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By Root 1243 0

at night, was chaotic. “Chicha Fuerte’s wife had a fight with my mother and insulted her,” said Toti. “After my mother insulted her back, Chicha Fuerte’s wife went to call her husband. He had just finished a fight in Mexico. That night I was going to fight Chicha Fuerte, but Roberto asked me to let him fight with him. They started fighting and Chicha Fuerte’s woman hit Roberto. But there were some bandits who knocked Duran down and Chicha Fuerte was supposed to step on Duran and start hitting him. But I kicked his stomach strongly and succeeded in making him fall. Then Duran got on hitting him, but it was at night and you could see very little. They were many and we did not know who had knives. But Roberto knocked Chicha Fuerte down. That was a famous fight story. When the police came, they found no one. We had all run away by then.”

Another witness was Victorino Vargas, Duran’s stepfather. “When Duran fought with Chicha Fuerte Ruiz, he made a cut on his face,” said Vargas. “I advised him not to go on fighting in the street because he was a boxer already. He could be facing a judicial claim. So he stopped his street fights then.”

Along with the resistance Duran felt he was receiving from the sport’s bigwigs, a controversy had developed with Plomo. After losing in the Golden Gloves final to Maynard, Duran was scheduled to face one of Panama’s most skilled boxers, Catalino Alvarado. Plomo felt his inexperienced fighter could first use a tune-up against a lesser boxer but Duran disagreed, sparking the first rift between the pair. Duran was stubborn as a mule when his mind was made up, so Plomo refused to handle him for the bout.

“I was fighting Catalino Alvarado from Maranon Gym, a very good boxer,” said Duran. “Out of all the boxers I was the best and the fight was on, but Plomo didn’t want to put me into the ring because he thought Catalino was way too good and would knock me out. “There is a guy named Sammy Medina who comes into the ring [to help me]. The way I beat [Alvarado] is that I could see the punches coming. I would telegraph them and just block them. Medina says to Plomo, ‘Look what your guy did in the ring, and you didn’t even want to put him in there.’ And Plomo tells him that he just didn’t want his guy to get hurt. After that there were several months that I wouldn’t train with Plomo and went to Medina. After about four months I returned to Plomo because Medina was never at the gym to train me.”

Plomo remembered it differently: “When Roberto was still fighting at 106 pounds, Catalino was a much developed boxer, weighing 112 pounds. Duran once asked me to set a fight with Catalino, but I told him that since he had not been training enough, he could not do it. But he insisted, so we organized the fight, which Duran finally won. Since he was a child, Duran had shown that when he had decided something he would always get it. When he wanted to win a fight, he would do it.”

Duran still hadn’t shown the aggression and power that would later define him, but that was about to change, as jockey Alfredo “La Seda” Vasquez began to manage his career and help him financially. Vasquez encouraged him to rely less on his ability to move and box, and more on his punch. It worked against an opponent named Buenaventura Riasco. Each boxing club had to send a fighter to represent it in a tournament and from them a selection would represent Panama City and face off against the boxers from various provinces. The winner would be Panama’s national amateur champion. After completing the elimination rounds, Duran and Riasco were thrown together to compete in the 118-pound division. Panamanian fans took a keen interest in the amateurs, and this particular match promised fireworks.

“Buenaventura Riasco was a very good amateur,” said Duran. “We were about to have a fight, but there was a rumor going around that Carlos Eleta was going to become the manager of Riasco and he was coming to the bout to see how good Riasco really was. I said, ‘Let Eleta come, because I’m going to knock you out.’”

Carlos Eleta was Panama’s leading business