Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [24]
Perhaps Eleta’s most significant role was as a surrogate father. Referred to by most as Senor Eleta, to Duran he became “Papa.” Eleta was someone he felt he could trust, someone stable. As tough as he was, Duran yearned for a man to replace his absentee father and Eleta filled that role.
Local notoriety also began to bring the good-looking cholo female attention, but his first girlfriend was not a popular choice with Clara and other family members. She was a black girl, or champundun in colloquial parlance. Race and class were inextricably linked in Panama, as in most societies, and blacks were at the bottom of the ladder. “She was a very dark girl,” remembered Toti. “But he loved her a lot. He wanted to marry her but my mother did not agree. She thought it was only a game.” Every good boxer on the isthmus lived in the spotlight, and by now many Panamanians gossiped daily about Duran. His love life was an instant topic of interest, so Duran went to his step-father, Victorino Vargas, for advice.
“I told him not to marry her, for he was going to become famous, so that in the future he could probably be able to get a prettier woman,” said Vargas. “He did not want anyone to know. Because he was young, and like all young people, they do not want others to know. But when I realized about this relationship, I told him he should marry another woman.”
The relationship didn’t stay a secret for long. During a live TV interview, he explained to the public that he was dating a “black woman” and had plans to marry her one day. But the relationship would fade as Duran turned his attention to boxing. Every one of Duran’s family members spoke of the affection that girls had for him. “Oh, the girls loved my brother,” said his sister Anna. “They would always ask about him and call the house at all hours of the night. But he was a very good brother to me, very protective.” Fighting came first. “Most of his time was for boxing,” said Toti. “He enjoyed being with women a lot, even when he was very young, but he did not take them seriously. It was like his sport, but not all the time.”
With the wealthy Eleta by his side, and willing to do whatever it took to make his fighter a champion, Duran now had a foundation. Even before his pro debut, he had begun to attract a following. “People saw the revelation when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old,” said Duran. “I was going against the best boxers of Panama, and they weren’t burnt-out fighters. They had a lot of experience.” In the locker room before fights, Plomo and his brother would bet each other which hand Duran was going to knock out an opponent with. “Boom, I would knock out the guy with my right hand, and I’d tell Plomo that I told him it was going to be the right hand.”
WHILE DURAN was learning the arts of both boxing and survival, another Panamanian was already an expert at both. In the early Sixties, Ismael Laguna, the “Tiger from Santa Isabel,” was the idol of all impoverished young boxers. Laguna was one of their own. Born on June 28, 1943 in Palmira on the coast of Colon, he too had skipped school, shone shoes and sold newspapers on the streets, and fought to protect his patch and his nine brothers and sisters. “I had eight or nine fights for breakfast,” said Laguna. “Even when there wasn’t a fight, I would tell someone to put gum in my hair so I could find one. If there wasn’t a fight, I would go look for one.” Colon made other Panama slums look like Club Med. A mainly black area, it was home to fight fanatics who would shout “olé” at ringside just as they did at bullfights in other countries. To Laguna, it was “the land of champions where the boxing tradition started from the time of Panama Brown.”
Laguna moved to Santa Isabel when his father, Generoso Meneses, was elected mayor of the region. Despite being caught up in gangs, and spending time in jail for picking up girls’ skirts to see their panties (preferably red), Laguna would avoid the path that derailed many of his friends. One day, when he was twelve, he saw a national boxing champion, Carlos