Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [80]
“He eventually showed up, but they put him right on and yanked him off the scale,” said Peltz. “Al Braverman did. And I don’t know if he was with King at the time, but he was definitely with Viruet. He had trouble making weight, I remember.”
“Viruet never made the weight,” Duran recalled. “He never weighed in. He went to go lose weight and he never came back to weigh in. Both Eleta and Flacco [Duran’s interpreter and helper] fell asleep on that one. The important thing was that they wanted me to fight.”
Plomo concurred, “He did not get on the scale. Is the champion supposed to get on the scale but not the rival? I believe Carlos Eleta was to blame there. No manager can accept that his own boxer gets on the scale and the other one does not. But Eleta was a terrible guy.”
While the fight officials dealt with the weigh-in, there was another problem. “The most fun we had with that fight was with King’s canvas. He uses the canvas with his big logo,” said Peltz. “We had the Spectrum and had a reputation for having a great arena. I didn’t want King’s logo in the center. So I decided … I told them to put our logo on the canvas. When they sent King’s logo on that Thursday we had it shipped over to JFK Stadium, and had some guy scribble his initials on it and hide it somewhere. A day before the fight they couldn’t find the canvas and I was like, ‘Geez, we might have to use ours.’ He sent Richie Giachetti down to my office and he stayed there the whole day trying to locate that canvas. He said I got some paper here, but you couldn’t even read the name of the guy who signed for it.
“We finally used our canvas and we got it on national television because that was a touchy subject in those days, what could and couldn’t get on TV. When the show was over, I saw King and he was wearing a crème-colored three-piece suit with all these frills on it like George Washington. He pointed at me and said, ‘I know you fucked around with the canvas. I can’t prove it, but I know.’ We uncovered it the next day and got it back to him.
“The good thing about King in those days was that he could only deliver the main event. Anybody else that he put on the show, he would have to pay for. I expected a decent crowd, but I think we sold like 7,500, but 7,000 in advance. I didn’t understand it because Duran was big in New York and they would come to Philly for the fight.”
The fight was picked up by ABC for home TV broadcast, and King needed a venue. In the early 1970s, Peltz and company had been drawing big crowds at the Spectrum. Peltz would pay King a site fee, and expected to use Duran as the bait. “The day of the fight we thought we’d sell another 7,000 or at least 3 or 4,000 like we were doing,” Peltz recalled. “But we only sold five hundred. The problem with the Duran fight was that something happened with the scale and ABC-TV was going to pull the plug the day of the fight. Jay Seidman came up to me before the fight and told me ABC wasn’t going to televise the fight. He said, ‘They think that there’s some kind of shenanigans going on.’ It didn’t make sense because I didn’t understand why they would care if Viruet made the weight or not. We went into a room with Howard Cosell, Alex Wallau and maybe Chet Forte was in the room. There had to be some big shots from ABC and they just wanted to pull the plug. I was pleading with them they just couldn’t do that. Alex was telling them how I was an honest guy and everything.
“The first fight started and the people were coming up to me, and Alex came up to me and said, ‘We just got it settled.’ I was shaking and I couldn’t even button my shirt. He fixed my tie and was like dressing me at ringside. The card was anticlimactic. I didn’t have Duran losing that fight, but it was a tough