Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [151]
In January 1988, Duran was hit by a claim for $4.3 million from the American Internal Revenue Service. The IRS said he had understated his taxable income from 1977 to 1984 by $3.8 million, with an additional $618,000 in penalties. His Miami lawyer claimed the assessment was “greatly incorrect.”
Still on the comeback trail and hoping for a final big payday with Ray Leonard, in February a pudgy Duran – “like a little beer barrel” according to US trainer Gil Clancy – outpointed Ricky Stackhouse at 162 pounds in the Atlantic City Convention Center. He showed flashes of his greatness. In round two, he sidestepped a jab and dislodged Stackhouse’s mouthpiece with a straight right. In round six, he sent Stackhouse to the canvas. In round eight, he dropped him again with a beautiful combination. He was getting back to where he wanted to be, though he claimed he’d had to lose two stone in a month to make the weight.
DeCubas had partnered with Jeff Levine and Mike Acri, a booking agent from Erie, Pennsylvania. Levine paid Duran a $30,000 retainer for promotional rights, and set up the Stackhouse bout. “What was amazing was the fan appeal,” said manager Mike Acri. “When he went back to the dressing room after the Stackhouse fight and walked back out and there were hundreds of people … it was like he was Mick Jagger, just hundreds of people chasing him. These people left the stands and started to run after him. He was the king of macho and was as big as Ali for the Latinos. We used to tell him, ‘You’re fucking Roberto Duran!’ And he would be like, ‘You’re right.’ And we would motivate him.”
At the Tropicana Resort in Atlantic City on March 14, Duran stopped Paul Thorne at the end of six rounds with a badly cut lip, though he suffered a cut eye himself from a clash of heads. Duran knocked Thorne down in the second and split his lip nearly to his nose. “The punches began to rain down,” Thorne, a recording artist, later remembered in a song. “He hit me with a dozen hard uppercuts and my corner threw in the towel. I asked him why he had to knock me out, and he summed it up real well. He said, “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.’”
“Now the champions will want to give me a fight because they are sure it is easy to beat me,” Duran told KO magazine. He had long since learned to play the media. “Making conversations with him are studies in frustration,” wrote’s KO’s Jeff Ryan. “Just as soon as Duran learns that he is speaking to a reporter, he utilizes the only defensive skills that Father Time hasn’t yet stolen from him. Up goes the guard. Out goes any touch with reality.” Yet Ryan and other writers had written off Duran so many times, he had a right to be annoyed at them. “Who is anyone to say I can’t?” said Duran angrily. “If I want to fight, and I get hurt, that’s my problem, not yours. Everybody keeps saying I was, I was. I still am! How can I hurt my image? The name I built up cannot be torn down. I’m Duran.”
It was not only the writers who were deeply skeptical of his latest comeback, however. Even the most knowledgeable fight observers felt Duran was finished, washed up. His heart made promises