Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [121]
A reluctant wave where a middle finger used to be.
15
King of the Bars
“Sometimes I look like a dragon, sometimes I’m radar.”
Wilfred Benitez
NO ONE TOOK the debacle harder than Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown. Arcel would be asked about it for the rest of his life, but even the man who had seen almost everything in boxing and in life was at a loss to explain it. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he later told an interviewer. “Something happened, and we don’t know why he did it. To this day I don’t know and the kid himself doesn’t know. You know, we’re all human beings. Unless you’ve boxed, you don’t know the physical and mental torture. I mean it’s torture. It’s like a guy waiting to be electrocuted.”
According to the author Ronald K. Fried, in his book Cornermen, Freddie Brown fell into a lasting depression. Randy Gordon, editor of The Ring, told Fried he returned to New York on a plane with Brown. “Freddie cried like a baby on my shoulder,” said Gordon. “Because he had seen them all. Jack Johnson and Benny Leonard. And Harry Greb. And he was always saying Roberto Duran could probably beat any one of them in his prime … And then he went out and quit – something that Freddie Brown really could not understand any real fighter doing, much less Roberto Duran.” The old cutman locked himself away at home, refused to take calls, stopped even watching fights.
Brown and Arcel also fell out. There had been tension between the two for some time over who did the most work in the camp. Arcel, an articulate and considered interviewee, tended to draw press attention while Brown felt that he was Duran’s true conditioner, dealing with the fighter’s tantrums and moods until Arcel swanned in a week or so before a fight from his day job to “oversee” things and run the corner. Brown also felt Arcel was wrong to tell reporters he had no idea why Duran quit; to Brown, you covered for your fighter no matter what. That was why he had put out the story about stomach cramps. “If they knew in Panama he’d quit, they’d have murdered him when he got back,” Brown told Dick Young of the New York Post in 1984. “So I made the alibi.”
Eleta went back to Panama, and berated his fighter through the press. Never one to hold back, he pleaded with Duran to lose the hangers-on. Another of Duran’s mentors, Omar Torrijos, also took no más badly. “After Roberto did that, Torrijos never talked to him again,” claimed Eleta. Duran claimed that he and Torrijos had resolved their differences concerning the bout. “The General said that many Panamanians are hypocrites, and he knows the people better than I do,” Duran told reporters in Panama. “The General had considered this case like that of Judas. These people, that were with Duran before the fight, had abandoned him after it.”
The country’s mood of gloom deepened when Torrijos died in a mysterious airplane crash on 30 July 1981, on a flight to the town of Colecito. The tragedy was related in the book Our Man in Panama by John Dinges. “It was said that Torrijos had no sense of danger and forced his pilots to fly no matter what the weather. That day, he chose to fly despite the storm front shrouding the mountains around Colecito, and heedless of the relative inexperience of the pilot. The plane struck the top of a hill while the pilot was maneuvering for a landing. All aboard were killed.” It ended a twelve-year reign in which compassion for the poor had made him the most revered figure in Panama since independence in 1903. The country had lost the head of the National Guard but also a calming figure who acted as a rational mediator between other Latin American countries. It affected Duran as deeply as the death of Chaflan.
It would also mark a decline in Panama’s fortunes. Inevitably a military power struggle followed the President’s death. Many thought the crash had actually been engineered by his understudy, Manuel Noriega. The country fell into a political quagmire as various factions competed for supremacy.