Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [159]
As he had in Montreal, Duran made sure to include “the people” again. He held daily workouts in the hotel atrium open to hundreds of fans. Leonard kept to himself in locked workouts in the warehouse district. The press hounded Duran about no más, but the angst and disdain had subsided with time. Neither fighter yearned to revisit the baggage that carried over from New Orleans. Duran made the right noises before the bout, saying how he had waited nine years, but the “fight” itself was instantly forgettable. On December 7, 1989 a crowd of 16,305 showed up at the outdoor arena at The Mirage in Las Vegas.
Duran, at thirty-eight, showed all the aggression of a sloth in a coma, while the thirty-three-year-old Leonard was a muscular shadow of his glorious pomp, though he still danced and strutted his stuff. Duran did land a glancing right hand in the first round; his next real punch came ten rounds later. By the second round, Leonard was already showboating and seemed in complete control. He hit on the break, stared down the Panamanian at the end of rounds and even threw low blows. In round three, Leonard side-stepped a Duran rush and rubbed his head against the top rope out of view of referee Richard Steele. Then he let him up and thrashed him with a left hook. The tactics that Duran taught other fighters were being painfully recycled on him.
By the middle of the fight the fans were booing and by the tenth round they chanted, “Bullshit! Bullshit!” The safety-first Duran seemed to be waiting for inspiration or motivation that never came. Before the eleventh, Plomo stood in front of his fighter and pleaded with him to throw punches, but even when Leonard then suffered a bad cut above his left eye, Duran didn’t capitalize on it. Despite his injury, Leonard won a wide twelve-round decision.
Leonard would need more than sixty stitches from the cuts in his mouth and above his eyes, but there was never any doubt about the outcome. Duran had barely even gone through the motions. “The war becomes a bore” and “Leonard beats hapless Duran” declared the papers the following day. Bizarrely, Duran claimed he should have won the decision. “He never could get off,” said Duran’s manager Mike Acri. “It was freezing, his corner wasn’t prepared. There was no blanket in the corner. The next day he was embarrassed and very nervous. We went back to the airport and when he started to hear that Leonard didn’t fight good either, he felt a little better. Someone said it was, ‘One wouldn’t and one couldn’t.’” Duran told a Miami Herald reporter, “Leonard didn’t beat me. The IRS did.”
Leonard would fight twice more in the next eight years, losing both, but like Duran his place in the boxing canon was assured. They will forever be intertwined. While Duran couldn’t balance the excesses of fame and sport for one tragic evening, Leonard shone. However, while Duran lived for the moment, Leonard never took the time to enjoy the jewels of his success. “The thing about life itself is that once you’re in the limelight you’re too deep into it to really appreciate and smell the roses,” said Leonard. “But once you get out of it and see some of the things you could have corrected or taken advantage of. But all in all, I’m healthy; I’m happy; I have a family and a career. I have a vision and life is good.”
Duran ballooned again. “We saw him five, six months