10
“Like A Man With No Heart”
Has anybody here seen Roberto Duran?
I met him once yeah I shook his hand
I looked in his eyes and now I understand
The love and the anger in the eyes of Roberto Duran
Tom Russell, “The Eyes of Roberto Duran”
THE RUST BELT city of Erie, Pennsylvania, was a boxing backwater and so seemed an odd choice for Roberto Duran’s first title defense in the United States. His opponent was the Italian-born, American-raised Lou Bizzarro, and their fight was originally set for the wealthy European principality of Monaco, but CBS bought the television rights and moved the fight to Erie, Bizzarro’s adopted hometown, to fit its schedules. Duran and his entourage had the hardest time even finding the place.
“We were driving to Pennsylvania and we couldn’t find the boxing commission,” said Carlos Eleta. “It was three or four days before the fight and the commission disappeared. So I call Ray [Arcel] and tell him what happened. Nobody knows anything. So I call Jose Sulaiman in Mexico and tell him I need some advice because I don’t know what is going on. They were going to name their own referee and judges. This wasn’t the real commission, but they weren’t doing anything because they were planting a lot of money on Bizzarro to go fifteen rounds.”
The problem with the state boxing commission arose when co-promoter Don King moved the bout to a Sunday to fit the prime-time TV slot. “Back in those days in Pennsylvania they had the ‘blue laws,’ where there was no professional boxing on a Sunday,” explained Lou Bizzarro. “The fight was supposed to be on Saturday, but King changed it to that Sunday and knew that the fight would be outlawed, and if I won I wouldn’t get the belt because the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission wasn’t involved. King was going to do it his way. But what was I going to do? I wanted the fight.” The blue laws, a legacy of the state’s Puritan past, forbade certain activities on Sundays, such as liquor sales and boxing matches.
Sanctioned or not, the title fight had the city buzzing. “It was the biggest thing ever in Erie,” said King’s co-promoter, Don Elbaum. “We paid him about $125,000 for him and King. It was either that or Duran got $125,000 and King got $10,000. We thought we could steal the title.”
After getting lost in Erie trying to find the commission, the Duran camp was then astonished to see the boxing ring that Elbaum had erected. Bizzarro was a noted “runner” and so the bigger the ring, the better his chances. “The day before the fight, we go to see the ring and it was like one for a bull fighter,” said Eleta. “It was huge, so Bizzarro would run all over the ring. They didn’t even have any cushion, all they had was a table and the canvas, all so he could run – and he did. The only problem was that because there was no padding, Bizzarro got blisters on his feet.” Seeking any advantage for his fighter, Elbaum had apparently found a ring big enough for Bizzarro and all his family. “It was the biggest ring ever made,” admitted Elbaum. “I actually had a thirty-foot ring built. When Ray Arcel came in with Duran, he looked at the ring and then looked right at me and said, ‘I thought you had class.’”
Eleta joked, “I didn’t believe in the mafia until I saw that ring.”
Lou Bizzarro, however, dismisses the stories as yet another boxing myth and says he has the evidence next to him every day of his life. “The ring was twenty-four by twenty-four feet,” he said. “I know because I still have it sitting in my restaurant.”
Born near Naples in 1948, Bizzarro had moved with his family to the USA soon after. His brother Johnny built the family boxing name while facing and losing to lightweight greats like Carlos Ortiz and Flash Elorde, and skinny young Lou followed him into the pro ranks without having a single amateur fight. Sparring with his highly ranked brother and others had already given him a thorough grounding in the game. “Not having any amateur fights actually made my career go faster,” he said. “By that time, I had gotten a lot of good ring work and felt I could handle some of the top fighters in the world.”
A sometime Sears model, the good-looking Italian prospect went undefeated in his first twenty-four fights. With wins over common Duran opponents Hector Matta and Benny Huertas, Bizzarro used both those fights as a measurement of how he’d fare against the great Duran. “Huertas was a tough kid who hit hard and walked right through you and threw bombs,” said Bizzarro. “In fact, he hurt Duran before getting knocked out. Matta was a slick kid and when I beat him it moved me into the top ten.”
Lou was a local hero in the small, blue-collar city, and talked up his chances to the press. “I look at it this way,” he told reporters. “Duran is only human like anyone else.” But having previously visited the notorious Fifth Street Gym in Miami, he knew what he was up against: a twenty-four-year-old terror already considered by some to be the best fighter, pound-for-pound, in the world.
“I knew Roberto because he was the talk of the Miami Beach Gym,” said Bizzarro. “He was knocking out middleweights with sixteen-ounce gloves and headgear. He’d just kick them right out of the gym. And he was sparring with the toughest guys from Miami. He was just so vicious that nobody wanted to get in the ring with him anymore. When you got into the ring with him, he was your enemy. It was a fight every time, just a fight to get him off of you.”
Most notoriously, Duran flattened Vinnie Curto, a middleweight contender, in the Miami gym. “Sure, he knocked down Curto,” said trainer Angelo Dundee, whose brother Chris ran the gym. “Roberto used to always work with bigger guys. I couldn’t believe what happened, so when he came down from the ring I checked his gloves. Roberto was wearing these old, old, heavy gloves and they were all water soaked. I changed them immediately and he got back in the ring.”
Bizzarro had spoken to Curto about the incident. “Vinnie was a real slick boxer. He told me that every time Duran hit him, it hurt. And that was when Curto was a nice, nineteen-year-old prospect. [Duran] couldn’t separate between the gym and the ring. It was always a fight. Then, there were the guys called gym fighters who were the toughest guys during sparring, but fell apart when they got in the real bouts.”
Stories of Duran’s prowess were becoming legendary. There was another one about a middleweight who sparred with him at the Fifth Street Gym and wanted to take it easy because of his greater weight, but Duran insisted they slug it out. “Holy Christ!” said the middleweight. “He hit me on my left arm so hard I couldn’t use it for a week. If those punches had landed on my ribs, I would have been knocked out.” Duran was also said to have flattened a highly rated welterweight in a Puerto Rican gym.
A dignified, classy guy who cared about others, Bizzarro had never met anyone quite like Stone Hands. “I brought Duran in a week ahead of time and we had a press conference,” Elbaum recalled. “Louie was 24–0 and at the press conference he was all dressed up. He was a good-looking, handsome kid. He got up and he was thanking everybody from the mayor down to the sponsors, me, and then he looked at Roberto and he said, ‘Thank you, Mister Duran.’ It was so … I get sick, it was too sugary. But this was Louie. Nice, nice, nice.
“Lou sat down, and Duran got up and said ten words in Spanish and sat down. Luis Henriquez, his translator, started shaking his head, and the sportscaster Al Abrams asked what he said. And Henriquez said, ‘He said he would send him home in an ambulance.’”
Bizzarro remembered a similar Duran. “I saw him a couple days before the fight at the press conference. Oh, he was vicious. He wanted to kill me before the fight. He didn’t say much, but it was more the way he would look at you and stare you down. You have to remember that Duran wasn’t a pleasant guy to be around. He was a mean guy.”
Unfortunately for the Erie contingent of 4,500 fans who arrived on May 22, 1976 stealing the title was probably the only way they would get it off Duran. Built like a character from a video game, Bizzarro was a spaghetti-thin boxer whose legs moved too fast for his body. His game plan was to lace up his boots and circle that ring until the final bell. Duran didn’t like dancers. Anyo
ne willing to move and get out of harm’s way affronted Duran’s machismo, and a man not willing to trade in the middle of the ring, or at least make an effort to fight, was a payaso, or clown.
As Duran has admitted on several occasions, he felt nervous in the moments before the fight began. Expectation weighed on him. “Something’s wrong if you’re a fighter and you’re not nervous when you go up to the ring,” said Bizzarro. “Before every fight I had butterflies. But as soon as the bell rings, they go away.”
From the first round, Bizzarro took off, and Duran had a weary look as he tried to cut off the ring. How long could Bizzarro run and hide? Shaking his shoulders back and forth, Duran moved in a cool fluency, fully aware that the motor would eventually quit on Bizzarro. “He could go backwards faster than anyone could go forward,” Elbaum recalled. “And I felt we had a helluva shot to get a decision, especially in his hometown.”
As the bell sounded at the end of the second round, Duran hurt Bizzarro with an uppercut to the chin. Bizzarro stumbled as he located the corner. Whether it was after the bell or just a punch Bizzarro wasn’t ready for, the damage was done. “It was a little overwhelming for me, absolutely,” said Bizzarro. “It was a dream of mine. I beat him and the money rolls in. But it was all too much for me at the time.
“In the second round, I knew I was hurt when he hit me with a punch after the bell. I made a mistake by dropping my hands. Don [Elbaum] had told me to be ready for anything with this guy and not to drop my hands in the clinch. As soon as I did it for the first time, ‘Boom,’ he gets me. It took me four rounds to recuperate.”
The third man in the ring that evening was Puerto Rican referee Waldemar Schmidt. “In the seventh round, I hit Duran with a right hand and knocked him down, and Schmidt called it a slip,” claimed Bizzarro. “It happened again in the eighth with a hook and he called it a slip again. I couldn’t believe it when he was talking to Duran in Spanish. Elbaum thought he was going to be German, and that’s why he OK’d him. It turns out that the guy is from Puerto Rico.”
In the clinches, Duran and Bizzarro held a running dialogue. Duran also raked his gloves across Bizzarro’s no longer model face and hit him late. A left-right-left combo dumped Bizzarro for a count of nine in the tenth, and he was on the floor again before the end of the round. Surprisingly Bizzarro came back to have his best round in the eleventh, but it was his last throw of the dice. “I didn’t want the referee to stop the fight,” he said. “I came back and beat him in the eleventh round.”
Heeding his camp’s advice, Bizzarro sketched a circle around Duran. It was a strategy implemented in training which made his handlers seem like geniuses for the first ten rounds. However, it was a strategy plagued by inconsistency. When people searched for weaknesses in Duran’s repertoire, the holes were so slight that they had to invent their own. Buchanan’s trainer Gil Clancy was guilty of this, and Elbaum wasn’t far behind. Duran threw so many punches with so much force behind each one that it seemed an impossible feat for any boxer to keep up the pace. Elbaum thought Duran would burn out by the late rounds. Others had made the same mistake. “Don told me that Duran would start fading by the tenth round, but I don’t know what he was talking about,” said Bizzarro. “If anything, I started to fade. He would never fade the entire fight. Duran hurt me from the second round on.”
Duran closed the gap considerably as Bizzarro slowed, and in the fourteenth he finally cornered his man. “Late in the round a savage right uppercut sent Bizzarro reeling onto the ropes and referee Schmidt gave him a standing eight count,” reported Boxing News. “Another right dropped Bizzarro for six, and Schmidt continued the count to eight before waving Duran in for the finish. A tremendous right to the head made Bizzarro’s legs fold under him, and he lay on his back without moving as he was counted out.”
Though just one second remained in the round, many spectators believed the fight should have been stopped before the final knockout. Elbaum wasn’t one of them. “No, because he was hurt but he wasn’t out on his feet,” said the promoter, “even though it was a situation where his brother Johnny wanted to stop it, he was running up the steps to stop it and I had to grab him and we were wrestling on the ground outside the ring so he wouldn’t stop the fight.”
In fact, the end came so suddenly that there was little time for intervention. “I didn’t see Johnny running up to the ring,” Bizzarro remembered. “All my focus was on Duran. That was just my brother looking out for me. He had been in there before and knew everything that Duran was doing. But I was fine. The only problem was that the new shoes I bought gave me blisters down to the bone. I couldn’t walk for weeks after the fight.”
Duran eventually made his way over to the fallen fighter, arriving with his hands extended. At that moment, Bizzarro looked anything but a male model. “The challenger fought the first nine rounds with his legs, and the last five with his heart,” summed up Boxing News.
“The one thing that angered me the most was that they were taking Bizzarro around as if he were the world champion, in a very expensive and fashionable car. And I was given no importance at all,” said Duran. “That is why I was so angry that I did not want to win; I wanted to kill him. The referee should have stopped that fight but even the referee was against me. There was the entire Italian colony there, all against me. When I knocked him down [the referee] did nothing so I asked him what was going on, but he refused to act. That was one of my best knockouts.”
Duran would find his way back to Erie years later, in his career twilight. Through manager Mike Acri, Bizzarro and Duran still get together. Bizzarro would have an uneventful end to his career but followed Duran’s never-ending saga.
DURAN NEXT TOOK on the tough Colombian Emiliano Villa on July 31, 1976. Villa had just given junior welterweight champion Wilfred Benitez a surprisingly hard fight and was 25-3-1 coming into the bout. Duran took two months to prepare.
“Villa was a huge Colombian boxer,” said Plomo. “During the fight, Duran hit him and Villa fell down and made a turn on the floor, and stood up again. Everyone was very surprised to see the impact of the blow. He decided to go on fighting, but then Duran hit his liver, and with a cross to the head he knocked him down. But the first fall had been incredible. He was already on the floor, rolled down, and stood up again. That had never been seen before.”
Villa appeared to jump like a kangaroo after being hit. Years later, Duran was watching a replay of the bout on his big screen TV in Panama City; he fiddled with the reception so the seventh-round knockout comes in perfectly. As the punch landed, a “Chucha madre,” a common Panamanian slang was heard from across the room. Hesitating as if waiting for someone to remind him that he was hurt, Villa stared at Duran for a long second, and then dropped. Villa was down on both knees when the referee stopped the bout. “One of my best knockouts was the Colombian,” said Duran. “I gave him a blow like this, pah! The guy fell down, gave a complete turn, and ended up standing up. The referee did not know whether to count or not.”
Next stop was the Hollywood Arena in California on October 15, 1976 and title challenger Alvaro Rojas. Nearly 6,100 fans gathered for a fight card billed as “Night of the Knockouts” in which Duran’s bout was part of a CBS-TV double-header featuring heavyweight George Foreman in the main event. It was another chance for American television viewers to get a look at this lightweight king who knocked everybody out, and Duran didn’t disappoint.
“He had this thing about him,” said fight promoter Butch Lewis. “He had that beard, that Manchu thing, and the guy used to look like the devil. He had the black coal eyes and the hair. When Duran walked in the press conference with his chest out, [Rojas] just stepped aside. Al Braverman was like, ‘Don’t move out of the guy’s way, you’re letting him know.’” The champion had few doubts about the outcome. “This fight will end,” he told one interviewer, “when I connect.” BN 8.10.76
Rojas, from Costa Rica, was a poor challenger. A press kit distributed to boxing reporters had his win-loss s
tatistics as 26-8, with twenty stoppage wins, but this was questionable. He had certainly beaten one former world champion, Clemente Sanchez, but lost to the few other name boxers he had fought, including former WBC champ Guts Ishimatsu, who had stopped him in the fourteenth round of a title defence in Tokyo. Yet he was conveniently rated tenth in the world by the WBA so he could qualify to fight Duran for the title. Ring magazine called it “a gross mismatch.”
The champion, clean-shaven for the bout and as handsome as a matinee idol, had trained at Gleason’s Gym in Manhattan and looked as big and strong as a welterweight. He hurt Rojas with the first right hand he landed, and thereafter it was only a matter of time. Rojas made the mistake of trying to trade punches, and at 2:17 of the first round was spreadeagled face down on the canvas, like a cartoon figure that had fallen from a high building, after another crushing right to the chin. As the referee counted him out, Duran, standing in a neutral corner, spotted Esteban DeJesus in the crowd and ducked between the ropes to berate him, shouting, “I want you next.”
Duran was paid $125,000 or nearly $65,000 per minute of work. With every strand of his slicked-back hair still in place, there was little evidence that Duran had just earned a night’s pay. “I was in very good condition. I hit him in the pecho,” Duran told an interviewer in the ring while Rojas was still lying flat on his back. A guy with a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth handed Duran a flag, which he waved at the crowd. Another fight, another body in his wake and Duran was off. Carlos Eleta hurried to give Duran an ice cream cone in the dressing room afterwards. “I told Duran not to worry about the title but about the ice cream,” said Eleta. “It worked.”
Hands of Stone Page 17
