followed it up with a couple of shots to the body, and he was out on his feet. His corner had seen enough and, with fifty-eight seconds left in the round, threw in a bloodied towel. The entire arena felt like it was going to collapse. The crowd went crazy, chanting, “Doo-ran, Doo-ran!” and then singing “Happy Birthday” to me. I got up on the bottom rope and burst into tears.

  Arum had made sure that Hagler attended the fight just in case something special happened—and it did. After I won, he brought Marvin into the ring and held up my arm and Marvin’s to signal that this would be the next big fight.

  But I wanted to celebrate this one first. On that night, I joined an elite group that included Bob Fitzsimmons, Henry Armstrong, Tony Canzoneri, Barney Ross, Alexis Argüello, and Wilfred Benítez as three-division champions. I now had the junior middleweight title in addition to the lightweight and welterweight crowns I once held. I earned only $25,000 for that fight, but I was gold again.

  “I wanted to prove I could still be champion of the world,” I told reporters after the fight. “Not many people believed in me. He didn’t seem to be able to handle the infighting. He wasn’t as strong. I wasn’t thinking this was an easy fight, not as easy as it was.”

  After the fight, we had to go to a TV show in New York for an interview, and that’s when I saw what I had done to Davey Moore. His face was so swollen, it looked like a beach ball. The next time, I told him, “I’ll kill you. You’ll feel better.” There wasn’t much he could say, so he just kept quiet.

  Of course he soon started coming up with excuses for why he’d lost. He said that a few days before the fight he’d had to have two hours of dental surgery to fix two broken teeth. He’d felt bad after the first round, he said—that his balance was off, that he was seeing “three or four” of me. And he also said he’d had a lot of problems because I’d thumbed him in his right eye. It was all excuses. Not that I cared—I was just there to prove people wrong, to show them I could still fight.

  In Panama, everyone went crazy, as you would expect, with cars honking their horns in the streets right through the night—not that anyone was sleeping: they were too busy celebrating. La Estrella de Panamá came out with a banner headline that read “Grandiosa Noche de Redención / Durán Reina Nuevamente.” Grand Night of Redemption / Durán Reigns Again.

  As you can imagine, Roberto Durán wasn’t going to go back to his hotel and read a book. We went in a limo to Victor’s Café, with people yelling at me, “Look
how you hit him!” It was a magical night. I can’t remember much about it, but Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali both turned up. Even my old friend and foe Sugar Ray Leonard showed up to congratulate me and hug me, and told The New York Times, “I’m very glad for him.”

  The next day, there was a news conference in midtown. “I cannot compare this night with any other night,” I told the reporters. “This was an exception. When everybody was thinking I was finished, I am world champion again. After last night, I forget whatever happened in the past. I am thinking of the present and the future. I don’t remember anything. Last night, I was born again.”

  A writer from Sports Illustrated came to see me at my suite at the Sheraton. I was still buzzing, drinking Moët & Chandon with about fifteen of my friends and family. He put on a tape of the fight and I started to get excited again, throwing punches in the air, the same punches that caught Moore in the face the night before. I was just like a bullfighter in the ring, allowing the blows to come close to me but letting them pass—and Moore was the bull. After the tape was finished, I flashed three fingers in the air: “Tres títulos.” Three titles. Only seven boxers had won that many and I was one of them. Chuleta!

  The president of Panama called and arranged to pick us up, and back home there was another parade in my honor. More people turned out for that one than when the Pope came six weeks later—between 300,000 and 400,000. I was back, but it made me laugh that all the people who’d doubted me were back, sucking up to me again. This time, though, I was wiser: I knew that if things went bad again, they’d run. Still, it was party time once more.

  Bob Arum came to visit me in Panama, and over dinner I showed him a huge gold ring I’d been given. “How do you like it?” I asked him.

  “Muy bonito!” Very pretty.

  So I took it off and offered it to him.

  “No, gracias, Roberto,” said Arum—but I like doing things for people. As I’ve always said, when I have money, I like to be generous.