Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [16]
Duran was thrown into a cell with the girl and was detained for several hours while the police tried to piece together what had happened. Five men knocked cold, a fifteen-year-old with a broken finger and a slight bruise, a hysterical girl and no independent witnesses.
“It’s about seven or eight in the morning and they open the door to tell me that the lieutenant wants to see me,” said Duran. “Five guys were there one after another and the police told me to stand there. I had my hand ready to hit them again. All the five guys are all swollen. The cops ask the men if they know me and each one says, ‘No. I do not know what happened. I have no idea. I do not even know who brought us here.’
“Then the cop asks if they know what happened last night and they shake their heads no. Then he asks if they were involved in a fight and they say no. Then the cop asks if they are accusing anybody of anything and they say, ‘Who are we going to accuse?’”
Still in disbelief, the police let the five men leave and kept Duran and his girl in the cell, mainly to avoid reprisals from the men. “When I get out, I tell the girl to go before the sergeant regrets it and throws us back in jail. I knocked five guys out with my bare hand, and I’ve even been shot at. My mother sent me to my aunt’s house. While we were talking, a big man came in, and she said he was her husband. ‘Your husband?’ I asked. ‘That was the man who sent me to prison.’ ‘No, that’s not true,’ he said. ‘I had to take him there as if he was going to jail because there was a fight, and I tried to protect him.’ Can you imagine my surprise? It was the man who had married my aunt. After a long time, I celebrated a party for him, for this son of a bitch, at my own house.”
Duran’s reputation in the streets often landed him with challenges. Yet these fights also solidified the unspoken bond that if you were a friend of Roberto Duran’s, he would stand up for you. He was fiercely loyal. “When I was starting my boxing career, there was in Chorrillo the first bar with air-conditioning,” he said. “At that time there were only canteens. It was the first time that at a bar in Panama, in the upper section of Chorrillo, they put up a music show. I used to hang out a lot then with the Barraza brothers. I was there with them when a girlfriend of mine arrived. I came in and took off my jacket, placing it on the chair. Then I felt like dancing, so I went to dance. Suddenly I saw a huge guy standing next to my table, and peeing on my jacket. When I walked up to him and asked him what he was doing, he said that if I wanted to fight with him, he was ready to fight with me. He then told me to go outside to fight.
“We both went out, my friends close to me, and his friends surrounding him. The guy tried to get in his car after throwing a punch at me, but after avoiding it, I got him out of the car. Then his friends came to fight, and mine got in their way, and the fight started. All of a sudden I saw that five of his friends were jumping on me. I started hitting them one by one, and knocking them down. I finally was left with only one, but then my friends came and threatened the remaining ones. My friends enjoyed watching me because I was a boxer in the street and also in the ring. So I started punching this huge guy all over his body and knocked him down too. When he stood up in the end, he said he did not want to go on. One of the Barraza brothers told him that he had started the whole thing but he answered that he did not want this to continue; he wanted peace now. We got back to the bar and went on drinking. Then we went to have dinner.”
DURAN STARTED to box for the Club Cincuentenario amateur squad, which would face other area boxing squads. The Panamanian Amateur Program was composed of boxers representing various clubs around Panama. Club Cincuetenario