Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [111]
Angelo Dundee had been secretly delighted to see Duran gulp down a beef broth as soon as he stepped off the scale at the weigh-in, a sure sign that he had gone through hell to lose weight. According to various reports, Duran then consumed two eggs, grits, peaches, toast, an orange, two T-bone steaks, peas, French fries and fried chicken. He rounded off the meal with beef consommé, hot tea, water, Kool-Aid and four large glasses of orange juice.
“I had a steak and a baked potato,” recounted Duran. “You know, boxer’s food. I think the major problem was drinking the hot cup of tea, then the cold glass of water, plus the shots I was given to lose the weight fast. I drank a real hot cup of hot tea because I was very thirsty. But I committed an error because I then drank a real cold glass of water. That’s when the pain felt even worse. And then I started to eat too much because I was dying; I was starving. I felt very weak, and my stomach was hurting me.” The mysterious weight-losing shots were probably diuretics. “Everybody inside my dressing room, including Eleta, all knew what was wrong. But my mindset … I thought the doctor was going to give me a shot to make me strong, but he didn’t do anything.”
Plomo, Duran’s longtime trainer, could read all the angles. They had met when Duran was a child and Plomo had watched intently as the fighter gravitated from small-town hero to universal icon. “Duran was acting like a bohemian,” he said. “He would sleep all day and party all night. Duran got up to 190 and had to get back down to 147. He ate three steaks and had five glasses of orange juice. Before the fight he complained about stomach pains to me. His stomach was stretching out.”
Leonard, for the record, ate two eggs and grits, two pieces of toast, peaches and Kool-Aid for breakfast, then fried chicken, green peas, a glass of water and Kool-Aid for his pre-fight meal. Before the bout, Duran saw him jogging around the Superdome to warm up and thought he looked drawn. “I told myself that I was going to kill him,” said Duran. But suddenly he felt even worse than Leonard had looked. “I start shadowboxing in the dressing room and Plomo comes in and I tell him that my liver was starting to hurt.” His quick-fix training regime had taken its toll.
In fact when Leonard entered the ring he looked anything but weak. Wearing black trunks, shoes and socks for the first time in his professional career, he was making a statement: Now I’m the badass. “Even before the fight started and the referee was giving instructions, Duran was in La-La Land like I was the first fight,” said Leonard. “During the referee’s instructions, in the first fight I’m looking up at the screen and all around and Duran is looking at me like, ‘Man I’m going to tear you up.’ In the second fight, I’m just calm and Duran is in a whole other world. It was a different ballgame.”
“I got this feeling when Ray Charles came out to sing, it was right up Sugar Ray’s alley,” said Duran publicist Bobby Goodman. “And I got an eerie, chilly feeling because it was one of the most stirring pieces before a sporting event that I’d ever heard. I just got goosebumps when Ray did it. It set the tone for the evening.”
THE NIGHT HAD arrived. Ray Charles, after whom Leonard was named, chose to sing not the National Anthem but a highly charged rendition of “America The Beautiful.” He then hugged his namesake and whispered encouragement in his ear. “If that rendition didn’t touch, didn’t move, didn’t cause a chill along your spine,” said Howard Cosell, “I don’t suppose anything could.”
For a man who put faith in the brujos, the vibe that night in New Orleans had to concern Duran. There wasn’t that animalistic anxiety present that had Duran jumping out of his skin in Montreal; he was listless, appearing almost sedated during