Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [119]
Budd Schulberg: “Duran was a classic example of the importance of thinking in boxing. I covered the first Leonard fight and Leonard was a great fighter who was in there fighting Duran’s fight, punching with him. You realized in that fight he was doing everything wrong. Then, in the second fight, he took Duran apart. But he didn’t do it physically; he did it with his mind. He absolutely frustrated Duran by being so evasive and driving him so crazy, but no punches were being landed. Really nobody was hurt in that fight, but when Leonard stuck out his tongue – which I couldn’t entirely admire him for – at maybe the greatest lightweight that I’ve ever seen, poor Duran threw up his hands and said, ‘No más.’
“Throughout the fight there was a growing frustration with Duran. He would say, ‘C’mon, let’s fight.’ He came out of the streets of Panama, and all he knows is the fight. And he is all of a sudden confronted by someone who says, ‘I’m not really going to fight you, I’m going to destroy you by not fighting.’ It blew his mind. I’ve always said that boxing is a chess match. The chessboard is the body and the face of the opponent. I never saw that proved more than when Duran was outchessed that night.”
One boxing magazine mooted several theories, including the Duran Was Behind And Knew He Wasn’t Going To Beat Sugar Ray No Matter What Theory, the Duran Didn’t Feel Like Fighting And Took The $8 Million And Ran Theory, and the Duran Downed Enough Food The Day Of The Fight To Feed A Family Of Four For A Week Theory. It concluded, however, that Duran’s walkout was “strictly an instinctive act that he almost immediately regretted,” a reaction to his own lack of fitness and Leonard’s taunting. It remains the most plausible explanation.
Hundreds of times since, Duran has reiterated that his stomach wouldn’t let him continue. “I would do it again if I had the pain,” he says in his scratchy voice in his house in the Cangrejo district as his son, Fulo, climbs on him. “Let’s put it this way, when I got up into the ring I couldn’t even move. I was fighting to breathe and by the third round the pain was really sharp, and I thought to myself that I had to go fifteen rounds of this.”
When Duran finally returned to Panama several weeks later, after his sojourn in Miami, his reception was hostile. People called him a coward. They wrote “Duran is a Traitor” on murals. It was reported in several publications that people vandalized his mother’s home in Los Andes. While her son claimed, “I don’t believe in witches, only in God,” Clara would blame the brujos for his loss, and remembers how the crowds wailed, “Cholo, perdio,” and lamented outside her home. “The saddest moment for me is when we saw Roberto give his back to Leonard,” she said. “That was very, very sad. I knew that Roberto was not well prepared.”
Despite the reaction of many of his countrymen, journalists supported him. “All the country was against Duran,” said Juan Carlos Tapia. “They were very angry. Duran took about three weeks before he came back to Panama. He was ashamed. I made a program when Duran arrived of all the big victories of Duran’s career. In the end I talked about the no más fight and I asked the public to put everything in a balance, his successes and no más. The public understood they had to support Duran in that moment. They forgot about it very quickly. The positives he had done were much more than he had done in one fight.”
Duran refused to leave his house. Locked in like a caged animal, hiding from the world, he slumped into a depression and railed bitterly at his critics. “Hypocrites, all of them,” he said. “I came home and I wouldn’t leave. My wife was telling me to go out and have fun with my friends. I just didn’t feel like going out