Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [76]
“In the second round, I knew I was hurt when he hit me with a punch after the bell. I made a mistake by dropping my hands. Don [Elbaum] had told me to be ready for anything with this guy and not to drop my hands in the clinch. As soon as I did it for the first time, ‘Boom,’ he gets me. It took me four rounds to recuperate.”
The third man in the ring that evening was Puerto Rican referee Waldemar Schmidt. “In the seventh round, I hit Duran with a right hand and knocked him down, and Schmidt called it a slip,” claimed Bizzarro. “It happened again in the eighth with a hook and he called it a slip again. I couldn’t believe it when he was talking to Duran in Spanish. Elbaum thought he was going to be German, and that’s why he OK’d him. It turns out that the guy is from Puerto Rico.”
In the clinches, Duran and Bizzarro held a running dialogue. Duran also raked his gloves across Bizzarro’s no longer model face and hit him late. A left-right-left combo dumped Bizzarro for a count of nine in the tenth, and he was on the floor again before the end of the round. Surprisingly Bizzarro came back to have his best round in the eleventh, but it was his last throw of the dice. “I didn’t want the referee to stop the fight,” he said. “I came back and beat him in the eleventh round.”
Heeding his camp’s advice, Bizzarro sketched a circle around Duran. It was a strategy implemented in training which made his handlers seem like geniuses for the first ten rounds. However, it was a strategy plagued by inconsistency. When people searched for weaknesses in Duran’s repertoire, the holes were so slight that they had to invent their own. Buchanan’s trainer Gil Clancy was guilty of this, and Elbaum wasn’t far behind. Duran threw so many punches with so much force behind each one that it seemed an impossible feat for any boxer to keep up the pace. Elbaum thought Duran would burn out by the late rounds. Others had made the same mistake. “Don told me that Duran would start fading by the tenth round, but I don’t know what he was talking about,” said Bizzarro. “If anything, I started to fade. He would never fade the entire fight. Duran hurt me from the second round on.”
Duran closed the gap considerably as Bizzarro slowed, and in the fourteenth he finally cornered his man. “Late in the round a savage right uppercut sent Bizzarro reeling onto the ropes and referee Schmidt gave him a standing eight count,” reported Boxing News. “Another right dropped Bizzarro for six, and Schmidt continued the count to eight before waving Duran in for the finish. A tremendous right to the head made Bizzarro’s legs fold under him, and he lay on his back without moving as he was counted out.”
Though just one second remained in the round, many spectators believed the fight should have been stopped before the final knockout. Elbaum wasn’t one of them. “No, because he was hurt but he wasn’t out on his feet,” said the promoter, “even though it was a situation where his brother Johnny wanted to stop it, he was running up the steps to stop it and I had to grab him and we were wrestling on the ground outside the ring so he wouldn’t stop the fight.”
In fact, the end came so suddenly that there was little time for intervention. “I didn’t see Johnny running up to the ring,” Bizzarro remembered. “All my focus was on Duran. That was just my brother looking out for me. He had been in there before and knew everything that Duran was doing. But I was fine. The only problem was that the new shoes I bought gave me blisters down to the bone. I couldn’t walk for weeks after the fight.”
Duran eventually made his way over to the fallen fighter, arriving with his hands extended. At that moment, Bizzarro looked anything but a male model. “The challenger fought the first nine rounds with his legs, and the last