Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [36]
Carlos Eleta could have gotten his prized fighter out with a phone call, but wanted to teach him a lesson. It was left to another influential figure to bail him out. “It was a good friend of mine who helped me in amateur boxing,” said Duran. “He was a rich man … a colonel at Cárcel Modelo. One morning I was cleaning the front part of the jail when an officer came up to me. I was sweeping the floor in the jail and he asked me why I was there. I told him what really happened.”
“Is it true?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then, he asked me for my mother, my uncles, my family, my grandma and everyone. He told me that he had grown up with them. Finally, he investigated what really happened and then they let me go. I went back to my cell to get my stuff. I said, ‘Taras Bulba, thank you and I’m gone.’
“People told me, ‘Manos de Piedra, remember us if someday we get the chance to see one of your fights.’
“‘No problem,” I replied, and I was out of there. I went directly to see Carlos Eleta and told him how I had been freed. I told him he had not behaved well, for he should have tried to help me. He said he wanted me to have a punishment for what I had done. But I was young then and did not understand that.”
Plomo, as is so often the case, remembered the event slightly differently. “He once had a problem when he went to a club called Balboa en El Chorrillo. Duran liked dancing very much, and having fun, but he did not drink alcohol. He was there one day when a plainclothes policeman started hitting his wife. Duran walked towards him and told him to stop hitting her, that she was only a woman. The policeman told him to shut up unless he wanted to get beaten too. Duran broke the policeman’s jaw from the first blow. The policeman had tried to humiliate him, and though he was not wearing his uniform, being a policeman as he was, he thought he had the same authority as if in uniform. A couple of other policemen turned up and Duran explained to them that he had to hit him because the policeman had threatened to hit him. Yes, he was arrested.”
A lengthy prison sojourn could have destroyed Duran’s career at the very time it was about to take off. After defeating Lloyd Marshall and the Mexican Fermin Soto in Monterrey, he was booked on his first trip to the United States to fight on the undercard of Ken Buchanan’s lightweight title defense against Ismael Laguna, at Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in world boxing.
5
Two Old Men
“Those guys, they’re older than water.”
Angelo Dundee
FIGHTERS DREAMT OF the Garden from the day they laced on gloves. Madison Square Garden was the Mecca of boxing, steeped in the history of the game’s biggest fights. Just six months earlier, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier had slugged it out there in the so-called Fight of the Century. To headline there was the ultimate validation. The Garden, which was renovated and moved to four different locations, was originally constructed at 23rd and Madison Avenue, Manhattan, in 1879. Not until the “new” Garden – known as “The House That Tex Built” after promoter Tex Rickard – was built in 1925, however, did it become the sport’s centre, graced by the greatest figures in the game. In 1968, it was relocated again to Pennsylvania Plaza, between 32nd and 34th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues.
Duran’s opponent was the experienced Benny Huertas, a former gangbanger who was popular with promoters and fans alike because he always came to fight. Huertas had lost almost as many as he had won and, sandwiched between the great lightweights of his era, would be a bit player in the division. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shed the distinction of being an extra in the world’s most brutal sport, but he always gave his best and was certainly no patsy.
Back in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, they called Huertas