Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [152]
Duran beat the unheralded Jeff Lanas on a split decision in Chicago on 1 October 1988. Far from looking good, he seemed to be behind by the middle of the fight and only an aggressive finish secured the win. Once again he had struggled to make weight and had to go running the day before the fight in a bid to shed a final six pounds. In the last round, he had stuck out his chin to taunt Lanas but was too slow to pull it away and was caught by several blows. It was a humiliation that augured badly for his challenge against the powerful, aggressive Barkley. “Roberto’s an old man,” declared one headline. Still, his camp believed this fight was the impetus for his showdown with the Blade.
The Lanas bout almost hadn’t come off, as Duran ran into a problem outside the ring. He had a daughter, Dalia, to Silvia Garcia, who lived in Miami. “Roberto was sitting on the couch with his arm around his pregnant ‘wife’ and in walks, guess who, Felicidad,” said Acri. “All hell broke loose. Felicidad went nuts. I almost had to postpone the fight because of it.”
As much as Duran loved to party and have a good time, few talk about him solely as a womanizer. Felicidad allegedly blew millions at casinos but she and Roberto also had an extremely loving, and to some extent open, relationship typical of many Panamanian couples. “He told me this story about this girl in Chile,” said Acri. “She smoked marijuana and then they had sex. She starts breathing real heavy and Roberto was like, ‘Is that from the marijuana or from our passion?’ She looks at him and goes, ‘I have asthma.’ He told that story in front of Felicidad.
“He wasn’t always into the women that much. He knew how to take advantage of celebrity but all fighters do. He wouldn’t have sex with Felicidad three or four weeks before a fight. He was too disciplined. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of women wanted to have sex with him but they weren’t flocking to him like he was Oscar De La Hoya or even Hector Camacho.”
HAD THE TWO met at night in a New York ghetto, it would have been the streetfight of all time. The Stone and the Blade. No guns or knives. Just a black gangbanger from the South Bronx and a ferocious Cholo who once beat five men in a brawl.
For all the talk about how badass Duran had once been, no one intimidated like Iran Barkley. Six feet and 160 pounds of pent-up rage, he was Ronnie Lott coming over the middle on an unsuspected wideout; he was Fred Williamson without the ’fro, with Jim Brown’s scowl. Barkley didn’t defeat people; he fucked them up royally. He was a ghetto nightmare who had run with the Black Spades, a ferocious street gang that numbered hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa among its former recruits. When bored of watching the local drug dealers, Barkley and his crew would “go around beating people up, stabbing them and hitting people with lead pipes.” Barkley was so menacing he might have forced some of Duran’s backup in Chorrillo to get backup.
He had finished a job on Thomas Hearns that Duran couldn’t even start. Cut badly above both eyes and behind on points, Barkley had blazed back in round three to floor Hearns twice and stop him in a sensational war in June 1988 to take the WBC middleweight title. “I don’t care about the cuts because I didn’t have time to bleed,” said Barkley afterwards. His destruction of the Hit Man was a reminder that slowly the great fighters of the Eighties were falling to combustible young talents. As Barkley watched Hearns topple from a left hook, he stood over him and banged him with another right hand, as if trying to send him through the canvas. One legend was down, another was next. The people who once feared Duran could now look across