Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [75]
Most notoriously, Duran flattened Vinnie Curto, a middleweight contender, in the Miami gym. “Sure, he knocked down Curto,” said trainer Angelo Dundee, whose brother Chris ran the gym. “Roberto used to always work with bigger guys. I couldn’t believe what happened, so when he came down from the ring I checked his gloves. Roberto was wearing these old, old, heavy gloves and they were all water soaked. I changed them immediately and he got back in the ring.”
Bizzarro had spoken to Curto about the incident. “Vinnie was a real slick boxer. He told me that every time Duran hit him, it hurt. And that was when Curto was a nice, nineteen-year-old prospect. [Duran] couldn’t separate between the gym and the ring. It was always a fight. Then, there were the guys called gym fighters who were the toughest guys during sparring, but fell apart when they got in the real bouts.”
Stories of Duran’s prowess were becoming legendary. There was another one about a middleweight who sparred with him at the Fifth Street Gym and wanted to take it easy because of his greater weight, but Duran insisted they slug it out. “Holy Christ!” said the middleweight. “He hit me on my left arm so hard I couldn’t use it for a week. If those punches had landed on my ribs, I would have been knocked out.” Duran was also said to have flattened a highly rated welterweight in a Puerto Rican gym.
A dignified, classy guy who cared about others, Bizzarro had never met anyone quite like Stone Hands. “I brought Duran in a week ahead of time and we had a press conference,” Elbaum recalled. “Louie was 24–0 and at the press conference he was all dressed up. He was a good-looking, handsome kid. He got up and he was thanking everybody from the mayor down to the sponsors, me, and then he looked at Roberto and he said, ‘Thank you, Mister Duran.’ It was so … I get sick, it was too sugary. But this was Louie. Nice, nice, nice.
“Lou sat down, and Duran got up and said ten words in Spanish and sat down. Luis Henriquez, his translator, started shaking his head, and the sportscaster Al Abrams asked what he said. And Henriquez said, ‘He said he would send him home in an ambulance.’”
Bizzarro remembered a similar Duran. “I saw him a couple days before the fight at the press conference. Oh, he was vicious. He wanted to kill me before the fight. He didn’t say much, but it was more the way he would look at you and stare you down. You have to remember that Duran wasn’t a pleasant guy to be around. He was a mean guy.”
Unfortunately for the Erie contingent of 4,500 fans who arrived on May 22, 1976 stealing the title was probably the only way they would get it off Duran. Built like a character from a video game, Bizzarro was a spaghetti-thin boxer whose legs moved too fast for his body. His game plan was to lace up his boots and circle that ring until the final bell. Duran didn’t like dancers. Anyone willing to move and get out of harm’s way affronted Duran’s machismo, and a man not willing to trade in the middle of the ring, or at least make an effort to fight, was a payaso, or clown.
As Duran has admitted on several occasions, he felt nervous in the moments before the fight began. Expectation weighed on him. “Something’s wrong if you’re a fighter and you’re not nervous when you go up to the ring,” said Bizzarro. “Before every fight I had butterflies. But as soon as the bell rings, they go away.”
From the first round, Bizzarro took off, and Duran had a weary look as he tried to cut off the ring. How long could Bizzarro run and hide? Shaking his shoulders back and forth, Duran moved in a cool fluency, fully aware that the motor would eventually quit on Bizzarro. “He could go backwards faster than anyone could go forward,” Elbaum recalled. “And I felt we had a helluva shot to get a decision, especially in his hometown.”
As the bell sounded at the end of the second round, Duran hurt Bizzarro with an uppercut to the chin. Bizzarro stumbled