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on. Two months later Duran faced P.J. Goosen at the Legends Casino in somewhere called Toppenish, Washington. The unheralded Goosen came in with a 19-2 record. Duran, in his 119th bout, railed against his naysayers. “I ignore all the people who say I shouldn’t do this. I don’t care what they say,” he told reporters. “The commissioners in Las Vegas should worry about their own boxers. I’ve seen ten-times worse boxers down there and they’re still able to box when they shouldn’t have a license. I’ve taken every test, and besides, I know what my body’s able to do. I listen to my body, and I will know when my body tells me it’s time to quit. The decision will be made by me. When I step into the ring I’m just doing my business.” After promising reporters, “you will see if my hands are still made of stone,” Duran banged out a ten-round decision.

“The problem is that the only thing he can do is to fight, and all he’s done is fight; he doesn’t know anything else,” said Juan Carlos Tapia. “He’ll risk his life to fight just to get money for his family.” Eleta urged him to quit, “I told him, ‘Before you hit them and they went down. Now you push them and then embrace them. What happened to you?’ He didn’t like that.”

Duran was only fighting to pay back debts that he claimed his wife accrued and money Carlos Eleta stole from him. It was never his fault. After a loss, he never took any blame, and in life, it was always someone else who made him broke. All of the money had disappeared with his skills. The man had fought since 1968, and he felt he had earned the right to spend his money accordingly. “We went to Panama once to see his house and where he was born,” said promoter Butch Lewis. “This guy would go down the streets of Panama and dig into his pockets and give money to people, kids in the streets. It didn’t matter how much he made in the fight because he would split it amongst the kids in the neighborhood. There’s no coincidence he’s a hero and it’s not about the money. After every fight he always came back and never forgot. And that’s the way things are.”

As he traveled to Denver, Colorado, to fight Hector Camacho on 14 July 2001, the man was stuck in a vacuum. The cold reception of only 6,597 fans in the 19,000 Pepsi Center revealed the truth that he wasn’t marketable anymore. His boxing daughter, Irichelle, backed her father’s decision to continue fighting. “How can you ask a man who has boxed all his life to do something else?” The truth was you couldn’t. Duran was going to box; it was his life. Even at fifty. Camacho pounded out a unanimous decision to win the National Boxing Association super-middleweight belt in a quickly forgettable twelve-round fight. “I was affected by the altitude in Denver,” said Duran. “If Camacho can’t knock me out, then who can?”

Salsa legend Ruben Blades said before the first Duran-Leonard that the American was “not fighting a man … he is fighting an emotion.” Now Duran was fighting in slow motion. It was time to leave the sport. But would he do it on his own terms?

21

The Last Song

“The end is going to be exactly how it started, in Chorrillo.”

Juan Carlos Tapia

IN THE BACK of every ex-boxer’s mind lurks a belief that he can still fight. He watches bouts on television and mentally breaks down the competitors, finding their faults, thinking how he could beat them, kidding himself. It is a dangerous illusion.

Even at the age of fifty-four, Duran still wished he was in the ring. “I would have no problem with the young guys today,” he told Sports Illustrated. “None.” But by then it was, finally, all over. He would always be Manos de Piedra to his people, Duran to the boxing fanatics, the no más guy to the casual sports fan. But he would never be a boxer again; never lean over the top rope to salute the fans, never breathe the sweet scent of success, never watch a man fall to the canvas before him. He did not go without a fight.

On 3 October 2001, he was in Argentina to promote a salsa CD and was traveling with his son Chavo and two reporters when their car crashed. Duran suffered