Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [31]
“Eleta had a company that sold vitamins and he gave me one called Mighty Tech. He told me to take two each day and I thought, if one vitamin is going to make me strong, if I take two then I’ll be strong as a bull. I started taking the vitamins in pairs. But they only got me sick. I got this type of wart on my butt, and I couldn’t run and I couldn’t jog. I told Eleta they had to stop the fight because I couldn’t train. I always remembered that Marcel used to tell me that he didn’t want to hear any excuses that I was sick or anything. I was fed up with that.”
Duran went to the equivalent of a back-alley doctor, his childhood pal Chaparro Pinzon, nicknamed Shorty. The biggest bout in Panama was riding on his rudimentary medical knowledge. “Three days before the fight, I still couldn’t walk,” said Duran. “Two days before the fight, I let Chaparro stay at my house because he was really poor and had no place to go. He would run with me in the mornings and go with me to the gym. He says, ‘Let’s pinch this wart and you’ll get cured.’ I was sitting on the bed screaming like a little girl because he takes out the roof of the wart on my butt and I’m drawing blood like crazy. About four hours later my fever goes down and the swelling between my legs starts to disappear. The next day I wake up like a bull and say that I’m going to knock the shit out of that bastard and he’s going to pay for everything he said.” Eleta was kept in the dark about Chaparro’s crude surgery. “Nobody knew about anything that happened at my house,” said Duran. “I was going to win despite my sickness.”
Duran and Marcel met on 16 May 1970, over ten rounds at 128 pounds, at the Nuevo Panama Stadium. The trash talking was over. Both fighters knew what a win would mean to their careers. Duran was undefeated at 25-0, while Marcel was 24-2-1. “Marcel was a helluva fighter,” said Eleta, who pulled the strings to make the fight happen. “But I knew that Duran could beat him.”
Under different circumstances, Duran and Marcel might have been friends, sharing ring notes at late-night haunts. With help from Old Parr they might have squared up over the pool table, thrown some playful jabs, then hugged each other in the way boxers do: one arm, strong grasp, with a hint of nostalgia. But Roberto Duran Samaniego and Ernesto Marcel grew up on different sides of the tracks. Colon and Panama City were close, but if you were from Colon, then you weren’t from the capital and that’s what mattered most. “It was the best from Colon against the best from the city. That’s why the fight was so big in Panama,” said Marcel. Such sentiment was echoed around the country. Fans took sides, grabbed a beer and settled in.
Inside the arena a swooshing sound, unique to Panama, circled like a wave with every punch landed. It appeared to most that Duran had the edge through the first nine rounds. Certainly he was the aggressor, and stung his opponent more frequently. Even if his punches weren’t hurting Marcel that much, they arrived from all angles. But it was close, and Marcel believed he was ahead. Now in the final round, according to Marcel, he was still utilizing the same in-and-out tactics that had held up in the earlier rounds. Marcel agreed it was a close fight, although Duran’s pride wouldn’t ever allow him to admit such a thing. However, the last ten ticks of the clock would remain embedded in Marcel’s head, a lonely reminder that to agree to be a boxer is a contract based on vulnerability in a callous world that grants no freebies.
Then, with ten seconds left in the final round, referee Isaac Herrera waved his hands and decided not to let Marcel finish the fight. He said Marcel had barely thrown a punch in the round and he was stopping the bout because of his inactivity. Others claimed Duran had nailed Marcel, and forced him to run to survive the last round. It was ruled a tenth-round technical knockout to Duran. There was confusion. Neither fighter was hurt or close to being knocked out, but there was concern from the Eleta-appointed