I Am Duran Read online

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  Copyright © 2016 Roberto Durán

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  eBook ISBN 9780735213142

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  I want to dedicate this book to all of my family and the people of Panama. They are my everything.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  ONE || Street Fighting Man

  TWO || New York, New York

  THREE || The Lion King

  FOUR || Sugar Ray Meets Charles Manson

  FIVE || No Más

  SIX || Redemption Road

  SEVEN || “No Moore”

  EIGHT || El Campeón

  NINE || “Uno Más”

  TEN || Paz and Macho Time

  ELEVEN || One More for La Patria

  TWELVE || The Last Good-byes

  PHOTOS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CREDITS FOR PHOTO INSERT

  PROLOGUE

  I DIED ON AN OPERATING TABLE in a hospital in Buenos Aires. I was dead for thirty seconds. That’s what I’m told, anyway.

  On October 4, 2001, I was in a bad car crash with my son Chavo. We’d left Panama the day before to attend a music promotion in Argentina that he was involved in. I wanted to help him out, even though I wasn’t keen on going. I’d already arranged to go to Vancouver to see my friend José Sulaimán, the president of the World Boxing Council, and I was going to take one of my daughters, Irichelle; I’d never really spent much time with her over the last few years. But Chavo was persistent. “Please, Papi!” he kept saying.

  “I don’t want to go,” I remember telling him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

  The flight there was a little bumpy. I shook my head—“Qué te dije?” I said to him. What did I tell you?

  In Buenos Aires we went straight to a nice restaurant and spent the evening doing the things I love most—eating, drinking, having a great time. Chavo was watching a soccer game on TV there, and he suddenly got the urge to see the second half in person. He asked where the game was being played. Not far at all, he was told.

  “Let’s go!” he said.

  “Screw it,” I told him. “I want to stay here with my wine and my champagne and my churrasco.”

  “Vamos, vamos, vamos!”

  The reason Chavo was so excited was that some soccer star named Ariel Ortega was playing—a midfielder, whose nickname was “El Burrito.” I didn’t know much about him, but I did know I wanted to stay where I was, drinking champagne.

  “Please, Papi, please! It’s not the same if you don’t come! I want you to meet El Burrito!”

  “I got your Burrito right here,” I said, grabbing my crotch. “Go on your own.”

  “It’d be much better with you,” said Chavo. “We’ll get in more quickly.”

  So off we went. By now, it wasn’t just dark, it was raining hard, too. I can’t remember much of what happened, but before we got to the stadium we got hit by a car from behind and both cars crashed into a wall. Bang! Had our driver let up on the gas pedal, I think we would have been okay, but he kept his foot down and the car went spinning along those wide streets they have in Buenos Aires. If we hadn’t hit that barrier, we’d have crashed into a bunch of other cars and died right there.

  I braced my hand against the front seat and saw I was bleeding badly. I felt groggy. My other hand, it looked broken. But the worst part was that the guy sitting next to me had gone flying across the seat and hit me very hard. I ended up with a collapsed lung and eight broken ribs. I was bleeding from my mouth, too, which made it hard to breathe. At least all the wine and champagne I’d had to drink meant it didn’t hurt so much.

  They put me in a neck brace and rushed me to the hospital. I was in a daze when we got there—one of the doctors in the corridor was screaming, “I have Durán’s watch! I have the watch of Manos de Piedra!”

  I was mostly worried about my son. “Where’s Chavo?” I kept screaming. “Where’s Chavo?” Please, I prayed to God, it’s okay to take me, but not him—please, not him. Then I saw him, with an IV line dangling from his arm. He was hurt, too, but not as bad as me, although he pissed blood for three days.

  In Panama, however, they killed me off. News got around that I’d had an accident, and before I could say anything they were reporting that I’d been killed in the crash. The rumors sent the country into a frenzy. They thought I was gone, and they started selling sweaters, key chains, trinkets, souvenirs—all sorts of crap with my name or photo on it. Back in the hospital I laughed my ass off.

  It wasn’t so funny for my family back home, though. The day after the accident, my brother Pototo opened the door to a neighbor who said, “Are you watching the news about your brother? He’s in critical condition”—and from that moment they’d been desperate for news. Pototo didn’t know what to do, so he called my wife, Fula. At least Fula was able to fly to Buenos Aires and calm everyone down.

  It turned out one of the ribs had punctured my lung, which led to water on the lung, so the doctors kept me in the hospital to operate on me once the bruising and swelling had gone down. And then I got an infection.

  That, I was told later, was when I went into cardiac arrest for two or three minutes. If it had been anyone else, the doctor said, I would have stayed dead. But my good health and physical strength meant I didn’t die, thank God.

  When I came around, everything was white. Chuleta! I thought I had died. “Am I in heaven?” I cried.

  “Not yet, Cholo,” said an old guy next to me. “Not yet!”

  Then the doctor gave it to me straight: my lung had suffered a lot of damage and I should consider myself lucky to be alive. “Durán, no more fighting. You’ve got to retire.” I wasn’t going to argue with the doctors.

  I was finally able to go home on November 16, nearly six weeks after the accident, and the doctors told me I needed another four months to fully recuperate. It had been really, really rough—I’d cried because of the pain.

  And so, in January 2002, I retired. I guess I was okay with leaving the sport like that, though before the accident I’d never given any thought to retiring, not even a few months earlier when I’d lost to Héctor “Macho” Camacho. If I hadn’t been hurt so badly in that accident, I don’t know if I would have continued fighting. In fact, being in good shape from that Camacho fight is probably what saved me in the crash.

  But even though I was fifty when I retired, I would gladly have beaten the crap out of all the deadbeats in the sport. The same goes with the boxers today: Pacquiao, Mayweather—they’re pitiful. I could have beaten all of them.

  Throughout my entire boxing career—thirty-three years—I never thought anyone could beat me. I never thought bad things would happen to me in the ring. I was going to win or I was going to knock someone out—I did a lot of that. Just
look at my record. I beat the American idol, Sugar Ray Leonard. Knocked out Puerto Rico’s hero, Esteban de Jesús. Wilfred Benítez. Iran Barkley—people thought Barkley was going to kill me. I nearly killed him. Remembering things like that makes me laugh.

  My strategy was very simple. In my personal life I am not an animal, but in the ring there was an animal inside me. Sometimes it roared the moment the first bell rang. Sometimes it sprang out later in the fight. But I could always feel it there, driving me and pushing me forward. It’s what made me win, what made me enjoy fighting.

  The worst thing you could do with me was be scared, because I’d smell that fear. I never feared anyone, even when I was a kid. I grew up on the streets, and after the childhood I had, who the fuck was I going to be scared of? I fought in the streets before I ever fought in the gym. I’d go to the corner and tell Plomo, my first trainer, “He hit me hard, but I’m going to hit him harder.” Plomo saw that instinct. The streets taught me everything I needed to know about life and boxing.

  Boxing has given me everything. I’ve met the rich and famous. Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Diego Maradona. I’ve traveled the world. New York, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Montreal, London, China. Panamanians love me. They adore me. I’m an idol in my country, but sometimes I think the gringos love me even more. I’ve been honored by presidents—great presidents like Nelson Mandela. Partied in limousines and private planes chartered by the government. I’ve slept in Panama’s presidential palace. Dined and gotten drunk with Hollywood stars, played and sung with some of the Latin salsa greats. I’ve bought dozens of cars, drunk the best wines, eaten delicious steaks. Boxing gave me all that, and more. So I drink a lot sometimes—so what? Life’s meant to be enjoyed, and mine’s been a party. La jodienda, Latin people call it.

  Boxing is part of my life, but so are my family and friends. It’s tough to keep it all in focus all the time from when you’re a pelao, a kid, to when you’re a man touching fifty who’s still fighting for his family, for his pride, for all those fans—for the joy of being respected by the people he cares about.

  I’m a family man who loves his wife, but I’ve also slept around and fathered other children. I make no apologies for that. As world champion, as one of the most famous and honored men in Panama, I’ve been around temptation every day, and I’m not going to say sorry for the things I’ve done. Thank God I have a beautiful, intelligent, forgiving, loving wife. I also have five beautiful children with Fula—three boys and two girls. They’re everything to me—gifts of God.

  You’ll always find me in a good mood. And if I do get in a bad mood, I’ll snap out of it in an instant. Maybe that’s why I’ve always struggled to make weight. When you’re a world champion and have achieved all you want, it’s hard to keep engaged. I’d fight, then drink, party, and gain weight. I’d have to lose twenty, thirty pounds in a month—it was like shedding tears of blood. And I’d still win. I loved to box, but I also loved the other things in life and I was never going to deny myself. It drove my trainers and managers crazy. But they weren’t the ones out there busting their asses in the gym and winning all those fights. I was the one who made them famous, not the other way around.

  Just look at my record. Over a hundred victories, seventy by knockout. Five world titles in four different divisions. I was a world champion at twenty-one. A champion again at thirty-seven. I fought into five decades, from 1968 to 2001. People rate me as the greatest lightweight of all time. And why not? I think I am. “There is only one legend,” as I’ve often said, “and that’s me.”

  Manos de Piedra. Hands of Stone. El Cholo.

  ONE

  STREET FIGHTING MAN

  I AM A CHILD OF THE STREETS. My neighbors were thieves, whores, and murderers. My father wasn’t around and I never made it past third grade. I still don’t read or write much, but I know what poverty is, because my childhood sucked. Mierda. Shit.

  To this day I believe that boxing champions never come from rich neighborhoods. They come from the barrios, the gutters—it’s God’s law. God wrote the script for me before I was born. All I had to do was follow the path He set for me. It wasn’t an easy one. Sometimes I had to sleep on the streets with a newspaper for a blanket. Good weather, bad weather, didn’t matter; rain or hot as hell. “A gypsy,” my manager Carlos Eleta once called me. “He likes to be free.” Okay, a gypsy, but I survived.

  When you’re a pelao—the nickname they give street kids in Panama—you don’t think about what you have or don’t have. You live from day to day—every fucking day. You struggle to find food to eat. You struggle to keep your brothers and sisters safe. I was too young to process any of this at the time, of course, and even now I don’t think much about it, but I know it’s there, and even when I became rich I never forgot where I’d come from. I didn’t have any toys, no fancy trucks for my birthday, no fancy clothes. None of that shit. It was all about lo que necesitas—what you need.

  I was born into the arms of my grandmother, doña Ceferina García, on June 16, 1951, and given the name Roberto Durán Samaniego. My mother was late for everything, and she couldn’t even get to the hospital in time. When the contractions started, she stayed home, and so I was born at Casa de Piedra, Avenida A (no. 147), Cuarto 96, in El Chorrillo, a working-class neighborhood down by the water in Panama City, not far from the entrance to the Panama Canal.

  Panama in the 1950s was a rough country, not like now. The government didn’t give a shit about stuff like education and keeping people safe. The Panama Canal was causing a lot of tension. Students were demonstrating against the United States and getting into fights with the National Guard. There was a lot of violence, rioting—nothing for the people but despair and poverty. When I was born, you arrived in the world naked and had to look after yourself immediately, because no one else was going to do it. Just ask my mother.

  My mother, Clara Esther Samaniego, was Panamanian, but my dad, Margarito Durán Sánchez, was a soldier with Mexican and Cherokee blood. He made me and then left when I was one and a half. I wouldn’t see him for another twenty years, when I was fighting professionally in Los Angeles, and then I didn’t see him again. All those years he was gone from my life I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about him. Why should I have? He was nothing to me.

  My dad met my mother when he was working as a cook with the United States Army in the Panama Canal Zone. She was twenty then, and before he left he would father another son, Alcibíades, with her, but this child died of a heart problem when he was two. He was buried in a cemetery for poor families—we barely had enough money for food, so how were we going to afford a tombstone? My mother already had another son, Domingo (“Toti”), from a relationship with a Puerto Rican man, and a daughter, Marina, from a relationship with a Filipino. Life wasn’t easy, but she didn’t make it any easier for herself or us.

  There were definitely no fancy homes in El Chorrillo, just wooden tenements—slums, even—and lots and lots of bars. Most people who lived there were immigrants working on the construction of the Panama Canal, mainly from the Caribbean, which was even poorer than Panama back then. There were some bad people there, guys who hustled for money by stealing cigarettes and beer from the U.S. military bases, but there were some good people, too, teachers and clerks, who looked out for us kids.

  I didn’t go to school much because I didn’t have to. I wasn’t interested, so there wasn’t much point. When I did go, I’d just have breakfast and then leave, since we didn’t have money for anything. I had this little box that contained stuff to shine shoes with, and I’d go home from school, change my clothes, and go out again to shine shoes. And that’s how I started my life—shining shoes on the pavement when I should have been at school.

  It was just as well I didn’t spend much time at school, because whenever I did go I ended up getting into fights and getting kicked out. Back then, I was more of a wrestler, preferring to pin people to the floor, b
ut even then, just like in the ring, I never backed down. It wasn’t my fault, though. The kids from the fifth and sixth grades would always pick on the pelaos from the first grade. So one day a sixth-grader started picking on a first-grader. I jumped in, decked the sixth-grader, and left him gasping for air. They took me to the principal’s office and this time they kicked me out of school for good. My mother took me to another school and the same thing happened. In the end I stopped going to school altogether, and every morning I’d leave the house to shine shoes and sell newspapers with my older brother Toti.

  I call it home, but there was nothing there for me. No dad, and a mother who wasn’t very interested in me. She’d get tired of looking after me and send me off to Guararé, where my grandmother lived. That was about 150 miles away, so I’d have to get in this fucking truck used to transport chickens. For eight fucking hours. Chuleta! And my grandmother was just as bad. Whenever I turned up she tried to palm me off on other relatives, and if they wouldn’t have me, then on her friends. She always told me there were too many kids and not enough money. It was true—there were days when we had no food, nothing to eat, and as a result we learned early in life to fend for ourselves. From the moment I started running in the streets I was helping my mother, Toti, my sister, and my other brothers and sisters—together we did what we could just to stay alive.

  I would do anything to try to get money for my family, even though I was only a child. I’d go out and chop wood and then use the money to buy milk and rice, and that’s what we’d have to eat that day. But my family was only one of many who had this kind of life. There were a lot of pelaos just like me. One of the religious groups would raise funds for a Christmas party for the pelaos by selling raffle tickets for two dollars. The prize was a gallon of Johnnie Walker Black. A lot of men bought those tickets.

  We’d jump the fence into the fancy part of the neighborhood called La Zona to look for food in dumpsters. People who had more money, and the gringos who worked on the Canal, they’d throw away the food they didn’t want, which was great for us. Those days when we could all eat properly were real celebrations!