Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [1]
“No quiero pelear con el payaso,” says Duran. I do not want to fight with this clown. He repeats the words, but a ringside broadcaster claims to hear him say “no más,” the Spanish for “no more.” The phrase will live in sporting infamy.
After a second, Leonard’s brother Roger yells, “He quit on you Ray.” Leonard runs over and jumps on the ringpost. The fight is done.
People would later dub the man a coward, a fake, a phony. They said laziness and gluttony had precipitated his downfall; fame had accelerated it.
The first part of Duran’s career, his life, was over. Act Two was about to begin.
EVEN BEFORE I went to Panama, I knew one thing for sure about Roberto Duran: The man was not a quitter. I didn’t understand the contradictions of the no más fight but also didn’t buy into the hype. When I told people that I was headed to his homeland, they joked about the infamous moment when he left the ring seven rounds early. “Tell him ‘no más’ for me,” they said.
With a face that reminded some of Che Guevara, others of Charles Manson, Duran’s feral stare never left me. His look was compelling, his image enigmatic, his fighting skills unsurpassed. In the ring, Duran came forward and intimidated; he didn’t know any other way. Those who stood up to him paid the price in blood and hurt; those who ran were pursued and hunted down. Sportswriters devoured stories of his wild childhood, told of him swimming across bays with a bag of mangoes held in his mouth to feed his family. His eyes were “dark coals of fire” and anything that he sneered at “froze” in terror. But who was this man? Was he really pure evil lodged in the body of a 135-pound prince, or was it all an act?
Even when his ability to intimidate had waned, the Doo-ran, Doo-ran cheers still echoed around sold-out arenas. Even when he was only a quarter of his former self, a sad, overweight Elvis making his last call, he was still Duran. Watching those final years of futility it became clear that legends never die, they just age. So when the thought of finding and telling the Duran story crept into my head, I couldn’t resist. With the purpose of finding this man, I decided to leave my job, friends and family and head to Panama City. I had a smattering of Spanish, a laptop and some old Duran fights on tape. I didn’t even know if he spoke English, or how well.
I was six years old on that November night in New Orleans in 1980. I wanted to know about the young Duran, the kid whose face came to be plastered all over Panama City, and how someone who had nothing became a symbol for hope in a Third World country that suffered every day. I wanted to see how the mere glimpse of Duran’s smile could make a difference. Few people have the influence on a country as Duran does in Panama and the only way I would understand it was to follow him there. The only way I could comprehend the strength, the character of this man was to eat patacones and empanadas with his people, sip coconut juice straight from the fruit, dance salsa, and listen to the music of Osvaldo Ayala, Los Rabanes or Sandra y Sammy. I had to go to Guarare and the gyms in Chorrillo to let the legend seep into my blood amid the 100-degree heat. All his old managers, promoters, friends and schoolteachers would have something to say and I had to absorb it.
Finding him was another story. Somehow in Panama everyone knows Duran personally. He is everyone’s buen amigo. So when a taxi dropped me off at Duran’s home in the El Cangrejo neighborhood the night I arrived, I knew I was onto him. Duran never showed that night, but I knew deep down that I would find him and learn the secrets that many in Panama claimed already to know. “That’s the reason that many people respect him because he never forget where he come from,” said Chavo, his oldest son. “He’s humble and always told me, ‘Remember I’m from El Chorrillo, a poor neighborhood, so you have to be humble.’ The people respect that. He’s always helping the poor people,