Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [58]
“Roberto got very angry, and asked him why was it that he was only now interested in meeting him, now that he was a champion. He added he could not be sure he was really his father. After asking what his name was, to which his father said, ‘Margarito,’ he inquired about the other people in the family he knew. Margarito answered he knew Uncle Joaquin, with whom he used to spend long hours. I told him not get angry at his father, after all he was his father.
“Roberto left the room for a while, and upon returning he went on with the questions. He asked whether he knew who his grandfather was, to which Margarito answered his grandfather’s name was Chavelo. They looked at each other for a while, after which they embraced strongly, and when they finally looked at each other again, they heard the words they had longed for so long: Father, Son. That was the beginning of a totally new friendship.”
Margarito wasn’t after anything except to see his son. “The reason I got in contact with Roberto was because I was in California and I was reading a boxing magazine,” he said. “At the time I was visiting my oldest brother. Then I see Roberto Duran in the magazine. I told my oldest brother that he had to be my son. ‘I bet it is my son,’ I told my brother. Soon enough I saw him when he came here to fight.”
Despite the reconciliation, they rarely kept in touch afterwards. Duran would face Javier Ayala less than a month later. Duran weighed 140 for Ayala, and went in at 139 for Medina. “There was a belief that Duran struggled to make weight for some of his fights,” said West Coast promoter Don Chargin. “Of course, the fighters don’t always let you know if they did have trouble. Duran was very popular with all the Latin fans. His father was Mexican. He would mix around with everybody around the gym and that’s what Latin fans liked. You know, he might have been wild in Panama, but when he came to Los Angeles he was always on time at all the press events and was always good with the press.”
Ayala proved to be a testing opponent. He came in with a poor 13-7-1 record but was able to fend off Duran; Chargin recalled that Duran made “Ayala fight the best fight of his life.” During the bout, at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on March 17, Duran knocked Ayala down in the last round but a bizarre occurrence meant he couldn’t finish him off, and left him feeling short-changed by promoter Chargin and the locals. “There was quite a bit of time left, maybe a couple minutes in the round,” said Chargin. “Duran knocked Ayala down and his head hit the bell. Back then the bell was a box with a button on it. So everybody stopped because of the confusion. Ayala was hurt, but he cleared and was able to finish the fight. We had a tough time with Duran after because he thought it was something we did on purpose. It took us a week before he finally understood what had happened.”
Before he left the West Coast, Duran spent some more time getting to know Margarito’s side of the family. “We went to my father’s house and we were drinking beer,” said Duran. “They gave us food, but we didn’t eat it because it was too spicy. I only saw my father maybe four times during my boxing career. Twenty-one years had passed after that first time. I always called him, but only his woman answered. He never did and never returned my calls.”
Margarito countered, “I used to see him every time he used to fight. They’d call us beforehand and reserve our seats.”
Although people give sundry testimonies on the person Duran really was, from a hard drinker who would enter New York bars and call out the toughest guy, to a party lover, to a legendary womanizer, the people who dealt with him inside boxing painted the same portrait of a maniacal figure. Was he acting