Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [20]
“My mother was in jail for eight days for having hit Guarare’s mayor,” said Duran’s aunt Mireya. “She knocked him down. She had problems with a policeman called Celso. She was taken to the town hall and the mayor came to talk to her. She was a woman with a very strong personality and she knocked him down with a strong fist punch. After this the mayor sent her to jail for eight days. At that time there was a sub-lieutenant called Ireni Caballero. He would come to the cell and, pressing a spoon on the bars, would say, ‘Bad woman, you knocked the mayor down.’ But she had just given birth to Joaquin, and at that time it was forbidden to put in jail women who had to breastfeed. When the mayor discovered this, he set her free. That woman certainly hit very hard.
“Her father was called Felix Moreno and he was also a very strong man. This great-grandfather of Roberto’s was killed by a cousin of his. That happened one day when he was returning after having killed a cow. He was carrying the meat, and his cousin waited for him on the road and asked him to have a drink with him. He answered that since it was early in the morning, he did not want to drink. In that very moment he killed him, opening the head of Roberto’s great-grandfather with a machete. He fell down injured and crawled to the farm of my grandmother Juana. He only had time to ask for some salt before dying. You may imagine how strong he was to have been able to crawl all the distance. It seems that this resistance is something that runs in the family.” Clara agreed: “Roberto inherited his power from his great-grandfather. Felix Moreno was so strong that he could kill a man with one punch.”
Wherever his power came from, the win over Riasco confirmed Duran’s potential. “They carried me on top of their shoulders and everyone was yelling,” said Duran. “All this time, some fag back there is grabbing my ass. The more packed it was inside the gym, the more we got paid for the fight. Sometimes we got paid four or five dollars. Plomo would take his share and whatever I had left I would run home and give it to my mom for food.”
His next goal was the Pan-American Games, due to be held in Winnipeg, Canada in July 1967. Duran was almost a guarantee to make the team for the tournament in the fifty-one-kilo division. Wins over Alvarado and Riasco had cemented his position as a top prospect, and in 1967 he represented Club Cincuentenario in an elimination tournament that began outside the city in Penonome. However, amateur boxing was riddled with politics, and forces outside Duran’s control conspired against him.
“In that time the military was in control,” said Duran. “There was a doctor for the amateur boxers and he took care of all of us. There was a very good boxer and the doctor was his manager. That kid had more shots and vitamins than anything. Already at that time, my mindset – I was too smart – was that of a professional. Three days before a fight, I’m painting at a hotel that I worked at and I go into a restaurant to eat lunch. They gave me this tortilla, which is a traditional food made of corn, but they were spraying this spray for fleas and it had fallen on my food. I ate it and drank Coke, and I got real sick because of it. I was sick and before the fight the doctor would not give me an exam.
“I was sad because I wanted to go to Winnipeg. I had a bad fever, and I was sleeping in the deposit downstairs of the hotel. Plomo found me and had me drink an Alka-Seltzer. I drank it and the next day I woke up like a bull. I go tell Plomo that the fight’s on. The doctor thought his fighter was going to knock me out, but I gave the kid so many punches that I almost killed him. I fought the next day and the following day, and after those three days I was happier than shit because I was finally going to go to Winnipeg.”
Duran had few influential connections in the sport,