Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [144]
“Duran wasn’t a spent fighter at that time,” said Steward. “He was coming off a great fight with Marvin. I always liked to work with speed and it was Tommy’s speed that was too much for Roberto. When we prepared for Duran we didn’t have any short guys for Tommy to work with. But we worked on many little tricks for Duran. It was all about speed and Tommy would say, ‘Duran won’t be as quick as these guys I’m training with.’”
In contrast, little went right for the Duran camp. “When we left Panama we went to Nassau in the Bahamas,” said Plomo. “He had been drinking and was throwing up, which lowers his defenses. We spent two months there but he was not able to train there even once. He was sick all the time. After two months there that Duran had not been able to train even one full day, he was not in good condition to fight against Tommy Hearns. If Duran ran, then he would not be able to do anything else, and if he trained, then he could not run. When we arrived in Las Vegas, Duran had still six pounds to lose. He had to run in the morning and then go to a sauna before getting on the scale. After this Duran thanked God because he had arrived to the required weight. He said he did not know what would happen during the fight but he could not cancel it, for he would have to face a claim in such a case and that would be too expensive.” Duran admitted to this author that he trained only two weeks in the Bahamas and one in Hollywood for the bout.
Two days before the bout, Duran told a New York Times reporter, “More than anything else, I wanted a rematch with Leonard. He was the best I ever fought, and I wanted to show him that I could beat him when I was at my best.” It suggested his mind was not on the job in hand, even though his opponent was every bit as formidable as Leonard. Hearns’s goal, meanwhile, was an assault on Marvin Hagler’s middleweight crown.
Before the bout, a story made the rounds that Hearns burned Duran mentally without trying. If true, it marked the first time that Duran was intimidated before a bout. Duran was a past master at pre-fight intimidation. With some it worked, with others it didn’t. Thus, Duran expressed his fears and insecurities through intimidation. When it didn’t work, he lost an edge. For years he had been typecast as a maniacal fighter with little control. Now, Hearns had switched the roles. At one point before the bout, Hearns pulled Duran’s hat down over his eyes, a sure-fire mistake in any setting.
“That happened, sure,” said Hearns’s trainer Emanuel Steward. “Roberto just ran away when Tommy pulled his hat down. I don’t know what it was, but Tommy always intimidated Roberto. Even when Tommy was like twenty years old and he was at a fight with Roberto in Las Vegas. I’ll never forget because Roberto was talking to someone and Tommy went up and tapped him on the shoulder. Roberto quickly backed away when he saw Tommy. It was like he saw a ghost or an evil spirit. That was Duran’s role; he was the intimidator. But Tommy always possessed something, like a spiritual thing over Roberto. Roberto was always passive around him whether it was at the press conference or on the street. It was very unlike Roberto.”
To Hearns, whose memory is sketchy, the hat incident seemed harmless. “It could have been true,” said Hearns. “Me and Roberto were playing around and I pulled his hat down. I thought it was just build-up for the fight. I didn’t look at it like it could have been something to make a man change his heart. Just playing around.” Hearns