Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [43]
Yet not a single British reporter was at ringside for his title win, partly because it was costly to send a writer all the way to Puerto Rico, partly because of indifference about a challenger who had failed to capture the public imagination back home, and partly because the British Board had refused to recognise it as a world title bout. Buchanan’s feeling of being a prophet rejected by his own people grew even stronger when he returned home. “When I got back, the British Boxing Board was going to fine me. They said they didn’t recognize WBA champions and didn’t give me permission to fight Laguna.”
In the trade, however, people were taking notice. If the hard-bitten US fight scribes retained any doubts about Buchanan’s ability, they disappeared when the wiry Scot took on Donato Paduano, an unbeaten Canadian welterweight who outweighed him by a stone, at Madison Square Garden. Buchanan boxed rings round him, wowed the New York crowd and was voted Fighter of the Year for 1970 by the American Boxing Writers Association, a rare accolade for a European boxer. A magnificent, even-tempered boxer who could brawl when needed, the soft-spoken Scot didn’t lose his cool in the face of adversity.
Buchanan was due to make his first defense against Mando Ramos in a bout which the WBC deigned to recognize for the title. However, Ramos pulled out a few days before and instead Buchanan trounced Ruben Navarro in Los Angeles. Ramos’s sorry decline would be not untypical of Latin American champions. “What happened was that he had postponed the fight for a month, so I had been in the camp for six weeks already and I’m worn out,” recalled Ramos. “I fucked up. I went out to this jazz bar [and] we’re in the back snorting coke and my trainer comes in and everybody leaves the room except for me. This pretty little girl comes in and asks, ‘You looking for a party?’ We went into a room and we had sex and I caught some disease. Then, I went home and had sex with my wife and gave it to her and she divorced me. So I was going through a lot of mental stuff.”
For a short period, Buchanan was the undisputed world lightweight champion, but in June that year he forfeited the WBC belt after a contractual dispute, deepening his bitterness towards the sport’s governing bodies. Then came the rematch with Laguna in September 1971 at the Garden, the night that Roberto Duran took out Benny Huertas in one round. “I got cut a couple times in the second fight. Laguna poked me in the eye in the first two rounds,” Buchanan recalled. “My left eye was blowing up like a balloon. So my trainer Eddie Thomas took a razor blade and he slit my left eye open at the bottom to let all the blood out and have the swelling go down. Sylvester Stallone owes me money for that because he stole that off me. He bloody well did. Did you ever see that happen?”
In the eleventh round an inadvertent clash of heads opened another cut over Buchanan’s right eye. “In those final rounds, the doctor kept coming to my corner to check my eye because there was so much blood, but my manager would stick his thumb in the cut over my right eye and showed the doctor my left eye and it wasn’t deep. It was OK. And just as the doctor had turned to go away, my trainer takes some grease from his hand and puts it in the cut. Once they said, ‘Seconds out,’ he put the grease right in the cut. They couldn’t see it. Eddie Thomas was a great cornerman. It saved me, and saved the championship. I know they would have stopped it.”
Buchanan wasn’t the only one who appreciated his cornerman’s magic. “That was a helluva job Eddie Thomas did in Buchanan’s corner,” said fight publicist Harold Conrad in the book The Hardest Game.