“Those guys, they’re older than water.”
Angelo Dundee
FIGHTERS DREAMT OF the Garden from the day they laced on gloves. Madison Square Garden was the Mecca of boxing, steeped in the history of the game’s biggest fights. Just six months earlier, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier had slugged it out there in the so-called Fight of the Century. To headline there was the ultimate validation. The Garden, which was renovated and moved to four different locations, was originally constructed at 23rd and Madison Avenue, Manhattan, in 1879. Not until the “new” Garden – known as “The House That Tex Built” after promoter Tex Rickard – was built in 1925, however, did it become the sport’s centre, graced by the greatest figures in the game. In 1968, it was relocated again to Pennsylvania Plaza, between 32nd and 34th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues.
Duran’s opponent was the experienced Benny Huertas, a former gangbanger who was popular with promoters and fans alike because he always came to fight. Huertas had lost almost as many as he had won and, sandwiched between the great lightweights of his era, would be a bit player in the division. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shed the distinction of being an extra in the world’s most brutal sport, but he always gave his best and was certainly no patsy.
Back in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, they called Huertas “the Boxer” because he would fight with anybody, though he spent most of his youth not in his native country but in New York City. “I was in a big Puerto Rican gang in Brooklyn called the Apaches,” said Huertas, “but I didn’t want to do this anymore. I wanted something else.” He saw an ad in a newspaper for a Hispanic Golden Gloves Tournament at a place called St. Nick’s, and at eighteen found boxing. It “was just something to do.”
Not long into his amateur career, tragedy struck. “Something happened in around 1962-63. It is so sad that I can’t even talk about it,” said Huertas years later, nearly in tears. “I killed a guy in the ring. It was sad because I had a new wife and we didn’t have a baby. He had his wife and he had a baby who was six or seven months. I thought about when his boy grows and asks, ‘Where’s my father?’ Suppose that thing happened to me with a baby … a lot of troubles.”
Huertas took nearly a year off from the ring but couldn’t quit the sport; his future rode on it. “Boxing saved my life. The barrio where I lived in Brooklyn was a bad one. A lot of people was killed. I had to do something better than that.” At the time, world champs such as Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres fought out of the Cus D’Amato gym where Huertas trained. D’Amato was actually Huertas’s co-manager, but wasn’t hands-on. He stayed in the background and Huertas never really knew one of the most famous of all boxing managers.
He turned pro in 1965, and by the time he was due to fight Duran his record was 18-14-3. Though Duran was barely known at that stage outside his home country and the boxing cognoscenti, to those in the know his match-up with Huertas added intrigue to the Garden bill. Was this killer from Panama any good or was his record built on straw men? No one really knew, but Huertas was expected to give him a test. Fight posters billed their ten-round semi-final as Roberto “Rocky” Duran versus Benny “Bang Bang” Huertas and described one as the “sensational unbeaten Panamanian K.O. artist” while the other was the “slam bang Puerto Rican puncher.” They were the opening act for Laguna and Buchanan.
“PAPA, WHAT TIME does the ice cream parlor close?” asked Roberto Duran.
“I think around nine p.m.,” said Carlos Eleta. “Why?”
“What time is my fight?”
“I don’t know, why Roberto?”
“Well, if I finish my fight in time, then I can make it over in time to get a milkshake.”
“I was telling him not to be scared to fight at the Garden for the first time,” recalled Eleta later, “and all he could think about was ice cream.”
For his part, Huertas was totally ignorant of the opponent he was facing, and in fact was more preoccupied by the recent death of his father. “I knew nothing about Duran,” he said. “The manager fooled me because at the time I was making 138-140 pounds. I was happy because I made the 138-pound weight limit. Then the promoter came and told me to make 135. I made the weight, but I killed myself. There was an exhibition a couple days before the fight, and it was all Panama. I saw him spar with someone else that day and I said, ‘This is going to be a war,’ because we had the same style.” Both had little regard for defense. Neither wanted to dance around the ring. They were there to fight.
On 13 September 1971, at the Garden, Duran wasted no time introducing himself. First, they scuffled, with neither exacting a decided edge. Then a thudding right to the temple left Huertas sprawled out on the canvas. It was all over in sixty-six seconds and Duran made it back to the ice cream parlor before closing. With his milkshake and his knockout victory, Duran waited to see if Laguna would return the lightweight crown back to Panama.
Benny Huertas would continue to fight anyplace they needed a body. “When you spend a lot of time in one thing and stop, you don’t want to leave it alone,” he recalled. “I have to stay in the house now and do nothing. I can’t work because of the discs in my back and in the garment business you have to work like a horse.”
Because of the way Duran knocked out Huertas, those who hadn’t seen him fight before were convinced that he was going to accomplish things in the sport. One punch was enough to sell some boxing writers. “The undercard … produced one fighter of special note, who will have to be watched as a possible future lightweight champion,” said the august Ring magazine. “I’d seen Huertas and he was a damn good fighter in the gym in Gramercy Park,” recalled boxing analyst Bert Sugar. “[Duran] takes him out in one round and it wasn’t even a fight. It was a mauling, a mugging. The kid had something. Good looking … everything.”
Panamanian boxing writer Alfonso Castillo, a small, bespectacled ex-jockey, was one of those who witnessed the destruction of Benny Huertas. He immediately coined a new name for the phenomenon: Manos de Piedra. Hands of Stone.
In the main event, Ken Buchanan again outpointed Laguna to retain his world title. It would be the Tiger’s last fight and Duran promised to avenge his friend’s loss. “Duran said that on one occasion that his inspiration to be a boxer was when he saw Ismael Laguna beat Carlos Ortiz,” said Panamanian boxing analyst Daniel Alonso. “After the Huertas fight, Duran said that he would beat Buchanan next for Laguna.”
Before he would get the chance, he was introduced to two elderly men who many would credit with his ultimate development as a fighter. Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown were American sages who knew more about boxing than anyone else alive.
Ray Arcel was born in the final months of the Nineteenth Century and began working with boxers in 1917, at the age of seventeen. Growing up a Jew in an Italian section of East Harlem meant he had his share of street fights, but he also had a sharp mind, went to a good school and harbored ambitions to be a doctor. All of that changed when he started to hang out at Grupp’s Gymnasium on 116th Street. There he encountered Dai Dollings, a fanatical Welshman whose pedigree went back to the bareknuckle era. Dollings, a strict vegetarian, had coached marathon runners, would walk to the gym in all weathers and complained about the softness of the New World: “You bloody Americans, you’re made of tissue paper.” When the young Arcel told him he wanted to be a trainer too, Dollings replied, “The hell with a trainer. You want to be an analyst.”
And that’s what Arcel became. He studied fighters like a scholar in the unheated gyms and smoky boxing clubs of New York State and beyond, and learned the black arts of corner work from the legendary Doc Bagley, who could stem a gushing cut with a plug of chewing tobacco. He also loved his fighters. His idol was Benny Leonard, the imperious Jewish-American lightweight who created the template for the modern boxer. Arcel would tell his boxers, “This is your school, where you learn your lessons.”
The list of champions he worked with eventually ran well into double figures. He handled Tony Zale during his three epic wars with
Rocky Graziano, trained Ezzard Charles for his gory classics with Rocky Marciano, and seconded so many of Joe Louis’s victims during the great heavyweight’s long reign that sportswriter Jimmy Cannon labeled him “the Pallbearer.”
By the mid-Fifties, Arcel was running the popular Saturday Night Fights, which appeared every week on the ABC television channel in the US. He was an independent operator, and a successful one, but this did not endear him to the New York hoodlums who then ran the sport. He started having trouble making fights. Main event boxers would cancel at the last minute. He received an anonymous phone call telling him to “get out of the TV racket if you know what’s good for you.”
In 1953, the fifty-four-year-old Arcel was standing outside a Boston hotel talking to a fellow trainer when a man stepped up behind him, hit him a vicious blow to the head with a length of piping wrapped in a paper bag, dropped the weapon and disappeared into the crowd. Arcel almost died and spent the next nineteen days in hospital. The assault was instrumental in his decision to retire from the sport he loved in 1956 to work in the purchasing department of an alloy company. By the early Seventies he was still in good shape but venerable, with neat gray hair, wise eyes and a dapper sense of dress in a Fifties style. He had been out of boxing for eighteen years and was a man out of time, but his knowledge and analytical skills hadn’t waned.
In March 1972, Carlos Eleta’s boxer Alfonso “Peppermint” Frazer was due to challenge champion Nicolino Locche for the world title. Eleta had met Arcel twenty years earlier, when the American helped to train a talented Panamanian lightweight called Federico Plummer. “Then, after many, many years, I get Peppermint Frazer and Duran,” said Eleta. “I have a chance for Frazer to fight for the championship of the world with a fellow from Argentina. So then I tried to contact Ray. I called Teddy Brenner at Madison Square Garden to get in touch with him.
“Brenner said, ‘Forget about it, Ray is retired and having problems with the mafia.’ They tried to control him, but they couldn’t because Ray was a very honorable person. As soon as I talked to him he said, ‘It’s been a long time Carlos, what can I do for you?’ I told him, ‘Well, I have a fighter who is fighting for the championship of the world and I need you for that fight.’ Ray told me he would do anything for me, under one condition, that he wouldn’t charge me a penny. That was Ray Arcel. I had so much respect for that man. He was a very strong man. The mafia tried to get to him, but they couldn’t.”
Arcel took the job. It was a tall order. The champion, Locche, was a chain-smoker possessed of uncanny defensive skills, with over 100 wins to his name. Not for nothing was he known as “the Untouchable.” About twenty days before the bout, Arcel arrived to bring Frazer to a peak. Though he couldn’t speak Spanish, he was fluent in the language of boxing and his mind was sharp as a tack.
With him came Freddie Brown. While the sharp-featured Arcel could have been mistaken for a university don, Brown, a “mere” sixty-seven, was a cornerman straight from central casting, a stocky, flat-nosed, cigar-chomping pug with the “dese, dem and doze” accent of the Lower East Side. A peerless cutman, he combined the patience of long experience with the blunt speaking of a man who knows his trade.
Peppermint Frazer had already received some helpful advice from Ismael Laguna, who was now tragically in the grip of sickle-cell anemia and was fading away from the sport. “I talked to Laguna, who beat up Locche for ten rounds but didn’t get the decision,” said Frazer. “He told me not to shoot at his head because I’d miss and tire myself out. Instead, I had to shoot at his shoulders and chest and wear him down.”
Ray Arcel was also at work. He managed to watch a Locche training session by “dressing like a Panamanian,” donning dark glasses and a Panama hat, and drawing on his vast memory bank, immediately spotted that Locche’s style was reminiscent of Johnny Dundee, a featherweight from the Twenties. He went back and told Frazer not to follow if the champion retreated and tried to draw him to the ropes: “Just stand there and look at him. Don’t do anything.” This would negate Locche’s counter-punching style.
The plan worked to perfection for fifteen rounds. Not known as a knockout puncher, Frazer disrupted the champ with skill and intelligence. “In, out, in, and out, I just left his head alone and I would just shoot a straight right once in a while,” said Frazer, savoring the memories. “I did just what Laguna told me.” When the final bell sounded, Panama rejoiced. It was March 10, 1972, and Frazer was champion of the world. “That day was like a carnival,” said Frazer. “Oh, they treat you like a king: All the women, the money, everything. So many new friends you didn’t know you had. But it depends what type of person that you are. Some people can’t live without the fame.”
Unfortunately, those same fringe benefits that all champs savor only lasted seven months as Frazer lost his title to the wonderfully skilled Colombian Antonio Cervantes. “I tried to get inside against Cervantes, but he had a long reach and kept me off him,” Frazer said. “They said in Panama that he was no good, but I saw him in Venezuela and I knew he was good. I had nothing to be ashamed of.” Having made his biggest purse of $50,000, Frazer bought two houses, which he still has to this day.
Eleta wanted Arcel and Brown to look at his other hot prospect, a kid called Duran. They were skeptical, but by chance Arcel was at the Garden – a friend had told him to check out Ken Buchanan – with his wife Steve when Duran iced Huertas in the first round. Duran bounded over to where the Arcels sat and shook their hands, even though they had never met. When told it was Duran’s twenty-second knockout in twenty-five wins, Arcel reportedly said, “Either he’s another Jack Dempsey or he’s been beating bums.” But out of friendship with Eleta, he took a look at this young hotshot. The fact that Eleta deemed him worthy of such elite cornermen was a sign of his talent. Eleta also felt that he had got the most he could from Plomo Quinones and Duran needed something more.
Duran’s next opponent was the experienced Hiroshi Kobayashi, who in his previous fight had lost his world junior lightweight title. “Eleta tells me that he’s going to get me a fight with this guy who just lost the championship and that’s going to be the test for me,” said Duran. “If I win that fight, then Eleta assured me of a shot at the lightweight championship of the world. I ask him who it is, and he tells me this Chinese guy. I tell him that this Chinese guy is a dead man and I’m going to kill him.” Kobayashi was in fact Japanese, a veteran of seventy-four fights, and had reigned as champion for almost four years. He was Duran’s sternest test to date.
They fought on 16 October 1971, in Panama City. Despite a remarkable ability to absorb punishment, Kobayashi wilted under Duran’s attack. He landed some clean shots but was stalked, hunted down and overwhelmed. Like a man trapped in a closet with no space to move his arms, yet still trying to block punches, Kobayashi was pummeled into a seventh-round stoppage. A national hero arrived back in the dressing room.
“I’m in the locker room and Freddie Brown comes in with Eleta and I get introduced to him,” said Duran. “The gym is so packed. At the time Eleta was friends with John Kennedy Jr., who was young, and Joe DiMaggio, who Eleta had brought to Panama. Carlos Eleta knew all those people. Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown sat next to me and they tell Carlos Eleta, ‘This guy is a natural and I’m going to convert him into a champion. And from what I saw, there isn’t much he needs to change because from what I saw he knows a lot.’”
While Eleta mingled with elite figures from all stratospheres, Duran rarely bothered to look far past his own circle of friends. “I told Roberto that I wanted him to meet Joe DiMaggio one night, and he said, ‘Why, who has he fought?’ That was Roberto,” laughed Eleta.
Arcel and Brown made a point not to tamper with the kid’s bullishness. Passivity was not in Duran’s nature and they did nothing to change his aggression; they just upgraded it. Together they provided the polish to Plomo’s wax job, so when Duran went into one of his rages, there was purpose behind it. Indeed, Arcel told Brown and the other trainers, “Don’t you dar
e tell him what to do. Leave him alone. He knows what to do. Just condition him. See that he’s in shape.” The instinctive defensive skills that kept him from absorbing heavy punishment during his first twenty-five fights were also being honed. Most importantly, Arcel saw that Duran knew how to think in the ring, not just fight.
“Plomo was a little jealous of Ray and Freddie and would start things,” said Eleta. “I always used to tell Duran that his fights were won during training and he would tell me that it didn’t matter because he had a right hand like Ingemar Johannsen.”
“We had only heard about him,” said New York boxing writer Bert Sugar. “Carlos Eleta called me and said, ‘You have to see this kid.’ He had Ray Arcel and Brown with him, which was a helluva mark. The kid obviously had something. I give Arcel and Brown a lot of credit. Anytime you have a force you have to direct it, and although he also had natural talent, I think you have to harness it. I mean some kids are great street fighters who piss away a career. Now, you had two of the greatest trainers of all-time. Just like Charley Goldman could shape and mold a clumsy Rocky Marciano, who I saw in training once fall over his own feet and knock himself down, if you can shape talent … and when Eleta brought them in, you knew he thought he had something. And if Arcel and Brown accepted the assignment, you knew they saw something.”
Duran returned to his hometown in January 1972 to face the globe-trotting Cuban Angel “Robinson” Garcia. Nicknamed for his likeness to the great Sugar Ray Robinson, Garcia was almost old enough to be Duran’s father and had the longest fight record of any boxer then active: 119 wins, fifty-five losses and twenty draws – and they were just the bouts the record compilers knew about. His indefatigability was exceeded only by his appetite for women and booze; he would often enter the ring after a bottle of wine and box none the worse for it. Duran, however, was too much for him.
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