Eleta hadn’t had the time to invent any feeble excuses. “If I knew that would happen,” he said, “I would have told Ray [Arcel] to say something was wrong with his hand.” Still, he tried his best to divert the criticism. First, he put an end to a party back at Duran’s hotel. On the eighteenth floor of the Hyatt Regency in Room Number 1843, a gaggle of hangers-on were soon drinking and carousing with Duran. Journalist Ricardo Borbua wrote that the people yelled, “In the good times and the bad.” He saw Duran singing and playing the juiro.
“He was with his friends, all these colonels from Panama, drinking, dancing,” recalled Minito Navarro, a radio presenter and friend of the boxer. “They had no shame.” Stephanie Arcel, looking for her husband, walked in on Roberto and Felicidad singing a duet. “You’d think he won the fight,” said a despondent Freddie Brown. It was only when Eleta barged into the room to find Duran drinking too that the party broke up.
“It hurt me more when I went back to the hotel and there was a fiesta,” said a frustrated Eleta two decades later. “After that I sent everybody out. I took him to the hospital.” In the car with Papa Eleta, Duran began to cry. He realized what he had done.
Eleta still insists that the medical staff confirmed that Duran’s stomach cramps were genuine and were the result of over-eating. Certainly Dr Orlando Nunez, after seeing the fighter, reported that he suffered from acute abdominal pains and would have fainted if he kept fighting. Nunez was Duran’s special physician, and also claimed in a TV interview that Duran never took or was prescribed diuretics. Two other physicians looked at him. The Louisiana Athletic Commission had Dr A.J. Italiano test Duran for possible symptoms that would have forced a stoppage. Italiano said the stomach pains could have come from overeating during the afternoon hours before the fight. Dr Jack Ruli, who checked out Duran from the Southern Baptist Hospital at 3 a.m. the morning of the fight, said that he was “fine,” but did admit a possible inflammation of the stomach.
Shep Pleasants was at the time the Vice-President for Development and Public Affairs for the hospital. He said Duran entered with an entourage and was taken to a $255-a-night suite on the fifth floor. “I didn’t know Duran was in the hospital until I arrived the next day for my shift,” recalled Pleasants. “I was deluged with calls from the media, friends, family. The phone was ringing off the hook. I just told everyone that he was fine. The one call that I remember vividly was from Duran’s father in Arizona. I told him his son was fine and I thought to myself why Duran hadn’t called his father himself.
“When I walked in, he had his whole entourage surrounding him. He was bright as a bullet. There was no distress hovering over the man. I said, ‘Buenos dias, campeon,’ but nothing more. He was sitting on the bed and he wasn’t in hospital garb. At that time the sucker was fine, but I … if he had had a gastric problem, it could have been gone by the time I saw him. I think he went to the hospital as a public relations move. And most everyone in the hospital and the town figured that out. You can’t just quit a fight and head back to the hotel and then decide to come to the hospital.”
It was widely circulated among Panama reporters that Duran had told his closest confidantes at the Hyatt that there was no validity to the story about the stomach ache. “There was nothing wrong with him and the proof of that, he goes to celebrate with his friends in his hotel room,” said journalist Juan Carlos Tapia. “Eleta arrives to go to hospital to justify that there would not be a more serious problem. But Duran didn’t have anything wrong. There were no stomach cramps. He was simply not prepared for that fight. Leonard was beating him bad and Duran said that nobody will knock me out.”
Of all the things that Duran lost that evening, from pride to the respect of his fans, he was able to keep his purse. As long as the opening bell rang and Duran entered the ring, his money was safe. By getting the money paid in a letter of credit, Eleta ensured that Duran would receive his share. It was that share that the Louisiana Ordinance Commission felt they were owed due to the “dishonest act.”
Don King publicist Bobby Goodman went back to a meeting with the Louisiana Commission to clarify the terms of the agreement made before the fight even started. “The commission wanted to hold up his purse. I had to run back for a meeting with the commission and I told them that the purse was already paid in a letter of credit,” said Goodman. “And the condition of the letter of credit was that we had to show them a newspaper article that the fight had happened. And it certainly happened. As soon as the bell rings, it was good. That was the terms of the contract, not that he fought badly, poorly or quit or whatever.”
Although the commission fined Duran a nominal amount of $7,500, Goodman quickly cut a check and paid the fine. There were still some explanations to be heard. “I made an appeal to the commission that Duran had stomach cramps and how do you know what went on in the mind of this great champ to the point that he just couldn’t continue,” Goodman said. “I had mentioned the ring snapped and a lot of things were going on. And they accepted that.”
Goodman had been close to Duran in the build-up to the fight and had noticed a change in him. “I didn’t get the sense that he was as intense for the training. Knowing Roberto, the macho part of being Roberto Duran where he had achieved such legendary status was part of his being. He was Duran and you didn’t have to say anything else. He was very proud of that and became quite a celebrity. Even up at the camp … I think he was so full of what everybody had written about him. I don’t think he got a big head, but I just think he eased up.”
THE BOXING world struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible. Roberto Duran, the man with hands of stone and a heart to match, who had never been stopped, knocked out or even badly hurt, had apparently given up. Most could not believe it; everyone had an opinion. “It would require a deal of convincing to shake the conviction here that Duran had to be sick or injured,” wrote Red Smith, America’s greatest sports columnist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, “because Roberto Duran was not, is not, and never could be a quitter.”
Forty-eight hours later, the man himself had changed his mind about retiring. “After what happened I’ve done some thinking and I’ve spoken to my wife and told her I’m going back to the ring. I had thought of retiring, but I’m not going to retire because Sugar Ray Leonard is not a man to beat me,” he told a reporter.
But when asked about the promotion of a third bout between them, Don King told reporters, “The next time I promote a Leonard-Duran fight, it will be on the planet Pluto.”
Duran, a sensitive man, cared deeply about the way Panamanians thought about him. Now a cloud hung over his proud little nation. “We drove all day and all night from the hotel to Miami,” he recalled. “My wife and my kids and Danny Castro, and two Dominican friends of mine: Fabio Matos, his girlfriend, and a friend named Abuela Lopez and his wife. They all stayed with me. That was it. Everybody else abandoned me. I told Eleta to give me the rematch, but he said that Leonard doesn’t want to fight with me. I said, ‘Why not, we’re one-and-one?’”
Duran offered to donate his purse in a third fight to charity, but later reneged. “I read all the stuff in the papers about claiming to fight for charity and my response to that is, ‘Give the last one back; that’s the one you didn’t earn. I’ll pay for the next one if you go the distance,’” said Trainer in an interview with The Ring in 1981. “But there’s a problem. Duran has to go out and prove to the American public that he’s not going to quit again. And he has to go out and fight somebody very significant to show them. Until he does that, another fight with Leonard is unthinkable.”
Duran hid out in Miami as speculation raged. “Nobody knew exactly what happened,” said boxing analyst Gil Clancy. “They were thinking all kinds of things. Everybody was saying, ‘No más, no más.’ He was sick to his stomach, and that’s what it was. He couldn’t help himself. He was going to go in his pants. That was the truth. Leonard fought a good fight and Duran was not ready for him. He gorged himself before the fight with food and malte
d milks and got hit in the belly and he just fell apart.”
Plomo thought he had the answer to the no más riddle. “Duran has always been an extraordinary boxer, a monster as you say. On many occasions he has fought feeling not well, but no one knew about it. He would not tell. But this time it was the stomach, and besides, this rival had not come to box; he had come to behave like a buffoon. This conduct much angered Duran, who wanted him to fight. This is why he told him he could be the winner. Leonard had not really hit him, it was Duran who actually abandoned the fight.”
But many were unwilling to believe that a man who once threatened to knock out God if he entered the ring had surrendered without even being hurt. Few events in sports history have been more controversial. “I don’t think that was him that night,” said veteran trainer Lou Duva. “When a guy has been fighting all his life, he would fight a tiger. But when he gets in and does that, that wasn’t him that night. Something was wrong. I don’t think it was so much Leonard but I think he was beat before he got into the ring. Something was wrong.”
Bobby Goodman: “The no más was more of him not being as prepared as he was the first time. He was showing his macho and was mad because Leonard didn’t want to fight. I didn’t accept that talk about stomach cramps, and I didn’t know why he did it, but I knew his macho and the fact that this guy wouldn’t meet him toe-to-toe was upsetting to him. You don’t want to fight, forget it. Sticking his nose out and his tongue out, and Duran was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m not fighting anymore.’ It was emotional. Maybe he was misguided but that was his feeling. And I’ve never known him to not do what he felt.”
Bert Sugar: “He’s never fully explained it, but if I can be a ringside psychiatrist practicing without a license, which we all do, it was the schoolyard bully syndrome. If you run from him he’ll catch you; if you hit him he’ll beat you. He said he wasn’t going to fuck around with clowns. The first fight Leonard had the worst game plan since Goliath tried to come forward dead.”
Emanuel Steward: “He just got frustrated by Ray. Ray was so sharp that night and he wouldn’t fight Duran like he wanted to. He was using all of these annoying tactics. So Duran was like, ‘The hell with this. I’m leaving.’ With his mindset it wasn’t like he was quitting; it was a macho thing. He was called a coward but it wasn’t that way. He just wasn’t going to be bothered with all that stuff. With Duran you were dealing with a high-strung emotional person and what he did wasn’t a way of surrendering. This highly instantaneous personality helped make him a great fighter. You can’t knock him for that.”
Ismael Laguna: “We have never talked about that no más fight. Duran had a lot of pride and wouldn’t allow Sugar Ray Leonard to put him on the canvas. He’d rather walk away than see himself get knocked out. He was different when he got money,” added the former champ. “Once he became a millionaire, he felt that he could do anything that he wanted. When Duran lost to Leonard I told him to retire, but he told me no and that he could keep fighting. I explained to him that it was better to retire young and healthy.”
Luis DeCubas: “There’s a lot of theories about no más that only Roberto can answer. Some people pushed all the right buttons and Mike Trainer was one of those guys. He knew that Duran was going to keep partying right after that fight and had the sense to make the rematch right away. Leonard was back in the gym right after that fight. Ray fought a good fight but Ray’s people won that fight. Back then the weigh-in was the day of the fight and he ate a big steak and it gave him stomach problems. That’s what happened.”
Juan Carlos Tapia: “There were no stomach aches, cramps or problems. Simply Duran was not prepared and had to lose a lot of weight. Leonard was beating him real bad and Duran said, ‘No one is going to knock me out.’ He turned his back and he left. It was total frustration.”
Journalist Hank Kaplan: “The morning after no más, I was eating breakfast at the Meridien hotel with my wife and Willie Pastrano. Duran was two tables away eating the biggest breakfast I have ever seen in my life. He had just gone to see a doctor to run a test about his stomach. It was about 9:30 AM and he was eating this huge breakfast with a plate half the size of the table. It didn’t speak well of his upset stomach. The way he looked it was as if he was completely oblivious to what he created. Maybe he was harboring the pain and stupidity of the fight. But he was getting whacked in the mush that night and he probably just said the hell with it. I don’t think it was much more than that.”
Others believed the overriding factor was Duran’s lack of condition. “In the second fight, Duran was out of shape and that’s why he pulled the no más stuff,” said former opponent Lou Bizzarro. “The boxing people couldn’t believe it. I knew he was out of shape for him to quit like that. Even when he put his arm up, Leonard hit him to the body but it didn’t faze him. Still, he knew he couldn’t handle a pace like that. Duran would have destroyed Leonard if they fought at lightweight. Leonard couldn’t shine Duran’s shoes. Leonard was a welterweight who had a lot of things going for him, if you know what I mean. But people pay money to see a good fight and you just can’t do stuff like that. If you get knocked out they accept it but if you make a U-turn and walk out, to me that’s not right. It’s something that a fighter should never do.”
J. Russell Peltz: “Whenever I think of a guy quitting, I think of Carmen Basilio. Here was a guy who would walk through Hell. I saw him attack a referee in the second Fullmer fight for stopping the fight. He was getting his ass kicked. So when I see these guys quit, and I’m not knocking fighters because they all have stones just to be a fighter, but relatively speaking that’s how I feel about that stuff.”
Within the boxing fraternity, fighters and trainers alike searched for answers. Only those who had faced such a situation in the ring could hope to understand it. “I think a lot of fight people saw it as Duran just being frustrated,” said Carlos Palomino. “He was a street guy and just acted without even considering the repercussions. He was probably like, ‘Fuck it. No más.’ I could see it when he took the robe off that he wasn’t the same fighter as the first fight. He didn’t look cut like he had before.
“But that was Duran’s rep, he would blow up so quickly between fights. Even as a lightweight I heard about how he would go back to Panama and get up to 180 pounds. He would just get into shape for the fights that he wanted. He even went up to 200 pounds when he was fighting at 147. He didn’t have the energy against Leonard. He couldn’t push up against the ropes like he did in previous bouts. He couldn’t close on Ray.”
Budd Schulberg: “Duran was a classic example of the importance of thinking in boxing. I covered the first Leonard fight and Leonard was a great fighter who was in there fighting Duran’s fight, punching with him. You realized in that fight he was doing everything wrong. Then, in the second fight, he took Duran apart. But he didn’t do it physically; he did it with his mind. He absolutely frustrated Duran by being so evasive and driving him so crazy, but no punches were being landed. Really nobody was hurt in that fight, but when Leonard stuck out his tongue – which I couldn’t entirely admire him for – at maybe the greatest lightweight that I’ve ever seen, poor Duran threw up his hands and said, ‘No más.’
“Throughout the fight there was a growing frustration with Duran. He would say, ‘C’mon, let’s fight.’ He came out of the streets of Panama, and all he knows is the fight. And he is all of a sudden confronted by someone who says, ‘I’m not really going to fight you, I’m going to destroy you by not fighting.’ It blew his mind. I’ve always said that boxing is a chess match. The chessboard is the body and the face of the opponent. I never saw that proved more than when Duran was outchessed that night.”
One boxing magazine mooted several theories, including the Duran Was Behind And Knew He Wasn’t Going To Beat Sugar Ray No Matter What Theory, the Duran Didn’t Feel Like Fighting And Took The $8 Million And Ran Theory, and the Duran Downed Enough Food The Day Of The Fight To Feed A Family Of Four For A Week Theory. It concluded, however, that Duran
’s walkout was “strictly an instinctive act that he almost immediately regretted,” a reaction to his own lack of fitness and Leonard’s taunting. It remains the most plausible explanation.
Hundreds of times since, Duran has reiterated that his stomach wouldn’t let him continue. “I would do it again if I had the pain,” he says in his scratchy voice in his house in the Cangrejo district as his son, Fulo, climbs on him. “Let’s put it this way, when I got up into the ring I couldn’t even move. I was fighting to breathe and by the third round the pain was really sharp, and I thought to myself that I had to go fifteen rounds of this.”
When Duran finally returned to Panama several weeks later, after his sojourn in Miami, his reception was hostile. People called him a coward. They wrote “Duran is a Traitor” on murals. It was reported in several publications that people vandalized his mother’s home in Los Andes. While her son claimed, “I don’t believe in witches, only in God,” Clara would blame the brujos for his loss, and remembers how the crowds wailed, “Cholo, perdio,” and lamented outside her home. “The saddest moment for me is when we saw Roberto give his back to Leonard,” she said. “That was very, very sad. I knew that Roberto was not well prepared.”
Despite the reaction of many of his countrymen, journalists supported him. “All the country was against Duran,” said Juan Carlos Tapia. “They were very angry. Duran took about three weeks before he came back to Panama. He was ashamed. I made a program when Duran arrived of all the big victories of Duran’s career. In the end I talked about the no más fight and I asked the public to put everything in a balance, his successes and no más. The public understood they had to support Duran in that moment. They forgot about it very quickly. The positives he had done were much more than he had done in one fight.”
Hands of Stone Page 26
