Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [117]
Duran, a sensitive man, cared deeply about the way Panamanians thought about him. Now a cloud hung over his proud little nation. “We drove all day and all night from the hotel to Miami,” he recalled. “My wife and my kids and Danny Castro, and two Dominican friends of mine: Fabio Matos, his girlfriend, and a friend named Abuela Lopez and his wife. They all stayed with me. That was it. Everybody else abandoned me. I told Eleta to give me the rematch, but he said that Leonard doesn’t want to fight with me. I said, ‘Why not, we’re one-and-one?’”
Duran offered to donate his purse in a third fight to charity, but later reneged. “I read all the stuff in the papers about claiming to fight for charity and my response to that is, ‘Give the last one back; that’s the one you didn’t earn. I’ll pay for the next one if you go the distance,’” said Trainer in an interview with The Ring in 1981. “But there’s a problem. Duran has to go out and prove to the American public that he’s not going to quit again. And he has to go out and fight somebody very significant to show them. Until he does that, another fight with Leonard is unthinkable.”
Duran hid out in Miami as speculation raged. “Nobody knew exactly what happened,” said boxing analyst Gil Clancy. “They were thinking all kinds of things. Everybody was saying, ‘No más, no más.’ He was sick to his stomach, and that’s what it was. He couldn’t help himself. He was going to go in his pants. That was the truth. Leonard fought a good fight and Duran was not ready for him. He gorged himself before the fight with food and malted milks and got hit in the belly and he just fell apart.”
Plomo thought he had the answer to the no más riddle. “Duran has always been an extraordinary boxer, a monster as you say. On many occasions he has fought feeling not well, but no one knew about it. He would not tell. But this time it was the stomach, and besides, this rival had not come to box; he had come to behave like a buffoon. This conduct much angered Duran, who wanted him to fight. This is why he told him he could be the winner. Leonard had not really hit him, it was Duran who actually abandoned the fight.”
But many were unwilling to believe that a man who once threatened to knock out God if he entered the ring had surrendered without even being hurt. Few events in sports history have been more controversial. “I don’t think that was him that night,” said veteran trainer Lou Duva. “When a guy has been fighting all his life, he would fight a tiger. But when he gets in and does that, that wasn’t him that night. Something was wrong. I don’t think it was so much Leonard but I think he was beat before he got into the ring. Something was wrong.”
Bobby Goodman: “The no más was more of him not being as prepared as he was the first time. He was showing his macho and was mad because Leonard didn’t want to fight. I didn’t accept that talk about stomach cramps, and I didn’t know why he did it, but I knew his macho and the fact that this guy wouldn’t meet him toe-to-toe was upsetting to him. You don’t want to fight, forget it. Sticking his nose out and his tongue out, and Duran was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m not fighting anymore.’ It was emotional. Maybe he was misguided but that was his feeling. And I’ve never known him to not do what he felt.”
Bert Sugar: “He’s never fully explained it, but if I can be a ringside psychiatrist practicing without a license, which we all do, it was the schoolyard bully syndrome. If you run from him he’ll catch you; if you hit him he’ll beat you. He said he wasn’t going to fuck around with clowns. The first fight Leonard had the worst game plan since Goliath tried to come forward dead.”
Emanuel Steward: “He just got frustrated by Ray. Ray was so sharp that night and he wouldn’t fight Duran like he wanted to. He was using all of these annoying tactics. So Duran was like, ‘The hell with this. I’m leaving.’ With his mindset it wasn’t like he was quitting; it was a macho thing. He was called a coward but it wasn’t that way. He just wasn’t going to be bothered