Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [136]
To Duran, they were all hypocrites as he would remember the familiar faces that he hadn’t seen in years. “When Duran was fighting and the fight was on TV, his fight had the greatest rating, everybody’s watching all over Panama,” said Spada. “When we came back from Moore fight, they send Duran in Miami in the President’s own plane. They brought us here to Paitilla, there was thousands of fans waiting for him. We went to the president’s house and Duran is one man who has made more Panamanians happy than anybody else. We will have other champions, but not like Roberto.”
There was a reunion of sorts in Panama. There had been lingering rumors that Eleta had stolen money from Duran. “Time passes on and I go to eat at a restaurant where I was going to have a press conference. What a coincidence, when the conference is over, politics begins,” said Duran. “One of the waiters tells me that Eleta is in the other room. In my mind, this bastard is in here. I go to where he is and I say, ‘How are you Eleta? Champion of the world, did you see this?’ He’s with a friend and you could see the tears in his eyes. His friend tells me that he needs me for political reasons. I don’t care about politics or Carlos Eleta. I’m the new champion and you doubted me. And I left.”
Eleta refuted the charge on many occasions. “All those people say what they want and Duran would believe them,” he said. “I never took anything from him. He was a man so worried about what the people around him said and thought of him.”
Although the common belief in Panama is that Eleta did skim from Duran’s purses, there were those who sided with Eleta.
“When I found out that Eleta took fifty grand from me, I made a big commotion about it,” Duran said. “Before I make the story any longer, he paid my money back piece by piece. He wanted me to sign a piece of paper that said I didn’t owe him anything else and everything was settled. It wasn’t Eleta himself, he sent a lawyer to sign the thing. My father-in-law tells the lawyer, ‘No, Duran can’t sign that paper because we don’t know if Eleta still owes him any more money.’ At some point he screws me out of my money but I can’t elaborate on a lot of the specifics.”
“I’ve heard all of the stories,” said LA-based promoter Don Chargin. “At the time I met Roberto he was young, and they change. They’re willing to do anything. I remember how close he and Eleta were. So I was really surprised at the break-up.”
Chargin saw firsthand how money destroyed many relationships. Having been close to several fighters throughout his career, he also had been privy to the combustibility of dealing with high-strung, spontaneous personalities like Duran. Often, with Don King as its pioneer, the sport dictated that promoters receive a bad rap and boxers always are the victims.
“After Leonard, [Duran] was the boss,” recalled Chargin. “It was pretty hard back then. Nobody could tell him what to do. I think he hurt himself. You always have to be careful because fighters blame people … they say, ‘It was my manager.’ The real good managers look out for the fighter’s welfare all the time.”
After the win over Moore, Eleta was a stranger to Duran, who must have felt a twinge of sadness watching another male figure check out of his life. First his real father left, then Chaflan and father figure Jose Manuel Gomez died, now the man who Duran once called Papa had turned on him. Or that’s how Duran perceived it. Consolation came from the adulation of his supporters. “An outpouring of acceptance and appreciation of Duran was never at a higher pitch,” said Sugar. “He wasn’t supposed to beat Davey Moore and yet all