Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [37]
Not long into his amateur career, tragedy struck. “Something happened in around 1962-63. It is so sad that I can’t even talk about it,” said Huertas years later, nearly in tears. “I killed a guy in the ring. It was sad because I had a new wife and we didn’t have a baby. He had his wife and he had a baby who was six or seven months. I thought about when his boy grows and asks, ‘Where’s my father?’ Suppose that thing happened to me with a baby … a lot of troubles.”
Huertas took nearly a year off from the ring but couldn’t quit the sport; his future rode on it. “Boxing saved my life. The barrio where I lived in Brooklyn was a bad one. A lot of people was killed. I had to do something better than that.” At the time, world champs such as Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres fought out of the Cus D’Amato gym where Huertas trained. D’Amato was actually Huertas’s co-manager, but wasn’t hands-on. He stayed in the background and Huertas never really knew one of the most famous of all boxing managers.
He turned pro in 1965, and by the time he was due to fight Duran his record was 18-14-3. Though Duran was barely known at that stage outside his home country and the boxing cognoscenti, to those in the know his match-up with Huertas added intrigue to the Garden bill. Was this killer from Panama any good or was his record built on straw men? No one really knew, but Huertas was expected to give him a test. Fight posters billed their ten-round semi-final as Roberto “Rocky” Duran versus Benny “Bang Bang” Huertas and described one as the “sensational unbeaten Panamanian K.O. artist” while the other was the “slam bang Puerto Rican puncher.” They were the opening act for Laguna and Buchanan.
“PAPA, WHAT TIME does the ice cream parlor close?” asked Roberto Duran.
“I think around nine p.m.,” said Carlos Eleta. “Why?”
“What time is my fight?”
“I don’t know, why Roberto?”
“Well, if I finish my fight in time, then I can make it over in time to get a milkshake.”
“I was telling him not to be scared to fight at the Garden for the first time,” recalled Eleta later, “and all he could think about was ice cream.”
For his part, Huertas was totally ignorant of the opponent he was facing, and in fact was more preoccupied by the recent death of his father. “I knew nothing about Duran,” he said. “The manager fooled me because at the time I was making 138-140 pounds. I was happy because I made the 138-pound weight limit. Then the promoter came and told me to make 135. I made the weight, but I killed myself. There was an exhibition a couple days before the fight, and it was all Panama. I saw him spar with someone else that day and I said, ‘This is going to be a war,’ because we had the same style.” Both had little regard for defense. Neither wanted to dance around the ring. They were there to fight.
On 13 September 1971, at the Garden, Duran wasted no time introducing himself. First, they scuffled, with neither exacting a decided edge. Then a thudding right to the temple left Huertas sprawled out on the canvas. It was all over in sixty-six seconds and Duran made it back to the ice cream parlor before closing. With his milkshake and his knockout victory, Duran waited to see if Laguna would return the lightweight crown back to Panama.
Benny Huertas would continue to fight anyplace they needed a body. “When you spend a lot of time in one thing and stop, you don’t want to leave it alone,” he recalled. “I have to stay in the house now and do nothing. I can’t work because of the discs in my back and in the garment business you have to work like a horse.”
Because of the way Duran knocked out Huertas, those who hadn’t seen him fight