Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [139]
Duran was solid with Felicidad but he could have easily ended up with someone else. “In Las Vegas, he met a very pretty Cuban woman who loved him very much,” recalled his mother Clara. “She was called Silvia Garcia. She worked in a hotel. I do not know what happened to Duran, why he did not return to her later. She was a very good woman. She used to send me pretty presents from the States. They lived together for some time, but then they separated. After that, Roberto met Felicidad.” Mireya added: “He has a daughter called Dalia, and had also one with a Cuban woman.”
A story made waves in local papers that Duran and Hagler had a less than cordial introduction days before the fight. Both camps met by chance on the Dunes Hotel golf course and Hagler apparently put up his arms and made a point not to look Duran’s way as they crossed paths. To Duran’s followers, the gesture was a clear sign that Hagler was intimidated. Hagler seemed to hold a respect for Duran that belied his usual contempt for his opponents. “I think Duran’s already starting to get to Hagler psychologically,’’ said Angelo Dundee a week before the fight. “He knows how to psych guys out before the fight.’’
Having himself nixed a mega-fight with Hagler, Ray Leonard weighed in on the subject: “I expect Duran to fight Hagler the same way I would have fought Hagler, the same way I fought Duran in our second fight,” he told a reporter. “Box him, go to the body. Not toe-to-toe, but test him at times. If he makes a mistake, jump on him, stand there and punch, then get out. You can’t be one-dimensional against Hagler, your mind must be a sophisticated computer. Just react. You can’t stop and think or he’ll be all over you.’’
The thirty-two-year-old Duran may have been the WBA junior middleweight champion but Hagler, twenty-nine, had cleaned out the competition in his divison. Hagler was fighting the first of his two-fight contract with Top Rank Inc. The fight was held in a sold-out crowd of 15,200 in the outside arena at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, and shown in close to 400 closed-circuit locations in fifty countries. Ring magazine polled twenty-five boxing insiders and not one predicted a Duran victory.
During the official press conference, Duran offered to fight Hagler “right now, why wait?” To which Hagler responded, “I thought the man couldn’t speak English.” Though both seemed confident, Duran looked in charge. One reporter covering the pre-fight hype noted that Hagler had become a guest at Roberto’s fight.
“I think beating Davey Moore proved to people and proved to me that I still have all my skills,’’ Duran told a reporter. “I still have my power and my speed and most of all, my experience. I think the key to beating Hagler is to get inside and I’m smart enough to know how to do it. With someone with his height and reach, you have to get to his body. He’ll try to work his jab but he can’t keep me off. I’ll get inside and once I do, I’ll prove to Marvin Hagler that I can punch with the middleweights. Hagler hasn’t been tested in years. Nobody’s hit him. I’m going to hit him. We’ll find out if he can take a real punch.’’
Marvin countered, “He likes to brawl and maul but I don’t intend letting him get close to me. I can box, I’ve proved that to people, and I’m going to box Roberto Duran. I’m going to pop away at him and keep him off balance. I’ll be sticking him with the jab and when I see the opportunity, I’m going to nail him with combinations. I really want to bust him up. The more his people talk and the more they call me names, the more I get up, the more damage I want to do. The thing about Roberto Duran is that he’s not afraid to get