I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  A few years later, I got a cameo role in the movie Harlem Nights, with Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. I said to Pryor’s character, “You wanna kick he ass?” I wasn’t much of an actor, but these little parts were well paid and good fun.

  I also went back to driving my fast cars and flying my microlights. I’d seen these planes up in the sky and said to myself, “Chuleta. I have to learn how to fly.”

  One Sunday after I’d gotten my license, I went up in my microlight and forgot to maintain the proper speed once I got to altitude. I was going too fast and quickly losing control, and before I knew it, I was heading toward the Puente de las Américas. The higher I flew, the more scared I became, and I forgot all the things my instructor had told me—all I could think about was that I was going to crash badly. I changed direction and headed toward the sea, thinking it was safer to ditch in the water than get wrapped around a tree. I was still coming in too fast, and when the aircraft hit the water, there was a huge bang and then everything went dark and blurry. I was trapped in the cockpit, and the whole time the plane was sinking. I asked God for help. I lashed out and—bam!—was able to free myself, bob up to the surface, and start swimming. A fishing boat dragged me on board, but the tail of the plane slipped out of our hands and we lost it. When I explained to Fula what had happened, she said it had been a crazy idea for me to learn to fly, and showing up soaking wet after crashing didn’t convince her otherwise.

  Needless to say, enjoying myself like this, I was going through huge amounts of money. One of my friends told a reporter I was spending $8,000 a week. I never kept count, but it wouldn’t surprise me—we were too busy having a good time! With the band, the flying, and the family, I didn’t think about boxing ever—didn’t even watch it. I didn’t fight at all in 1985—didn’t even bother watching Hagler destroy Hearns in Las Vegas in April.

  Soon enough, the money started running out, but mostly I was getting bored and restless. At the end of 1985 I went back to the gym and started hitting the bags. To start with, it was just to pass the time, but after a while I got back in the ring and started sparring again. I didn’t worry about the weight or speed work, but it was good to feel that I could still move my feet properly, that I could still react when someone went for me.

  One evening I sat down with Fula and told her I wanted to box again. She’d seen it coming, and although she wasn’t happy, she knew it made sense—it would keep me out of the house and stop me from bothering her and it would bring in some money again. Rumors were going around that I was broke, and it was true that times were bad, but I wasn’t penniless. I still had property, six cars, and lots of jewelry, but I would have hated to sell that stuff off—it was the last remnants of my boxing legacy.

  My beloved Excalibur was not one of those cars, though, and giving it up had been the most painful decision of my life. I’d had to sell it at a discount to some guy in Panama. What could I do? I needed plata. Money. The answer was to go back to the only thing I knew—fighting.

  I didn’t make a big announcement about coming out of retirement since I didn’t know how long it would last, and when I finally came back, in January 1986, the competition wasn’t much. I beat two guys in Panama, both by knockout, but nobody seemed impressed, even though one of them, Manuel Zambrano, was the Colombian junior middleweight champion. I dropped him with a left to the jaw in the second round. It felt good to do that in front of 16,000 of my people at the new Panama Gymnasium.

  Bob Arum had promised me that if I won, I’d fight the winner of the John Collins–Robbie Sims middleweight fight, but I was still obsessing about a rematch with Hagler. I even said I was ready to take on anyone in his family—except his parents—to get to him and win another championship.

  Instead, I took on Sims on June 23 in Las Vegas as part of a card called the “Triple Hitter,” which included Barry McGuigan and Hearns defending their titles. I was now 79–6–0, with sixty knockouts. “I’m not washed up,” I told reporters. “I want that fourth title.”

  It didn’t go well against Sims: I lost a split decision. Afterward, I said I wanted to continue fighting, but I had now lost six of my last thirteen fights. And that’s when I connected with Luis de Cubas.

  “Oh, you’re going to be my manager, are you?” I said when we met at Miami Airport. “Give me a hundred dollars, then.” That’s how bad things had gotten.

  De Cubas had arrived in Minneapolis from Cuba in 1966 when he was nine. Now he was living in Miami, working at a bank in Miami Beach and trying to get into boxing promotion with Chris Dundee, Angelo’s brother. He gave me the $100 and put me up in a hotel in Coral Gables, just outside Miami, where he was friends with the owner, and they allowed me to stay there until he could put a fight on for me and pay me.

  The first was at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and de Cubas said I was guaranteed $15,000 and a cut of the gate. I was going to fight José “Pepe” Quiñones, who had just knocked out Doug DeWitt. But three weeks before the fight, Teddy Brenner called de Cubas, saying Quiñones had a rematch clause. That’s when Victor Claudio, a Puerto Rican, came into the picture.

  We filled the Convention Center with the help of Chris Dundee, who was a great promoter—he’d do wrestling shows in Miami every Wednesday night and pack people in with American wrestlers the fans loved, like Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan.

  I beat Claudio by a decision. I took home $15,000, maybe $20,000, but no one picked up the TV rights for the fight.

  Besides a new promoter, I got a new manager as well. Carlos Hibbard was from Panama, an unemployed cabdriver and amateur nutritionist. Like me, he was a street kid and we had a lot in common. We’d originally met in New York, he reminded me, just before I fought Davey Moore, when he’d asked me for my autograph.

  In 1987, Hibbard went to the nightclub in New York where I was playing with Orquesta Felicidad. He took one look at me and must have thought, “You don’t look anything like a boxer.” I weighed 218 pounds then. But he thought he could get me back in shape. “I want to see if you have anything left,” he told me. He said that I still had the reflexes and all I needed to do was adopt the weight-loss program he’d devised. So now we were working together!

  He had to borrow money to get to Miami to be able to do so, but somehow he did it, and he put me on this strange diet that included herbal teas and a tonic made up of ginseng, peppermint, and fermented garlic. It was weird, but that shit worked.

  After I beat Claudio, the next guy up was Juan Carlos Giménez. “Durán, you can beat this guy?” de Cubas asked me. Although he was ranked seventh in the world then, and a big guy, Giménez was very beatable. That’s the kind of fighter de Cubas wanted in front of me. He didn’t have the money to make it happen, but he hooked up with Willy Martinez, who had founded Ivette Promotions. De Cubas also represented the heavyweight José Ribalta, who’d just gone ten rounds with Tyson, so they wanted both of us on the card to fill the seats.

  The Convention Center in Miami wasn’t available, so they took the fight over to the Hyatt downtown, in front of 5,000 people. De Cubas had a tape of Giménez he wanted to show me, and after looking everywhere, he found me partying at a nightclub called Rich and Famous. He managed to drag me out, and we sat down in the manager’s office. I watched the tape for maybe fifteen seconds. “Oh, get me this guy,” I told him right away. “I’ll kill him.”

  The day of the fight, I showed up at the weigh-in in a limousine even though most people had written me off. I’d been having bad headaches, and when the doctor checked me out he found I had high blood pressure, so we had to wait for it to go down before he’d sign off that I was fit to fight. De Cubas was very worried: the fight was sold out. I asked him what he thought of Giménez.

  “Don’t worry, Durán. Juan Carlos is a palomita.” A little dove.

  I got hit hard with a right first round but fought my way out. Giménez thought I was in trouble, but I wasn’t really, although I still had a h
eadache and couldn’t move all that well. But as the fight went on, my headache got better and I was able to think more clearly. I could have knocked him out, but I didn’t dare overdo it. So by the time we got to the fifth round and he was still standing, I looked over at de Cubas and said, “Palomita, eh? Palomita?”

  That fight took more out of me than I was expecting, but I still won easily by a decision: the first round was the only one he won. It was just as well that I did, because Willy Martinez paid me $50,000 for it, which I badly needed to keep the family going.

  De Cubas still needed more cash, so he brought in a business partner, Mike Acri, who was connected to Jeff Levine, another promoter, and we went to New York to make a deal for a fight against Ricky Stackhouse, a rising prospect with a 19–4 record and ten knockouts. Levine gave me my $50,000 in cash in a nylon bag and I signed on the spot.

  I asked de Cubas to take me to this Dominican guy’s place that sold beautiful crocodile-skin shoes, and I walked out with seven pairs, including some with fur lining, just the way I like them. I didn’t tell Fula, since I spent $15,000 to $20,000 that day.

  Years later, Luis Gardini, who owned the shoe shop, fell on hard times and came to me, asking to borrow $30,000 or $40,000 to get himself back on his feet again. I loved his shop so much, I gave him the money without getting anything on paper. “When I get this turned around, Durán, I’ll pay you back,” he said. But I never heard from him again.

  I fought Stackhouse in Atlantic City’s Convention Center and won a ten-round decision, and then I fought a guy named Paul Thorn at the Tropicana Casino, also in Atlantic City, and beat him by TKO in the sixth. I cut him up pretty bad, above both eyes, while his mouth was bleeding all over the place, but he cut me, too, over my left eye, with a head butt, and we ended up having to go to the hospital in an ambulance together.

  I think Thorn was the only fighter to go on to write a song about me. It was called “Hammer and Nail,” and it told the story of our fight, how when we got into the ring my “punches began to rain down” on him. Finally Thorn’s corner called it quits. Why did I knock him out like that? As he wrote in the song, I’d “rather be a hammer than a nail.”

  Yes, I was a hammer, and I needed bigger nails, bigger fights.

  A few months later, in Atlantic City, I met another of the great boxers: Mike Tyson.

  At the time, Tyson was the king of boxing. He’d knocked out Larry Holmes in Atlantic City. He’d crushed Tony Tubbs in Japan. Now, in June 1988, he was fighting Michael Spinks in Atlantic City at the Trump Plaza. De Cubas had taken José Ribalta with him because he was trying to get a rematch with Tyson through Don King, and he was also trying to get tickets for me and Ribalta for the Tyson fight. He’d asked King for a ticket for me, but with the bad blood between us, King said no. Then de Cubas ran into Steve Lott, Tyson’s assistant manager. “Steve, I’m really embarrassed,” he started saying, “but I got Durán coming in for the fight and I don’t have a—”

  “Louie, please,” said Lott. “He’s Mike’s idol. He loves Durán!”

  In his memoir, Tyson said this about me:

  A lot of people assume that [Muhammad] Ali was my favorite boxer. But I have to say it was Roberto Durán. I always looked at Ali as being handsome and articulate. And I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment. When I saw Durán fight, he was just a street guy. He’d say stuff to his opponents like, “Suck my fucking dick, you motherfucker. Next time you’re going to the fucking morgue.” After he beat Sugar Ray Leonard in that first fight, he went over to where Wilfred Benítez was sitting and he said, “Fuck you. You don’t have the heart or the balls to fight me.”

  Man, this guy is me, I thought. That was what I wanted to do. He was not ashamed of being who he was. I related to him as a human being. As my career progressed and people started praising me for being a savage, I knew that being called an animal was the highest praise I could receive from someone. I was sad when Durán quit during the No Más rematch with Leonard. Cus [D’Amato, Tyson’s manager] and I watched that fight in Albany and I was so mad that I cried. But Cus had called it. “He’s not going to do it a second time,” he predicted.

  And Tyson told me that when I fought Davey Moore, he’d snuck into Madison Square Garden, pretending he was me, and up to the gallery. Tyson was just a kid then, only sixteen, a nobody, but he was fanatical about me. Later he told me he spent hours at home shadowboxing, screaming, “Durán! Durán! Durán!” So getting a ticket was not going to be a problem.

  “When I tell him, Mike’s going to be so happy,” Lott told de Cubas. “The only thing is that Mike might want to see him.”

  So we went to the Seacoast Towers to see Tyson, who was staying in the penthouse. He had been sleeping and came out wearing only a Diet Pepsi towel, which he had to do as part of his endorsement deal. He came and gave me a huge hug. He knew I was a badass, and he wanted to be one, too.

  Then he went crazy, dancing around the room, shouting, “Roberto Durán! Roberto Durán! Oh, Roberto! Roberto!” He told me, with de Cubas translating, “I feel like a girl who has fallen in love for the first time.”

  Eventually, he sat down and started talking about my fights; later he’d say that his favorite fight of all time was my first fight with Leonard. He could remember all the details, including the exact dates. “How could Alexis Argüello say he could beat you, when he lost to Ñato Marcel and you beat Ñato Marcel?” He was a real obsessive about the sport, and it was easy to see he was going to be one of the best boxers around.

  Tyson said he felt bad he couldn’t give me tickets for the first row, but he had some for the fourth. He asked if I could come by the dressing room before the fight, and then he asked my advice on what he should do in this fight.

  “Hit him low. He has a left foot a little messed up, so hit him on that side. Mike, you’re a lot stronger, bigger. Jump on him.”

  And then Tyson goes and knocks him out in ninety seconds without breaking into a sweat! Later he told Larry Merchant of HBO that it was me who told him what to do.

  After the fight, we went to the dressing room, and of course there were a ton of celebrities outside, but none of them was allowed in except me. Tyson was standing there in a towel with his then wife, Robin Givens. He was so happy to see me and told de Cubas that if he hadn’t promised his gloves to the Boxing Hall of Fame, he would have wanted to give them to me. “I hit him just like you told me!” he said. “Why don’t you come to the party Don King’s throwing for me?”

  Don King was the last person I wanted to see, but it didn’t matter—there were hundreds of people there. I saw Gregory Hines, the dancer. And sitting on a throne, with a crown on his head and a fancy cane in his hand, Mike Tyson, the undisputed king of boxing. I took some photos with him, drank some champagne—all of which gave me back a taste for life at the top that I’d once enjoyed so much. What I needed was another title.

  Iran Barkley was on the radar—a rising American boxer from Brooklyn who’d just destroyed Thomas Hearns in June in a three-round knockout to win the WBC middleweight title. A Cuban-Lebanese guy, a friend of José Sulaimán, reached out to Barkley to see if we could make the fight. They went to Stan Hoffman, Barkley’s manager, with a tape of my fights and urged him to give me the opportunity to become the only Latin fighter to win four world championships in four different weight classes. I wanted it so much, I could almost taste it. Finally, I got the news: February 24, 1989, in Atlantic City.

  I’m sure they thought I was easy pickings, and an opportunity for Barkley to make a name for himself by picking off a washed-up legend, especially when they saw me at the first press conference, when I weighed 227 pounds, more than I’d ever weighed before. We were going to fight at 160 . . . Here we go again, I thought: seventy pounds to lose in two and a half months. De Cubas told me to get to Miami—“I have everything here for you,” he said. “Gym, sparring partners, whatever you need.”

 
I lived with a couple of friends in an apartment off Biscayne Boulevard. My old friend Wiwa ran with me, cooked for me, too, even bought the groceries. Giovanni, Chaparro, Ramos, and the other manzanillos were there, but they only wanted to party, and I tried to ignore them as much as I could. I trained well for that fight over at Caron’s gym, in a Dominican neighborhood, although de Cubas sent me some monsters as sparring partners and, by the end, the training sessions were more like real fights. One of them got so upset at me hitting him that he quit.

  I went running three times a day in the park next door, wearing army boots. Sometimes I could only manage to run very slowly, but as the days and weeks went by, the weight came off. Right until the day we left for Atlantic City, I kept running with those boots on, and I’d run so much around the park, I’d worn the grass out, leaving a trail behind. I never wanted to set foot in that park again.

  I cried, I was so mad. People were saying the New Jersey Boxing Commission was crazy for letting me fight Barkley. He was nine years younger than me and much bigger—six-one, whereas I was only five-seven—and he had a 25–4 record, with sixteen knockouts. Growing up in New York, he’d been in a street gang, so I guess everyone thought he was tough shit, someone who could impose his will on me. Fuck that. Not me. So many people were against me, on the radio and in the newspapers, and most of them were Panamanian. I prayed while I ran in the morning for God to give me the strength to shut those people up.

  It was crazy back in Panama, too. “Don’t let your father fight,” people would say to Robin, who was now eight. “He’s going to get himself killed.” His schoolteachers gave him letters for me that went, “Durán, you have a family. You live for your kids. Don’t leave those kids orphans.” The newspapers picked up on it and word got out pretty quickly. “He’s past his prime. He’s an old guy.” Even those in my corner had doubts. “You have to box him,” de Cubas kept telling me. “You can’t stand toe to toe with him. He hits too hard. He’s too strong.”