Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [67]
Keeping Duran hidden before the bout not only stopped any possible physical or verbal assault, but left the challenger in the dark. “I didn’t know who he was,” Lampkin remembered. “I really didn’t. I kept asking, ‘Is that Duran there?’ And they said, ‘No, that’s not him.’ I didn’t know when I was ever going to see the guy.” One thing that Lampkin dreaded was the heat. Duran had spent his life training in veritable tanning-salon gyms; Lampkin hadn’t. This was Duran’s land.
“The building is hot, there’s no air-conditioning at all,” said Lampkin. “It’s like an oven with the temperature at five hundred degrees ... and it was like the summertime back there. When you get there you don’t think about that stuff; we never knew. All you do is get in there, go to the dressing room, and come out when it’s time to fight. We thought it was like any other arena.”
By the time Lampkin was walking down through the aisles of the Nuevo Panama Gym, however, everything was forgotten: the jungle heat, the crowd, the pressure. It was man against man, and the American began well. Duran cut off the ring, using his jab to set up three left hooks to the face, but Lampkin, whose upright style and sculpted body made him seem much the bigger man, responded with a clean straight right that made Duran lose his footing. “When I hit him with a body shot, he would kick his leg up real high, and people thought he was trying to kick me,” Lampkin said. “I can’t remember what round it was, but I know I hurt him.”
There was nothing squeamish about Lampkin. He elbowed Duran in the head during a clinch in the second round, a warning that any dirty stuff would be countered in kind. Clean shots bounced off Duran’s devilish beard throughout the round, which Lampkin earned.
Through the early rounds, Duran looked to have a slight edge. Breathing heavily by the fourth, he scored with combinations and staggered Lampkin in the fifth with a clubbing right cross. Legs weazy, but mind intact, Lampkin wobbled around the ring, took another right and instinctively fell into and wrestled Duran to the floor. After the brief delay, Duran refused the head and cracked Lampkin with a left to the ribs that sent him hobbling back to his cornermen.
But always Lampkin fought back. Even inside, a space Duran called his own, Lampkin often ended several close-quarter exchanges with a chopping right and scored on the outside with a left-right-left combination. Few men had hit Duran like that, and several rounds were too close to call. Still, Duran was landing the bigger punches and between the seventh and eighth rounds an issue arose in Lampkin’s corner. It was reported in the New York Times that Lampkin was forcibly sent out by his handlers for the eighth round, though it wasn’t explained why.
The pace was torrid as neither man looked to back down. Even those blinded by bias had to admire the American’s persistence. Few lightweights could have taken the punishment Duran gave Lampkin and kept going forward. In the ninth, Lampkin walked through a punishing left hook to the body and a pair of rights to the head; his courage never wavered. Duran concentrated on a huge welt that had formed under Lampkin’s left eye, banging the puss out with a vicious uppercut.
Duran forged on and caught his second wind in the late rounds. By the end of round thirteen, both of Lampkin’s cheeks were swollen and his step was heavy. He had given his soul, yet still he wouldn’t fall. He took solace in the middle of the ring and raged back at Duran.
“He was a guy who would do anything to win,” Lampkin said. “He was a dirty guy and I knew that but he was the main guy. I figured I was holding my own. All I wanted … to keep him in the kitchen and hit him with some good shots and knock him out. But it was very hard to do. I was the first one to take him fourteen rounds. What got