Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [113]
Leonard continued to sneak in punches, a left and short right to Duran’s jaw. Seconds before the stoppage a befuddled Duran speared Leonard into the ropes with his head. With thirty seconds left Duran pawed at Leonard. Despite not taking much punishment, Duran put up his right fist to signal enough. Leonard saw Duran’s guard down and hit him with a two-punch combination to the body that didn’t seem to affect Duran before referee Octavio Meyran stepped between them. Duran turned his back on them both.
The bemused referee urged him to continue.
“Pelea, pelea.” Box, box.
Duran walked away and raised and waved his glove again, a sign of surrender. He then looked back towards Leonard, who had moved away to the other side of the ring, and gestured towards him as if simulating masturbation. Leonard, unable to understand Spanish and suspecting a trick to lure him in, came over with his fists up, ready to continue. With twenty-three seconds left in the round, Meyran made a karate-chopping motion to urge the fighters to come together and resume. Instead he received another shake of the right fist from Duran.
“No quiero pelear con el payaso,” said Duran. I do not want to fight with this clown. According to Meyran, Duran also said in broken English, “I don’t box anymore.”
“When I asked why,” the referee said later, “Duran said, ‘No más, no más.’”
Then Leonard heard his brother, Roger, yelling, “He quit on you Ray. He quit.” Leonard ran and jumped on a ringpost and applauded himself. Roger stormed into the ring and went to punch Duran in the face; the fighter put his fists up and stepped back.
As Duran’s cornermen climbed onto the ring apron, Hands of Stone trudged toward them. The venerable Arcel and Brown, men who had seen everything, were as stunned as the thousands of Panamanians who had bet their paychecks on Duran. “I almost fainted,” Arcel told Ring magazine. “I thought maybe he broke his arm or something. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain it. All I know is I’m quitting boxing. After sixty-three years, and now this? I’ve had enough. I have never seen anything like this. A big fight like this, and all the money.”
Somewhere Duran’s mother, Clara Samaniego, lit a candle and prayed for her son. No one was listening anymore.
OUTSIDE THE RING, confusion reigned. “We didn’t know what happened,” said ringside reporter Bert Sugar. “The referee didn’t know what was happening. It didn’t calibrate. They said he was quitting and someone next to me said, ‘Bullshit.’ I didn’t hear ‘no más’ but I saw him go like that [wave his glove]. Leonard hit him with a bodacious uppercut to the body and he didn’t blink. And they’re going to tell me it’s stomach pains? He wasn’t even looking at Leonard.”
Steve Farhood was sitting a few seats away from Bert Sugar. “The New York Times business bureau had a function for the fortieth anniversary of JFK’s death. They had great guests who were all in Dallas the day of Kennedy’s death. One of them was talking about how he never [before] saw a rumor literally move through a room,” said Farhood. “And you don’t know what the rumor is, but you can see it turning. It was the same in New Orleans, except we saw it actually happen but we didn’t believe it happened. I remember a head turning to me and saying something and me turning my head to the right to tell someone else. And we were all looking for confirmation that we just saw what we saw.”
The simple, awful truth was that Duran had broken the unwritten contract he made the day he stepped in the boxing ring: To punch till the end. There was no need for translation, he had surrendered, demolishing the Latin notion of valor that he had helped build. Speculation raged as everyone in the arena searched for an explanation. Some were already starting to call Duran