Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [68]
Lampkin plodded out of his corner for round fourteen; he wouldn’t return the same fighter. Within the first thirty seconds, Duran had landed a short, glancing left hook that set him up. Lampkin, near the ropes, dropped his guard for a split second. A whipping left hook sent him to the canvas and out on his back, his head bouncing off the floor like a weight dropped on cement. Ringsiders cringed at the sickening force of the fall. Even before the referee had knelt down to count, Lampkin tried to raise his head, but couldn’t. He had no chance of beating the count. By that point, ringsiders were more concerned about his health.
As soon as the hook had landed, Duran knew the possibility that something grave had occurred. “I almost killed the guy,” he noted later. Handlers, security guards and medics began to crowd around Lampkin, a wounded man lying among strangers. “I remember him taking me down and my head hit the canvas pretty hard and I tried to get up and I have a picture of me on my elbows,” said Lampkin. “From the slamming of my head, all of a sudden I tried to raise up real fast and then I just fell back out.”
Duran capped the nightmare off with his most infamous quote: “Next time I send him to the morgue.” The media ran with it, and it became emblematic of the Panamanian’s perceived callousness and brute hostility. However, Duran’s camp denied that their fighter was a monster. “No, those are lies,” said Plomo. “The guy was half-dead, he did not need to frighten him any further. They took him to hospital on a stretcher because he failed to react.”
“I told him that I never had been knocked out in my life and I don’t feel that he would have done it if I had water in my corner,” said Lampkin. “I sensed that we were both tiring. They weren’t expecting me to last, nobody did, especially the Panamanian people. When I went back there they told me that I had beaten Duran, but I didn’t win the fight. His daughter and son told me, ‘We’ve never met you Mister Lampkin, but my daddy said you were his toughest fight.’”
The punch, and the quote, would cement Duran’s reputation. Society believed that Duran didn’t have the capacity to feel compassion, not in the ring. The media blew up his quote on the morgue, thus enhancing Duran’s ugliness. “[Lampkin] could have died after that fight,” said Duran. “I told him I would kill him next time. I fought him with very little training. I lost too much weight; I was dying. I always have a quality that I would never lose … I have a gesture where you don’t know which two hands are coming. It’s the moment where you think the right is coming and it’s the left, and then you expect the left and I hit you with the right. That’s why I had a lot of boxers confused, I was just too smart for them.” Duran would call Lampkin his toughest challenger.
WBA President and ringside physician Dr Elias Cordoba originally called Lampkin’s condition “delicate but not serious.” However, it wasn’t until thirty minutes after reaching the local hospital that Lampkin regained consciousness. According to WBA doctor Keith Arthur, the reason for Lampkin’s delayed consciousness was “a severe accumulation of blood in the thorax which diminished the blood flow to the brain.” At this point, the number one contender was fighting for his life. A wire story even reported that Lampkin had died.
At the Santo Thomas Hospital, Lampkin went into convulsions. “They took me back to the dressing room or somewhere and everybody was all over me,” Lampkin recalled. “‘Give him some room,’ and then someone said, ‘Get this man to a hospital.’ I can vaguely remember that, and then I went to the hospital.”
Although Duran claims that he, Toti and his mother visited Lampkin at the hospital twice after the fight, Lampkin doesn’t recall it. “Sure, Roberto and I went to the hospital together,” said Toti Samaniego. “Lampkin was acting crazy and was talking about a rematch and stuff like that.” Plomo also remembered the visit, as Duran was