I Am Duran

by Roberto Duran

  Plomo drew up a daily schedule of road and bag work, and then we’d finish with eight rounds of sparring. He was tough on this old man! The gym was located in San Miguelito, in Panama City, and it was hot and shabby, just like in the old days. But I wasn’t a kid anymore: I knew that. Two weeks before the fight, I was already down to the 168-pound limit.

  The fight was at the arena that had been named after me, and on that night it was packed. They brought me in on a crane, and as I looked down on the crowd I could see all my family—my wife, my sons, my daughters, cousins, friends . . . It felt like I was flying.

  And then, as the dry ice was turned on, they played “Patria,” the famous Rubén Blades song. “Patria son tantas cosas bellas,” it reminds us, “patria is so many beautiful things.” As the song says, our homeland is everything in the soul of our people and the cries of our martyrs; it is not the “lessons of dictatorships or imprisonments” or oppression.

  For Panamanians, this song touches the heart: it stands for so much, especially after all the shit we’d been through in the last few years. As I looked down I could see sons and fathers and grandsons hugging one another—all the generations here together, crying and celebrating my name and my legacy. That’s what boxing means to these people: it’s powerful enough to bring everyone in the nation together even when everything else in their lives is falling apart.

  I beat Lawlor by a unanimous twelve-round decision and I was a world champion again. I had done it—on my forty-ninth birthday, in my own country, and with all my people around me. It was a magical moment.

  There was so much emotion among the people in the arena—such a release—that things got out of hand. The chaos got so bad, the police had to come and fire tear gas to control the crowd. It didn’t faze me, but it wasn’t what I wanted at all to mark such a special victory.

  Afterward, Robin went off to college in Miami, before coming back to study in Panama. He did everything his way—independently. I had no idea at the time, but to pay for his tuition he did the shittiest jobs going. It was only years later that he told me he didn’t want to be a twenty-one-year-old kid asking his father for money to go out with a girl. He didn’t want to live off the Durán name. He still gets pissed off when people say my family takes advantage of my name. They don’t know us. Yes, having a last name like Durán helps you a lot, don’t get me wrong. But all it does is open a door; it’s up to you to keep it open and walk through. If you suck at your job, they’re going to fire your ass—doesn’t matter if you’re a Durán or not.

  Now that the kids were grown up, it wasn’t just my cornermen who asked why I kept on fighting, even though I was nearly fifty. “Why’s your dad fighting again?” Robin’s friends would ask him. He’d ask me himself: “Why? Why? Why are you doing it again?”

  “I’ve got to,” I told him. “I’m not done. I can beat all these kids.”

  Fula never asked me to stop fighting, even though as I came to the end of my career and she saw how much I was struggling to make weight, she got more and more scared. She knew that whatever she said, I was going to keep fighting, whether she liked it or not, and that I needed her to support me. She understood—she always has. Even when I was suffering and sweating, this was my life and my choice. My legacy wouldn’t be damaged if I lost a few fights when I was past my prime. All those pelaos who fought me wished they had half the career I’d had, and a fraction of the titles, and when they stepped into the ring with me, they were nervous and respectful. They were fighting Roberto Durán, and there was only one fighter who could beat Durán and that was Durán himself.

  A friend of mine, Félix Piñango, once compared me to Barabbas the gladiator: a man who’s earned his freedom from the ring and been offered all the good things in life but spurns them. He wants to die in the arena. That, said Félix, was me.

  No, it isn’t. I never wanted to die in the ring. But why wouldn’t I want wealth and luxury? Why the hell not? Yes, I fought for pride, and because I thought no man could ever beat me, but I loved the money. I gave it away because I never forgot that I was a pelao from El Chorrillo and that there are many, many people from El Chorrillo who never made a tiny bit of the money I made.

  But there has to be an end: it happens to all the great fighters. For me, it finally came on July 14, 2001, when I fought Héctor Camacho again, this time in defense of my NBA super-middleweight title. I didn’t know it would be my last fight, but I did know that Plomo and I were nearing the end of the road. We spent the time away from the gym doing what we had done since I was a pelao—playing dominoes, playing chess. “We started this together,” I told him, “and we’re finishing it together.”

  The fight with Camacho was going to be in Denver, Colorado, and we went to South Beach, Florida, for our training camp. I was happy to have Robin back and by my side, although he was doing his schoolwork at the same time. He wasn’t sleeping well, had no life of his own, but I could see he was happy taking care of me. He was doing a good thing for his father.

  Robin told me that we should be going to Denver at least a month before the fight so I could get acclimatized to the altitude there. “He’s not thirty anymore,” he said to Tony Gonzalez. “He’s not even thirty-five. He’s fifty. It’s not the same.”

  “No,” said Gonzalez. “Two weeks’ll be plenty.”

  The first day in training camp I was flying. I was knocking out sparring partners, I was putting in excellent roadwork, an hour or an hour and a half at a time, which would have been good going for a fighter half my age.

  But that was before we got to Denver. I had never felt that kind of altitude. I was sucking air from the first day I got there. In the first training session I got on the treadmill and before I knew it I felt like I was suffocating.

  “Dude, you’ve only been running twenty-five minutes,” Robin told me.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  That brought the morale down. I’d get tired just going for a walk. When I sparred, it felt like I was getting hit by a heavyweight. I should have listened to Robin, because if I’d known this was how I was going to feel, I would have gone to Denver much earlier.

  They promoted the fight as “When Legends Collide.” The American press had a lot of fun with that. One guy called it “When Legends Collapse,” because our combined age was eighty-nine.

  Of course Camacho and I still loved to talk shit to each other—what do you expect? I was Panamanian, he was Puerto Rican, we weren’t going to shake hands and play chess. I was going to try to kick his ass and he was going to try to kick mine. He said I was too old and shouldn’t believe in miracles, that I was going to try to do the impossible, and he was ready for the impossible, and that if he lost to me, he was going to retire. I told him he was a clown: Camacho the clown. He’d look good, I thought to myself, if he walked into the ring wearing one of those big red noses.

  I felt I could still compete, but on that night Camacho had a pretty good right jab and left hook. Before the start of the twelfth, as my cornermen were yelling, “Three more minutes!” the referee, Robert Ferrara, came to my corner and told me, “You’re still the greatest.” I went out and fought, and now my corner was screaming, “Tu primero, Cholo, tu primero!” You first, Cholo, you first! But I had no gas left. Still, Camacho couldn’t knock me out! That shows you how tough I was.

  I lost a unanimous twelve-round decision, but I felt that I had won that fight. And that was the last time, it turned out, that I stepped into the ring. A few months later I was in the car accident.

  On January 26, 2002, I called a press conference to announce my retirement. I really had no choice. My rehabilitation was going to take too long, and the doctors had already told me to give up. “Boxing is my life,” I said. “But right now I don’t want to think about it. I am still exercising,” I told the press, “so that when all the honors arrive, people will see me in good shape.” I’d come out of the hospital just as Diego Maradona�
��s farewell match was taking place: “I don’t want to look all fat like Maradona,” I added. There was going to be a lot to celebrate: all the world titles, 103 victories. Apart from 1985 and 1990, I had fought at least once every single year since 1968.

  And that was the end of the road for Durán the boxer. I guess if it hadn’t been for the accident, I would have kept on fighting, even though I was fifty, until there was absolutely no one left to fight. It was still a thrill for people to see Roberto Durán, the legend, in action. But I also think I loved to fight so much that if I had kept fighting, I might’ve died in the ring. Not because someone was hitting me and hurting me, but because of what I was putting my body through to get in shape to fight. I think God wanted me to retire not as punishment but as prevention, so I’d still be alive today. I suspect my family wanted me to retire, too, even though they respected my wishes.

  After I retired, two of my children, Chavo and Irichelle, went into boxing. I wasn’t a big fan of the idea, but their mother was, and they knew it was going to piss me off if they tried to keep it a secret. I didn’t even want to see them fight. It was one of the reasons I got into boxing—so my children wouldn’t have to. I don’t think my other children were in favor, either: it was worse for them seeing Chavo and Irichelle fight.

  Irichelle, who lived with her mother in Miami, got interested because Muhammad Ali’s daughter started fighting. Irichelle fought three times between 2000 and 2002, in New Orleans, Panama City, and Las Vegas. She trained for seven months in Australia, and even had Chavo come out and help her train for her first fight, in Vegas. She lost a four-round split decision, and said she was overwhelmed by the crowd and the media.

  Irichelle fought twice more, winning once and losing once. I was so disgusted that for a while I didn’t even talk to her. Why? Because when I fought, I knew what I was doing. My children didn’t have all that experience and ring craft. And Irichelle was very feminine; she was not a typical female boxer. Jovanna went to the fight in New Orleans, and she heard some of the fans whistling at Irichelle and calling her a “sexy bitch.” Some boxing writers called her “Little Miss Hands of Stone.” Irichelle didn’t need that kind of nonsense in her life.

  My son Chavo was good, even though he didn’t have any amateur experience. He started fighting at twenty-seven and won five fights between 2000 and 2004, with two knockouts. He lost one fight, and one was a no-decision. I saw him fight twice, once in Argentina and once in Panama City. Julio César Chávez’s son was coming up then, too. Chavo would have beaten the crap out of him, because Chavo was tall and had a great understanding of boxing—he knew how to block punches and he knew how to hit. Perhaps he could have become a world champion, but I got him out of boxing. A fan once came up to him at one of his fights and said, “I didn’t come to see you fight. I just came to see if your father was here. Don’t bring shame on your father’s name—go out and win.”

  I knew it had to be tough for my children because of my name and my legacy, but I’d rather they didn’t fight at all. I was once asked how I felt when I saw them fighting. “I don’t feel anything,” I said. “I know my little animals. Boxing is not for them.” But they were competitive, just like me. I didn’t like to lose at anything—billiards, softball, whatever. I always took the contest to another level, and I passed that competitiveness on to my children.

  In 2005, I reconnected with Mike Tyson. He was at the end of his career and having a lot of problems. He’d filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he was pretty much finished in the ring, losing to a nobody called Danny Williams in the summer of 2004. He was out of money and still doing drugs, and had lost his entourage now that he had no money; when he fought Williams, his security guy had worked his corner. Williams knocked Tyson out in the fourth round, down and out against the ropes. Tyson was thirty-eight now; he’d injured his knee in the fight with Williams and he needed surgery.

  I’d always liked him, and I understood that boxing’s always going to be a struggle when you get older. Tyson was on the last run, but he was going to give it one last shot against a fighter named Kevin McBride, and the plan was for me to work with him. He was training in California with de Cubas, who’d set up a camp at Paso Robles, up in the hills, and had brought in Buddy McGirt, who at the time trained Antonio Tarver and Arturo Gatti. We all met up in Los Angeles and drove up to see Tyson. It was a pain in the ass to get there—three hours from Los Angeles, maybe more, up hills and down, up and down—to this big complex with two houses and a gym downstairs, everything spread out over 159 acres. The owners were from Germany—de Cubas said they owned Porsche.

  Now here we were, two badasses who were no longer in their prime but who respected each other. Fans loved us or hated us, but they respected us, too. It wasn’t a Panamanian thing or an American thing, it was a boxing thing, and at our peak, we were the best and the baddest at it.

  Tyson didn’t have much left, obviously, but at least we had a good time messing with his head. He was terrified of the huge tarantulas out in the compound. There was a cemetery near the house that had six Germans buried in it, and we would tell Tyson that the German ghosts would come out at night, looking for him. I got de Cubas to tell him that at night the Martians would come down to take the black people away. “Look, Tyson—up in the sky—it’s a UFO coming to get you!”

  “Fuck you, Durán! Fuck you!” Tyson would say. And we’d fall down, laughing our asses off.

  We stayed up there for several months, bouncing between Los Angeles and Paso Robles, while Tyson used to go back to Phoenix, where he lived. My son was training for a fight nearby, so I told him to come up and stay with me.

  Eventually, we had to get on with the business of the fight and headed back to Vero Beach, where McGirt was training his guys. And still Tyson wanted me to train him.

  I go to the gym. He’s on his cell phone. I say, “Let’s hit the heavy bag.” He doesn’t want to. Does he want to spar? No. “What do you want to do?”

  “Hit the speed bag.”

  “Okay,” I say, “but tomorrow we are going to change the schedule.”

  The next day, one of his handlers brings him his cell phone: “It’s your wife. You’ve got a new baby.”

  “New father!” Tyson’s shouting. “New father!” He says he doesn’t want to train that day.

  At five the next morning my alarm rings. Time to get Tyson to go run on the beach. When I knock, the door opens by itself. “Tyson, it’s me, Durán. You ready?” Big apartment. No one there.

  The day after that, Tyson calls me at two a.m. “Durán, I’m with my wife. I’m not going to train for a while.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Phoenix.”

  Tyson eventually showed up again in Miami, saying he’d hurt his leg, but one day at the gym he threw his cane away. I still have it somewhere.

  Tyson ended up losing to McBride. He quit on his stool after the sixth round. His corner had begged the referee to stop the fight. Afterward, Tyson said he was retiring: “I don’t have the guts to fight anymore. My heart is not in it. I don’t want to disrespect the sport I love.” He wanted to be a good father, he said, and wanted to take care of his children. It was the right decision. He’d lost three of his last four fights by knockout.

  That was not the Tyson everyone knew, everyone feared—but it happens. Age catches up with you. I knew that in my own heart, but our hearts also tell us we’re boxers, champions, warriors, and we keep chasing that last fight, just one final moment of glory in the ring.

  TWELVE

  THE LAST GOOD-BYES

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, I got a call from my friend Pupi. “Hey, Durán—you need to come to Miami. The old man is very sick. He could die at any time.” He was talking about my old friend Victor del Corral, who’d been by my side since the very beginning of my journey.

  I went right away. Victor was at Jackson Memorial Hospital, and his daughter Sonia was with him. It
was clear he couldn’t recognize anyone and didn’t know what was going on. “Look, Papi,” said Sonia, “it’s Durán.” It was the last time I saw him.

  The next day, Sonia called and said Victor had died. He was eighty-four. I went to the funeral home where his body had been laid out; around the casket were mementoes and photos of Victor with all his friends, including me. It was a typical Cuban wake and lasted all night, with lots of people talking, drinking coffee, and paying their respects to the man who’d looked after us so well in his restaurant all those years.

  After the funeral, I went to the Manhattan restaurant one more time to say good-bye in my own way. It felt wrong to be there without Victor being around, and I didn’t want his family to think I was taking advantage of our friendship by continuing to eat for free. How lucky I’d been to know this special man. He was the best—the very best. May he rest in peace.

  Victor wasn’t the only one to leave us. Toti, Plomo, Arcel, Freddie Brown, Flaco Bala—they’ve all gone, a sign that time is passing more quickly nowadays. Once upon a time, we thought we were all going to be together forever. Not anymore.

  These days, death is never far away from me. In May 2009, I was at home in Panama when the telephone rang at midnight.

  “It’s me, Tyson.”

  “The boxer?”

  “Sí. The boxer.” I hadn’t heard from him for years—not since we’d been training together. He was in tears, going crazy.

  His four-year-old daughter Exodus had just died—it was a terrible story. Her brother Miguel had found her dangling from an exercise treadmill, tangled in a power cable, unconscious. She’d died the next day when she was taken off life support.

  “Durán, please, get me Flex,” said Tyson. Flex was a Panamanian reggaeton artist. “My daughter was a big fan of his, and I want him to come sing at the service. Whatever he asks, I’ll pay.”