Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [13]
“When he was a child, he loved to fight and I saw him fighting a couple of times. He was already working as a shoeshine boy. I saw him fighting against another shoeshine boy, older than him, but Duran hit him really hard and knocked him down. I then told him he should fight as a boxer and not in the streets anymore; for during that fight I realized that Duran could be a professional boxer. He had the character to be one.”
Plomo had watched scores of little ruffians come and go, arriving full of bravado but unable to stomach the rigors of endless training in the sweltering blood buckets they called gyms in Panama. “Duran came to the gym and asked me if I could be his trainer. He just wouldn’t leave until I gave him an answer,” said Plomo. “I told him, ‘You’re just a kid, but if you demonstrate your boxing skills I will teach you. Then he threw a punch with force and I approved him. I told him to come the next day with a bathing suit and sneakers. He would come every day with the same clothes and shoes.”
With uncommon perseverance, Duran would finally get his uniform, a moment that neither the fighter nor his brother would forget. “Roberto did not have any boxing clothes and I had been given some as a present,” said Toti. “So I gave him the shoes and the shorts, for I was not going to fight. Roberto had started fighting as an amateur boxer and during these fights the people throw coins to the ringside for both the fighters. Roberto started winning these fights.”
Roberto was an unusual child even among the mixed bag that Plomo coached. “After training, Duran’s day was only beginning,” said Plomo. “Duran would go to the streets after training and then to a local park called Santa Ana, where he shined shoes to gain seven cents to bring home and give to his mom. I had several boys that also fought very well, even one who was really good, but he would always cry when hit. When I saw Duran, I realized he resisted being hit and so I decided to leave all the others and devote my time just to him. Duran really had the quality needed.”
That defiant attitude would pay dividends for both men. Plomo took Duran and began to shape him. He began to focus his defiance and funnel his boundless energy.
HAVING STARTED out in the sport in 1956 with his first pupil, Zapatito Molina, Plomo was to witness the original Panamanian boxing boom. The sport first took root there around 1910 when the Canal was finished. Black laborers from Barbados, Jamaica and other islands stayed on and fought each other and visiting U.S. seamen for small purses and side bets in bars and theaters. Though the country’s first world champion, a gangling, flamboyantly homosexual bantamweight called Al Brown, reigned back in the Twenties, he fought most of his contests in the United Sates and Europe, and the sport did not take off in Panama until after the Second World War, in particular when the U.S. increased its military presence in the contentious Canal Zone. In the mid-Fifties, Plomo started working with young prospects, often around the ages of nine or ten.
“There were many places in Maranon, not boxing gyms but places where people were starting to box,” Plomo recalled. “In the yards of houses, people would set up rings and hold boxing matches. They would set down wooden planks where the canvas would be, and then wrap around the ropes. Then people would come and would stage boxing matches. It wasn’t a very big ring, but it was big enough to hold matches.