Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [38]
Panamanian boxing writer Alfonso Castillo, a small, bespectacled ex-jockey, was one of those who witnessed the destruction of Benny Huertas. He immediately coined a new name for the phenomenon: Manos de Piedra. Hands of Stone.
In the main event, Ken Buchanan again outpointed Laguna to retain his world title. It would be the Tiger’s last fight and Duran promised to avenge his friend’s loss. “Duran said that on one occasion that his inspiration to be a boxer was when he saw Ismael Laguna beat Carlos Ortiz,” said Panamanian boxing analyst Daniel Alonso. “After the Huertas fight, Duran said that he would beat Buchanan next for Laguna.”
Before he would get the chance, he was introduced to two elderly men who many would credit with his ultimate development as a fighter. Ray Arcel and Freddie Brown were American sages who knew more about boxing than anyone else alive.
Ray Arcel was born in the final months of the Nineteenth Century and began working with boxers in 1917, at the age of seventeen. Growing up a Jew in an Italian section of East Harlem meant he had his share of street fights, but he also had a sharp mind, went to a good school and harbored ambitions to be a doctor. All of that changed when he started to hang out at Grupp’s Gymnasium on 116th Street. There he encountered Dai Dollings, a fanatical Welshman whose pedigree went back to the bareknuckle era. Dollings, a strict vegetarian, had coached marathon runners, would walk to the gym in all weathers and complained about the softness of the New World: “You bloody Americans, you’re made of tissue paper.” When the young Arcel told him he wanted to be a trainer too, Dollings replied, “The hell with a trainer. You want to be an analyst.”
And that’s what Arcel became. He studied fighters like a scholar in the unheated gyms and smoky boxing clubs of New York State and beyond, and learned the black arts of corner work from the legendary Doc Bagley, who could stem a gushing cut with a plug of chewing tobacco. He also loved his fighters. His idol was Benny Leonard, the imperious Jewish-American lightweight who created the template for the modern boxer. Arcel would tell his boxers, “This is your school, where you learn your lessons.”
The list of champions he worked with eventually ran well into double figures. He handled Tony Zale during his three epic wars with Rocky Graziano, trained Ezzard Charles for his gory classics with Rocky Marciano, and seconded so many of Joe Louis’s victims during the great heavyweight’s long reign that sportswriter Jimmy Cannon labeled him “the Pallbearer.”
By the mid-Fifties, Arcel was running the popular Saturday Night Fights, which appeared every week on the ABC television channel in the US. He was an independent operator, and a successful one, but this did not endear him to the New York hoodlums who then ran the sport. He started having trouble making fights. Main event boxers would cancel at the last minute. He received an anonymous phone call telling him to “get out of the TV racket if you know what’s good for you.”
In 1953, the fifty-four-year-old Arcel was standing outside a Boston hotel talking to a fellow trainer when a man stepped up behind him, hit him a vicious blow to the head with a length of piping wrapped in a paper bag, dropped the weapon and disappeared into the crowd. Arcel almost died and spent the next nineteen days in hospital. The assault was instrumental in his decision to retire from the sport he loved in 1956 to work in the purchasing department of an alloy company. By the early