Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [32]
“Everybody in Panama wanted to know why he stopped the fight,” Marcel recalled. “I asked the referee many times after, why he stopped the fight. And Isaac Herrera, one of the greatest referees in the world, tells me he really didn’t know why he stopped the fight. I was winning, so people wanted to know why they stopped the fight. Yes, the fight was narrow. After the fight [Herrera] said that I wasn’t fighting.”
Duran countered, “All Marcel did was hug me the whole fight and smell the cologne I was wearing. Marcel never made weight, lost by forfeit and I even gave him pounds. He never wanted to get in the ring with me. It was just about the time that my body started to become quick. After the fight, I never saw him again. To this day I ask him to his face why he didn’t fight me again.”
Although Marcel claims to remember boxing official Juan Carlos Tapia interrogating Herrera about the stoppage, Tapia denies it. “I was a judge in that fight,” said Tapia. “Marcel got really scared. He received a punch in the ninth round in the throat and he didn’t want to fight anymore. In the tenth round, he ran around until the fight was over. The referee told him that he had to fight, and when Marcel did not fight, they stopped the fight and gave it to Duran by TKO. All three judges had Duran winning. If the fight would have lasted ten rounds, Duran would have won a unanimous decision.”
While Marcel claimed he wanted a rematch at 128, Duran’s natural growth and excessive eating habits forced him to move to the 135-pound limit. “I asked Duran for the rematch,” said Marcel. “And he said he would go his way and for me to go my way. And I went on to be a world champ at this weight.” Duran countered: “In a three minute round, for two and a half of those minutes Marcel would dance around and run from me. In the last minute, he would try to stand up to me and impress the judges and the fans, but when we went toe-to-toe, I broke him apart. By the fifth round, I was way ahead of him. [Years later, at an honorary dinner] he came over to me, hit me in the ribs and told me that I was the only man to really beat him. And I said, ‘If you really wanted the rematch, then why didn’t you come up to the 135-pound limit? You were afraid to fight me at 135 because you were afraid I’d beat your ass again.’”
In August 1972, Ernesto Marcel won the WBA featherweight title to become one of four Panamanian world champions. He would retire from the sport, still champion, two years later.
FOR ALL THAT the Duran-Marcel fight captured the imagination, there was still only one true boxing hero in Panama. In November 1965, Ismael Laguna had lost his lightweight crown in a rematch with Carlos Ortiz, but in March 1970, he had regained it from Mexican bomber Mando Ramos, traveling to Los Angeles – where Ramos was hugely popular – to do so. “The whole stadium was against me,” Laguna recalled. “I looked up and saw them all chanting, ‘Mando, Mando.’” But the twenty-year-old Ramos was already traveling a path of drugs, women and deceit, while Laguna was too respectful of his craft to fritter away his talent. He stuck and twisted his jab early and often, draining Ramos’s body like a wet towel and stopping him on a bloody ninth-round technical knockout. “I met up with some bad people and I got caught up in methamphetamines and cocaine,” said Ramos years later. “I wasn’t right at all. Mentally my mind was not in the fight.
“Duran and I were supposed to fight at one point,” he added. “If I were to have been right, that would have been a great fight. I would have boxed him, but I never got to show my ability in boxing. I could box; I could punch moving backward. I swear I would have boxed Duran like that, punch and moving back and forth.”
Champion once more, the experienced Laguna was regarded as one of the best pound-for-pound boxers in the world. Then the unthinkable happened. In September 1970, he was outmaneuvered by an even better boxer, a skinny, broken-nosed Scot called Ken Buchanan, and lost his cherished title for the