Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [109]
Judging by the mass of backslappers and party people surrounding him, Duran had no intention of staying in shape, or of fighting again any time soon. “I got back to Panama and I felt like the king of the world,” he said. “I start drinking and get fat, I am with women up and down. I go to New York and it’s the same thing there. I get up to two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Eleta should have never taken that fight that soon. He should have given me time to prepare myself. They said that they offered Eleta ten million dollars to accept the fight, but the truth is that I don’t know how much they gave him.”
The rematch was officially signed by early September and scheduled for November 25, 1980 in the vast New Orleans Superdome. Duran started training late and had only about two months to lose what he claimed was seventy-eight pounds, though other reports claimed it was more likely that he had to reduce from 185 pounds rather than 225. Certainly he looked decidedly pudgy when he sat at ringside for the pitiful Larry Holmes-Muhammad Ali title fight in Vegas on October 2, a travesty which saw the most famous and charismatic sportsman on the planet reduced to a stumbling punchbag. As soon as the beaten Ali’s retirement was announced, the Panamanian leapt into the press bench shouting in Spanish, “Now I’m the Greatest!” He was egged on by Latin commentators, who reached their microphones towards him, but others were embarrassed by his display and he was eventually asked, politely, to sit. Duran was reported as “flabby, scaling at least middleweight” by Boxing News editor Harry Mullan. Yet at that moment in boxing history, he was indeed the greatest.
His preparation, in Miami Beach, continued badly and from the moment he and his posse eventually arrived in New Orleans, Eleta felt he could lose. “He committed so many mistakes in training without anybody knowing,” said the white-haired patrician years later. “I took him to New Orleans in plenty of time. They say he drank beer and ate too much. There were all these manzanillos hanging around. I told him to get all these people out of here but he said they were his friends and he needed them around. Some of them were mixed up in drugs. Some claimed Roberto was also, but I don’t think so.
“His friends were bringing him food late at night. Ray Arcel came to me and said, ‘Carlos, something is wrong. I am training Roberto and he is not losing the weight. He’s gaining weight.’ I find out that someone in Panama, they call him Abuela, was taking food to his room, beer and this and that. He was telling Duran that the handlers don’t know what they are doing. Fifteen days before the fight he was twenty pounds over the weight. Arcel told me that I had to postpone the fight but when I told my friend the promoter, he told me it was impossible because he put a lot of money into that fight. I made him sign a contract where he has to put all the money fifteen days before the fight in Panama. When Duran entered the ring, that money came to us. I saved his purse in that fight.
“That’s why I made the rematch with Leonard in a couple months. Roberto was out of control. I said if I don’t go and sign that fight he will go and lose with nobody. I tried to put