Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [150]
With a few rounds remaining, both men had swelling around their eyes and Duran was spitting blood from a cut inside his mouth. If Duran hustled the eighth from Sims, he was nearly as fatigued in the ninth. Despite battling in the tenth, Duran couldn’t maintain the pace, and in the end youth and strength prevailed, though only just. At the end of a grueling ten-rounder, the split-decision went to the rugged, unspectacular Sims. If a point had not been taken from Duran for low blows in the eighth round, he would have managed a draw. Duran earned $100,000 for his work. Judge Art Lurie scored it 96-94 for Duran, while Bill Graham, 97-92, and Jerry Roth, 96-94, favored Sims, who finished looking like the loser, with his left eye almost closed and his mouth bleeding.
“Duran sure has a lot left,” Sims told a reporter after the bout. “I made a mistake by letting down in the middle rounds. I knew that Duran was always dangerous and he shook me up a couple times. I got a little weary and paid for it. But I knew I was the clear-cut winner and this was just one hell of a fight.”
The loss was a setback but Duran had been in the fight all the way. “If this was Roberto’s Duran’s last stand,” said Boxing News, “at least he went out the way we all hoped he would, spitting defiance to the end.” KO magazine called it “Roberto Duran’s Last Night In The Spotlight.” As usual, however, Duran had not been reading the script. “If the people, if the press want me to come back, I come back,” he said. “If you want to see Duran fight, he will fight.”
He was out of miracles, or so it seemed. The nostalgic reunion with Luis Spada had run its course, and now Duran concentrated on his salsa, following in the steps of his brother Armando, who had formed the popular group Arena Blanco. The boxer began to tour with his own band, yet he still didn’t feel his fight career was over. That December he met a cab driver and part-time herbalist named Carlos Hibbard at a music gig in New York. Hibbard, a Panamanian Jew living in Brooklyn, had no boxing education, placed his faith in the mezuzah he hung around his neck, and drove a cab without a license. Duran, who was always attracted to mystics and quacks, was amused at his chutzpah and intrigued by his ideas on diet and weight loss. Somehow a man with no steady job and whose motto was “you can’t be a loser if you got the mezuzah” gained his ear, and months later, Hibbard joined the Duran team as a nutrition guru. By 1989, he was reportedly earning one-quarter of Duran’s purses, by which time speculation was also widespread that Duran had exhausted most of his money and even had dipped into his children’s trust funds.
Now under the management of Miami-based Cuban Luis DeCubas, he would fight five times over the next two years. “I got Duran after the Robbie Sims loss. I was living in Miami at the time,” said DeCubas. “I got him the fight with Victor Claudio. I was working as his manager, and pretty much doing, everything like finding sparring partners, getting opponents, and locating a place for camp. When I saw him at the airport in Miami, he was 227 pounds. He looked me in the eyes and told me he would become champion again, and I believed him. I was a young guy and here was Roberto Duran telling me he was going to be champion. Of course I believed him.”
Moving away from his Vegas stomping grounds, the Duran camp headed to the East Coast to Miami and the Atlantic City casino stage. On 16 May 1987, he earned a unanimous decision over Victor Claudio, a former Olympic boxer from Puerto Rico, in front of 3,500 fans at the Convention Center, Miami. Duran ripped open a cut over Claudio’s eye in the third, and knocked him down in the ninth round with a left hook, but couldn’t put him away. His hand troubles also flared again, and he headed straight to Mount Sinai Hospital for X-rays after the fight.
He returned to Miami that September to take on Paraguay’s Juan Carlos Gimenez,