Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [11]
“One day my brother Domingo told me he was going down to the gym,” he remembered. “Everybody would go over and practice there around noon. At that time there were these little blue bags and the only thing that could fit into the bags was shirt and shorts, nothing else. I liked the way the uniforms looked.” Just as he had trailed Chaflan through the dusty streets of the city, so he tagged along with Toti to the Gimnasio Nacional (later Neco de la Guardia) in front of the National Guard headquarters on Avenue A. He knew that boxers could get paid for beating up people in the ring, and money meant the difference between eating and not.
“I was carrying the little bag and we’re walking to the gym, which is very close to where we live,” said Duran. “When I was carrying the bag people would ask me if I was a boxer, and I said, ‘No I’m not.’ My brother told me to sit outside and wait for him. There was a banister and I sat there and waited. When he came out of the dressing room, he was wearing his boxing shorts and his boxing shoes. I watched him practice that day.”
It was a tough gym, packed with former and future national champions. “A boxer named Adolfo Osses told my brother to help him spar,” said Duran. “My brother put on headgear, gloves and a jockstrap. I marveled at my brother’s uniform. When he finished sparring, I said, ‘Toti, how can I get the same gear that you are wearing?’”
“If you become a boxer they give you all that,” replied Toti.
“And that’s how I became a boxer.”
Toti could punch but he wasn’t cut out for the ring. “I knocked Adolfo Osses down because I hit hard,” said Toti. “He was a professional boxer and I was an amateur. [But] I had a problem with my nose and my nose used to bleed when I would jump rope; that is why I was not able to fight. Duran also had the same problem, but he got rid of that later. I did not. When I knocked Osses down, Duran got enthusiastic about boxing. Duran was only a boy at that time but he had such a strong hand that even Osses was not able to stand his blows. Grandma [Ceferina Garcia] used to hit hard. In my family we all have a heavy hand.”
Barely eight years old, Roberto had to spar with the experienced boxers like all the others. “That is what boxing consists of; you may fear no one,” said Toti. “I started fighting first and I taught Roberto how to fight. I did not like to see my brother get hit, so I showed him how to fight. This started many years ago, when he was seven or eight.”
It wasn’t long before Roberto, already obsessed with wrestling and running, was noticed by Sammy Medina, a former national bantamweight and featherweight champion who had once killed an opponent in the ring. “One day a little kid with a shoeshine box walked into the Neco de La Guardia gymnasium,” remembered Medina. “He put on a pair of gloves and started to box with a boy smaller than he was. I was impressed by the way he moved his head to dodge the blows and I called him over. He said he wanted to be a boxer. I began to teach him and I had him for a couple of years, boxing amateur about three times.”
It was hard to train when you didn’t even have enough food to eat. “The only problem we both had was poverty,” said Toti. “We would sometimes go to train and get hungry but had no money for food, so we used to go to sell newspapers to make some money. And the following day we had to start running really early, but we were not strong enough. I remember we once started running, thinking it was five o’clock, but we had made a mistake. It was one o’clock in the morning and the police stopped us. We were coming from the bridge towards this area and the policemen could not believe we had mistaken the hour. Roberto liked boxing so much that he would sometimes skip sleeping and go training on the beach in Chorrillo.”
Toti and other jobbing boxers made a mere fifty cents a contest. Even established boxers received only a pittance