In the end, I lost a unanimous decision, even though in the eleventh I had cut Leonard with a hard shot to his left eye that drew blood. Two of the judges scored it a ten-point margin for Leonard. The other scored it a five-point margin, which meant that Leonard retained his World Boxing Council middleweight title (160 pounds).
Afterward, Leonard was gracious, saying he was fighting a man who was thirty-eight years old. “He is a veteran, however, and he did come to fight.” The punch stats said that he threw 150 fewer punches—438 to 588—but he connected on a lot more—227 to 84. Many of the 16,305 fans there that night were booing at the finish, and they didn’t think it was a good fight. Neither did some of the writers. One of them called it a “slow, passionless waltz . . . Leonard’s few flashes of brilliance were enough to earn a decision over Durán, who seemed almost indifferent.” I was not indifferent. I just wasn’t the same fighter; I didn’t have that fire.
“He didn’t win that fight,” I said in the press conference. “Look at his face. He is going to remember me a long time.” A lot of people agreed with me. “Blood leaked from a wide gash on his left eyelid,” Pat Putnam wrote in Sports Illustrated. “Both lips were bloody from two cuts inside his mouth. More blood seeped from a cut on his right eyebrow. Except for the happiness spilling from his bright brown eyes, he had the look of a guy who had just been mugged in a saloon parking lot.”
I had bigger problems to deal with that night. Whatever bullshit story I was given, I still don’t know the truth about what happened. All I know is, at the end of the fight, for which my purse was $7.1 million, I got $2 to $3 million, and the rest went to the IRS. It was either that or go to prison. But now I was clear of the debt and could get on with the rest of my life.
That wasn’t all. After the fight, the Tropicana Hotel, where we were staying, called de Cubas to say there was a problem: “A couple of guys were arrested, because there was blood in the bathtub. It looks like they killed somebody.”
“No comas mierda,” said de Cubas. That’s bullshit. “That was from the chickens they killed for Santería to try and help Durán.” It was a typical Santería tradition—offering a sacrifice to the gods in return for their help.
Back in Panama, my homecoming was pretty low-key, both because of the result of the fight and because people had more serious things on their minds, like whether we were going to get invaded. I got back in time for our daughter Jovanna’s quinceañera—a tradition in Latin cultures of celebrating a girl’s fifteenth birthday to signal her transition to adulthood. Jovanna’s birthday was on December 10, but we celebrated it six days later. Fula prepared everything in Miami, including photos and centerpieces, as well as shoes and earrings for Jovanna and the dresses for the other girls, which Fula’s aunt then altered. We brought in a chef from Miami, and he went to the Marriott Convention Center in Panama to prepare the food for eight hundred guests. I may have lost to Leonard, but I still knew how to have a good time! To this day, Jovanna’s friends say it was the best quinceañera ever in Panama.
And then, on December 20, the United States invaded. I was in El Chorrillo at the time, in my car with about $3,000 on me, as I watched the American army trucks roll through, looking for General Noriega. But because I didn’t pay much attention to the news, I hadn’t heard we were being invaded, so I just kept driving to meet up with the friends I was going drinking with. When I got to the bar, it was empty. I went outside and there were all sorts of lights in the sky—blue, red, white. Everyone was screaming, “Invasion!”
The next day, we stayed together in front of the TV and watched the biggest disgrace in the history of our country, going on day and night. Hundreds of people were left dead, homes looted. Officials would later say 10,000 people were left homeless after the invasion, which ended with Noriega being captured and extradited to the United States. But for me the greatest sadness was what happened to my barrio in El Chorrillo. The area suffered a lot of damage. City blocks were burned down by the American troops to cut off possible escape routes for Panamanian soldiers.
But our problems were minor compared to many others’. A lot of Jovanna’s friends had come over from the United States for her party, and now they couldn’t leave. Stores were robbed and the streets turned into no-go areas. Even at home, we weren’t untouched: we couldn’t find a record of the money that Jovanna had been given as gifts, and it’s likely some of it was stolen in the chaos.
With our TV and radio on all the time, I got more and more paranoid about what was going to happen to the country. I got so worried about the financial situation that I went to the bank where I had all my money and took out $275,000. I put it in a suitcase to take to Miami. As soon as the travel restrictions were lifted, I checked the suitcase in at the airport, but when I landed in Miami it was gone. I never found it, and to this day, I don’t know if one of the manzanillos had something to do with it or whether the airline made a mistake. I still had some money in the bank, though, and as soon as we could, we moved out of Panama and made our home in Miami. I took some more cash out, but this time I hid it under the bed for party money. The rest went pretty quickly on a new house and new car to give the kids some stability.
While I hadn’t been around much for the kids, I had always been strict with them. Now that we were in Miami, I spent much more time with them, which allowed me to keep a closer eye on what they were up to and make sure they behaved themselves. “He’s Chavo’s friend,” Jovanna and Irichelle would say when they were trying to sneak a boyfriend into the house, but I wasn’t stupid. All I had to do was give them “the look”—the one I gave my opponents in the ring, which was pretty intimidating—and they knew they couldn’t fool me.
By their second year in high school, the girls were asking to go to discos. “You have to be back in by one a.m.,” I’d tell them. “One minute late and there’ll be a problem.” Sometimes they’d get back a little late, maybe one-fifteen, and they’d take their shoes off and try to sneak in quietly through the garage. But I’d be waiting for them, sitting inside, and I’d shine a flashlight on them: “When did I tell you to be back by? You’re grounded for a month, and when you do go out again, I want you to call me every hour.”
“Every hour?” they’d ask in horror.
“Yes.”
I didn’t mind them having boyfriends, but if those boys stepped out of line with my girls, I threatened to kill their entire families. I think they understood what I was saying; we didn’t have a lot of problems after talks like that.
I’d tried to keep the girls in private school, but when the money got tight, we had to send them to public schools. We were still the Duráns, though, and people gawked and stared—who else had kids who showed up for school in a limo with a bar inside! The kids were so embarrassed, they used to ask our driver to drop them off in an alley near the school.
It was the same limousine I had to drive me to the nightclubs in Miami: I’d pick up my friends—I’d even go dressed in tennis shorts—and we’d fill the bar with whiskey and champagne and do the rounds of clubs, like Papa Grande on Coral Way and Douglas Road, Honey for the Bears on Southwest 27th Avenue, Mystique in Southwest Dade County, and the club at the Days Inn on Le Jeune. Although it was mostly about drinking and women, sometimes I’d get up onstage and sing and play drums. At the end of the night we’d bring some girls back to the limo and I’d tell the doorman, “Don’t let anyone near the car,” and you can imagine what would happen next. It was one hell of a party. I was the king of Miami.
While things were still kicking off in Panama, more and more of my friends were moving to Miami, which meant I could revive the idea of the salsa band. I got a temporary group together—Los Tres Robertos, The Three Roberts—and we played some clubs in South Florida, including the Club Tropigala at the Fontainebleau Hotel. It was a fun way to make some money again. The other two Robertos—Roberto Ledesma and Roberto Torres—were international stars, Latin singers who had fans, rec
ords, and reputations. But audiences loved to see me, too—I’d go on last, with the band playing the theme from Rocky and four showgirls wearing big headdresses following me onstage. I’d wear a white robe, which I’d eventually take off, and I’d shout out to the crowd, “Let’s go dancing!” as the music kicked in.
We’d kept on the house in Cangrejo, Panama, but it was getting harder to maintain both places, especially with Fula’s brother always calling her to say he needed money for this and money for that. She’d send it to him, but it got to the point where we couldn’t pay the bills, and it was no surprise when we lost the house in Miami and had to move to a hotel on 72nd Avenue until I could find somewhere for us to rent. It was the same old story: I was running short on cash but still insisted on showing people a good time. Fula was still going to the casinos. The spending had stayed the same, but our income was steadily decreasing. I knew of only one solution and that was to get back into action.
De Cubas and Acri finally set me up with a fight on the Mike Tyson–Razor Ruddock undercard at the Mirage against Pat Lawlor. I was to be paid $250,000, and we set up camp at Caron’s gym. One day, de Cubas said, “Let’s go see Mickey Rourke.” I knew him as the actor who thought he was a boxer; now Rourke had split up from his wife and was sleeping at the gym, and of course he wanted to spar against me. I didn’t warm up properly and messed up my left shoulder sparring with him. But I also picked up this strange fever I couldn’t shake off. I thought they were going to suspend the fight, but it turned out I wasn’t the only one with money problems: one of my handlers was in the shit as well—he’d signed off on a dry-cleaning business in New York and had bought somewhere between ten and fifteen laundry machines he was going to have to pay for after the fight. “You’ve got to fight,” he told me. “I’m not going to lose that money.” Part of me couldn’t believe this was what my boxing career had come to: getting into the ring to pay for some dry-cleaning machines.
Pat Lawlor should have been an easy fight—I was an eight-to-one favorite—but I went into it with a fever and my left shoulder was shot, which meant I had to abandon my fight plan, and I lost by TKO in the sixth round when I couldn’t continue. The doctor said I also tore my biceps near my left shoulder. Even though I had only one arm, I thought I could still fight. Some boxing people called it another No más, but that was bullshit. Lawlor didn’t beat me at my best. I vowed everyone would see what happened when I was healthy and fought him in Panama.
It took a while for the injury to my left shoulder—my rotator cuff—to heal, so I wasn’t able to fight for eighteen months. Eventually, de Cubas and Acri got me involved with promotions for USA Network, which was starting to carry fights on Tuesday nights, many staged at the casino in Bay City, Mississippi. I wasn’t getting a lot—between $50,000 and $75,000, minus expenses and manager’s fees—but I did three fights there, starting with Jacques LeBlanc in June 1993, which took me into my third decade in the boxing ring.
American boxing writers were no longer calling me Hands of Stone: they were mocking me now, calling me “Belly of Jelly.” That might have been started by LeBlanc himself as part of the pre-match promotion, but he was too much of a coward to admit it. “He has little respect for the master,” I said. “Since he’s been saying things, he’s going to pay.” I was in good shape for that fight and won by a unanimous ten-round decision.
I had a good time there with all those cowboys and rednecks. The fights would sell out every time, with about 5,000 people at the arena, and I used to ham it up for them by wearing a Confederate flag into the ring. But I wasn’t happy about the money—one night, as they were paying the fighters in the casino office, I remember shouting, “Ladrones!”—Thieves!—at de Cubas and Acri, but we always worked it out in the end.
They were trying to bring me back and get me paid big money again, but they didn’t want to take any risks, so they were picking opponents for me who just stood in front of me, guys I couldn’t miss. During that time, I may not have been in the top four or five in my weight class, but I was still competitive enough, and I could still fight, even though I knew I was now on the way down and the days of being able to bust my ass to make weight in a championship fight were over.
On December 14, 1993, I fought Tony Menefee in what would be the hundredth fight of my career. At forty-two, I was fighting a guy half my age, who was mostly a club fighter who made a couple of hundred dollars when he fought. I was old enough to be his father and that was pretty depressing. Even I hadn’t thought I would be boxing at this age.
I almost pulled out because I didn’t feel good, and delayed leaving for Mississippi until two weeks before the fight, which meant the change of weather hurt me. I caught a cold and had a temperature of 102 the day before, but I decided to fight since the people at Casino Magic and in Mississippi had been good to me. Besides, it had already been pushed from November to December because I’d had a knuckle injury, so it would have been very difficult to reschedule.
Menefee thought he could beat me because I was old, but what I’d lost in speed I made up for in experience, and there was no way his style of run-and-clutch was going to work on me. By the time we touched gloves, I could see he was afraid of this old man. What he hadn’t realized until too late was that people like me who had nothing to lose, who just wanted to survive, were the hardest to beat. After what I’d been through, I’d rather die in the ring than get beat. And you don’t know what that experience is until you’ve been there yourself. No one can teach it to you, you can’t train for it, but after your fists, it’s your most powerful weapon in the ring.
I won by TKO in the eighth round. I’d hurt him with two rights, and then I gave him another flurry and he had to take a standing eight count. I was the one who stopped the fight, basically: I didn’t want to hurt the guy any more—he was a young fighter—so I looked at the referee. The fans booed, but it was the right decision. “If I hadn’t stopped, I would have killed him,” I said afterward. It was my ninety-first victory and my sixty-third knockout. I told people I felt like a young kid again.
• • •
IN 1993, it was finally safe to return to Panama—though it took years for the country to recover fully from the mess the U.S. invasion left behind—so we went back to Cangrejo. It was supposed to be a nice homecoming, but it turned into a nightmare. The house was deserted and empty. My brother-in-law, who’d been staying there while we were in Miami, had sold everything. The bills hadn’t been paid, there was no furniture, no electricity, and no water. He’d been using the money I sent him—money that was supposed to help take care of things in Panama—to gamble, and the minute he heard we were on our way back, he disappeared. It turned out he’d even sold off my championship belts and my guns. I was in such a rage over what he’d done that my kids were scared I was going to kill him. I managed to control my emotions in front of them, but I wanted revenge. All we could do, however, was file a police report and in the meantime try to get our lives back together. The kids had to take showers at their friends’ houses, since we didn’t have hot water for months. We were a proud family and we tried to keep all of this to ourselves, but they were really hard times.
I began to think about doing things outside boxing. I announced I was going to run for the Senate in Panama—it was my mother’s idea, a way of getting me out of the ring once and for all. I knew the people, she kept telling me; I knew what it was like to be poor, and the people needed someone like me. I shouldn’t have listened to her or let my friends talk me into running. But I’d made a promise to my mother and I wouldn’t break my word. So I decided to run in the May 1994 election to represent El Chorrillo.
I also made a promise to myself: I vowed to win my sixth world title. After beating Menefee, I signed up for my first fight in Europe, in the South of France, against Carlos Montero in Marseille.
I was busier than ever, going back and forth between Miami and Panama, as I tried to get my political career going. My d
aughter Jovanna had wanted to go back to Miami because she’d had a boyfriend in high school there; somehow, we managed to scrape enough money together to rent an apartment in Miami Lakes and she stayed there with me.
We set up camp at the DiLido Hotel in Miami Beach. I liked to go running along the beach, and one day this guy came up to me, yelling, “Give me your money! Give me your money!”
“I haven’t got any money.”
He came after me and threw sand in my eyes. I covered up, waited for him to get close, and—bam!—I dropped him. But when I hit him, the callus I had on my right hand from training opened up and started bleeding. The guy must have been on drugs, because he got up right away as if he wasn’t hurt. Chucha la madre! “You want to box?” he’s screaming. “You want to box?” He starts moving like he’s shadowboxing. So I hit him again. He goes down. He throws sand in my eyes again—bam! I ran back to the hotel and stayed in my room. I could see from my window he was coming back with a bunch of guys.
In France I found a doctor to sew up my hand so I was able to fight, and I beat Montero in a ten-round decision for my sixth consecutive victory. Then I made it seven in a row by beating Terry Thomas back at Casino Magic in March 1994. I was climbing the mountain again.
TEN
PAZ AND MACHO TIME
THE LEGEND VERSUS THE COMEBACK KID, they were calling it. I was going to fight Vinny Pazienza in Atlantic City for the International Boxing Council super-middleweight title on June 25, 1994, at the Las Vegas MGM Grand. It was a good payday, too: $500,000.
Pazienza had disrespected me, calling me ugly, no better than a dog. “He can’t speak good English,” he said at a press conference, “but I bet you he can box like a German shepherd.” He threatened de Cubas. He disrespected my country and called me a coward and a quitter. “Who else has he fought besides Leonard?” he asked the reporters. “Guys like Kirkland Laing. Please.” My team thought he was juiced up. He certainly looked all bloated, and he hung out with muscleheads. I just smiled and reminded reporters that in 1991 he’d broken his neck in a car accident: “I’m going to break his neck again.”
I Am Duran Page 17
