Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [69]
Lampkin tested his legs two days after the fight but couldn’t walk. Most men would have taken the knockout as a sign to quit boxing, but not Lampkin. “One thing, I did suffer a concussion because I couldn’t walk. My left leg was paralyzed,” said Lampkin,“from the fall on my head. I was dragging my left leg and I had to go home in a wheelchair.” After being cleared to return to Oregon, Lampkin was met at the airport by the mayor. He was immediately taken to the hospital for more tests and to make sure he didn’t have blood clots.
“It was a very difficult time,” Lampkin recalled. “I had to go to a neurosurgeon. Then I was under treatment for six months. A woman was working with me so I could walk again. First, I could walk; then I could run again. If you didn’t know it, you would never think that anything was ever wrong with me. I was just as strong as ever.”
Lampkin continued, “Maybe some would call, but he didn’t. Duran never called or anything. Maybe twenty-some years later, I saw Duran. He and Sugar Ray Leonard came to Oregon to a casino. I saw it in the paper, so I went down to the casino and I walked up to Duran and said, ‘Hey, you remember me, Ray Lampkin? We fought each other.’ He looks at me, ‘Huh, huh?’ But I made him remember. Then we took some pictures together. We got to know each other like good friends. And he had his lawyer call me in Portland to come to Panama as a guest.”
Even now, when people look at Ray Lampkin they remember the knockout, the trauma. Some wonder how he survived such a beating to keep fighting. “I didn’t get rich or win the championship of the world, because of that fight and the injury that I suffered,” said Lampkin. “That was the fight that sent me downhill into retirement. I had seven more fights after the Duran fight and I was never the same. I never recuperated from the injury. I wanted to make myself believe that I did, but I kept getting hurt. I didn’t want to die, so I left it alone. After that concussion it got to the point that I couldn’t take a good head shot. I didn’t want to be crazy or walking around like a vegetable or something. I’d rather be rich, but have some sense with it so I could enjoy it.”
Duran, however, felt no remorse. “If I did not do this to him,” he told Plomo, “he would have done it to me.”
ROBERTO DURAN reveled in his “killer” image but on occasion he also tired of it. “I do not wish by any motive to have this public image,” he told La Critica. “I am human and not invincible. When I was in front of the North American Ray Lampkin and I knew that he was in bad condition after the knockout, I prayed to God that he would recover soon.”
Yet what he said and what he did were often at odds. After an easy knockout of Jose Peterson in Miami in June, he traveled to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua to face Pedro “El Toro” Mendoza. In Nicaragua, Duran met the despot Anastasio Somoza, who asked him to take it easy on his local opponent. “Somoza, the President of Nicaragua, invited Duran for a fight with another boxer they had at his weight,” said Plomo. “But the President asked [Duran] to let him fight a bit, not to hurt him right at the beginning, so that he can show how he fights. This is what Somoza told Duran when he went to visit him at the presidential residency. So Duran told me what Somoza had told him, not to be too hard at the beginning. He liked to hear what I had to say about things. He knew I was right most of the times. And I told him this was not the right thing to do.
“In the end, this boxer, called El Toro, did not last long. After Duran had struck him twice, he fell down. Then a woman came to the ring, and Duran thought she was coming to greet him, for she called out his name. ‘Duran,’ she said, and suddenly, PAH, a terrible blow. She was a Nicaraguan woman, and when Duran moved away, she received the impact of this blow and fell down as well. At that moment all the Nicaraguan people outside got on the ring ready to beat us.
“They shouted that they wanted to get us because that man had hit a woman.