Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [143]
“Everyone was saying he was a destroyer,” Duran said. “But when he hit me it didn’t do a thing to me. But I was scared to throw my right hand.” He was still ebullient at a press conference the morning after. Facially unmarked and sporting a yachting cap, he rubbed together the fingers on his swollen right hand and joked, “No good punching, plenty good counting money.” Hearing of a Hagler complaint that he had been thumbed, Duran burst out laughing.
“He win, I lose, he complaining,” he quipped.
18
Tommy Gun
“A lot of people came to me and said to watch him because he was a legend, but I already knew this, and he could do anything he truly wanted to do in that ring. But I felt like my skills and my abilities were greater. More than me watching him, he had to watch me.”
Thomas Hearns on Duran
IT WAS, IN hindsight, a mistake. To fight the world’s best middleweight, take a seven-month layoff, then step straight into a war with the world’s best light-middleweight without so much as a tune-up bordered on madness. But money has a way of barging aside all other considerations in boxing. In the latest in a series of massive bouts, Duran agreed to fight Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns on June 15, 1984, in the arena outside a Caesar’s Palace parking lot in Las Vegas. Hearns’s WBC junior middleweight title belt, which he had won from Wilfred Benitez in December 1982, would be on the line.
Duran should have defended his own 154-pound WBA title against number one contender Mike “Body Snatcher” McCallum, but abdicated his belt for the money bout with Hearns rather than face the mandatory challenger. The skilled McCallum showed up at the Duran-Hearns press conference to protest the decision to push him aside but no one was listening. “Originally Duran was going to fight a rematch with Hagler because he fought him so tough the first time around,” said Emanuel Steward, who managed both McCallum and Hearns. “The WBA told me that Duran was not going to fight McCallum. It was either Duran fight Mike for $500,000 or Hagler for $5 million. Due to Rule Nineteen or something like that, something about the betterment of boxing, it would be Hagler and Duran again. I told Mike that we couldn’t stop the WBA. I said, ‘I tell you what, Mike. Duran can fight Tommy and you could fight the winner for the title.’”
Although McCallum agreed to Steward’s proposition and was put on the undercard of the Hearns-Duran fight, he was angry. “Mike was supposed to fight on the undercard for $250,000, which was the most he’d made to that point,” said Steward. “I wasn’t going to take a penny of that, I told him. Then Mike said that he wasn’t going through with the fight because he was supposed to fight Duran instead of Tommy. So he fell off the card.”
Duran had lapsed back into his old routine and was more interested in making music than training. Some reports had him coming down from as much as 196 pounds. “He was not in the best shape,” said Luis Spada. “The time before that fight, he was involved in his music orchestra. When we signed the contract in the Dominican Republic to fight Hearns, he went to play in the orchestra. Roberto wanted me to stay with him and the orchestra. I said, ‘No, I’m not here for the music. I am going back to Panama.’ After that he was taking too much time with the orchestra. When he needed to train, there was no time left for training.” Duran struggled to focus on the bout at hand. His ultimate aim was a return bout with Leonard but it didn’t pay to underrate the Hit Man.
Tommy Hearns was an elongated stalker of frightening power. His hooks landed like whiplashes and his straight right was one of the hardest in boxing. Hearns also felt Duran was made for him: too small, too old, no longer dangerous. From the fashion in which Duran picked off punches, probed with his left to land the right, pulled his head back, searched for the left hook to the body and even to his defensive tactics, Hearns knew how to respond. Steward taught Hearns to shoot