Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [72]
A Duran left hook and right uppercut jammed Ortiz’s head back in the first round, delivering a message that he would pay for his mistakes. Ortiz landed a big left hand of his own at the end of the second round, but returned to his safety-net, the ropes in the third. For both boxers, many punches landed awkwardly on arms and shoulders. As if chopping down a tree, Duran took out a tiny piece of Ortiz in each round.
Remarkable recuperation bought Ortiz several more rounds, angering Duran in the process. Inside, Duran challenged himself to destroy the man; anything less was inexcusable. Ortiz rarely moved or jabbed. It was his wish to stand and deliver, and as the seconds ticked away in the seventh, a Duran hook along the ropes left Ortiz staring absently at the canvas. Ortiz collapsed and stayed parallel to the canvas, while throwing his hand into the air to locate anything to clinch. Somehow Ortiz survived the round.
At the bell for the tenth round, Freddie Brown held Duran back, then shoved him into the ring as a master would a fighting cock. Blood seeped from Ortiz’s mouth as Duran’s left hook landed flush. The champ slid away immediately, leaving his opponent’s counter to whistle in the breeze. Although Ortiz showed life in the twelfth, and shoved Duran at the end of the following round, he took nearly twenty unanswered blows in the fourteenth.
Few men could withstand such a consistent beating. Trying to last the final three minutes, Ortiz couldn’t escape a huge right hook which put him flat on his back. The ropes, no longer his friend, couldn’t hold him anymore. He was counted out with only twenty-one seconds left in the fight; twenty-one seconds for Ortiz to explain to his children that one day he faced a monster and stood up to him. He rose to his feet, but too late to stop the ensuing celebration. Plomo extracted Duran’s mouthpiece and the crowd surged from each corner as Duran leaned over the top rope to point at someone in the seats.
Some critics suggested that having made very heavy weather of stopping two skillful but relatively harmless men in Viruet and Ortiz, Duran had lost his motivation, and his next opponent was another man it was difficult to look good against. Saoul Mamby was a black Jew of Jamaican-Spanish descent who lived in New York.
Duran and Mamby had run together in Central Park and even sparred on occasion. “We had worked together when he was getting ready for DeJesus," Mamby later told Boxing Insider magazine. "I knew he was a very good fighter. Very strong, very sharp. He could box and he could punch. I remember he hit me with a right hand and the punch – the pain lasted for about three months, in my rib. And I still had to go and fight Antonio Cervantes after that.”
Mamby, who had served as a soldier in Vietnam, cleaned windows and drove a gypsy cab in the Bronx to supplement his boxing income. He was the archetypal have-gloves-will-travel journeyman. With his green duffle bag slung over his shoulder, he turned up for short-notice bouts and drew the wrong end of hometown decisions. His cagey style was strictly for the purists, he was never seen on national television and was never in a position to object to the choice of opponent, or how much he was paid. But he could box, had beaten Benny Huertas and Doc McClendon and drawn with Edwin Viruet, and had never been knocked down. “Mamby boxed the way Sarah Vaughan weaved a melody,” said Boxing Illustrated, “economical and exact, without flash.”
After thirty-two fights, Mamby was a top-ten junior welterweight, yet he weighed in the lighter, at 138¾ pounds to Duran