The Fifth God Of War: Roberto Duran

“Yield to the god.”
~ Virgil, the Aeneid

The battered and bloodied world welterweight champion Barney Ross glowered at his three corner men as the thirteenth round was about to begin. “If you stop this fight,” he said, “I’ll never talk to you the rest of my life.” In the opposite corner, a surging Henry Armstrong sprang out of his corner at the bell. Trainer Ray Arcel, a cotton swap in his mouth, watched the last three rounds with Ross’s words echoing in his ears and a prayer on his lips. He prayed not that Barney would win, but that Barney would survive.

The defeated boxer was brought back to the hotel where Arcel put hot towels on his swollen face and tended to his wounds. He stayed with him for four days and four nights.

That was 1938. Arcel was already in the fight game twenty years. He was in New York City at the beginning, when a troupe of great Jewish boxers left Grupp’s gym in Harlem and walked nine blocks north to Stillman’s gym. Arcel would teach hundreds of young men how to fight, including twenty world champions. His first was Frankie Genaro in 1923. His last was fifty years later.

Arcel met Freddie Brown at Stillman’s. Brown grew up on Forsythe Street in the Lower East side not three miles from Benny Leonard’s house. He began training in the 1920s and had what A.J. Liebling described as the unmistakable appearance of old fighters: “small men with mashed noses and quick eyes” and a chewed-up stogie stuck on his lip that contrasted nicely with the clean cotton swap of Arcel.

MANGOS
Twenty-year-old Roberto Duran’s American debut was at Madison Square Garden. Thirteen thousand, two hundred and eleven ticket-buyers watched him lay out Benny Huertas like a door mat in sixty-six seconds. Dave Anderson covered the fight for the New York Times. “Remember the name –,” he advised.

A startled Ray Arcel saw that stone fist land on Huertas’ temple from an aisle seat. As the Panamanian left the ring on his way to the dressing room he startled the old man again with a polite greeting for him and his wife. A month later Duran would be introduced to Freddie Brown and the triumvirate would be complete.

“When I came into his camp in 1972, he was just a slugger until I taught him finesse,” Brown remembered. A slugger? Duran was worse than that. He was a savage. Duran was a Roman wolf-child placed in a civilizing school where the arts of war were taught by ancient masters. Like Agrippina summoned Seneca to tutor a young Nero, Duran’s manager summoned Arcel. Arcel brought in Freddie Brown. It took not one, but two eminent trainers to tame Duran, and Brown bore the brunt of it –camping outside of his door to chase away the girls, waking him up early in the morning to do his roadwork, locking the cupboards.

The two old men never did completely civilize their pupil, though they did better than Seneca –Nero became emperor and used Christians as human torches to light the streets of Rome. Duran listened, and because he listened his mind was filled with a century’s worth of ring knowledge.

In 1972 Duran indecently assaulted lightweight champion Ken Buchanan and snatched his crown. His reign of terror lasted six years and twelve title defenses.

“The only guy we had like him,” Brown told Pete Hamill, “is Henry Armstrong.” Arcel trained Armstrong after Ross retired and understood the intricacies of explosive boxing. Both trainers knew the value of intelligence in the ring. “Boxing,” said Arcel whenever the subject came up, “is brain over brawn…if you can’t think, you’re just another bum in the park.” Duran was not only “one of the most vicious fighters we’ve ever had,” said Brown, he was “one of the smartest.”

George Herbert once said that “a great ship asks deep water.” Roberto Duran didn’t ask, he invaded the welterweight division when it was as deep as it ever was. Waiting for him were two bangers in Pipino Cuevas and Thomas Hearns, defensive specialist Wilfred Benitez, boxer Carlos Palomino, and the smiling celebrity who lorded over them all –the boxer-puncher Ray Leonard.    

MALICE
By the end of 1979 a clash between Leonard and Duran was almost certain. Duran had already retired former welterweight champion Palomino in a dominant performance, while Leonard stopped Benitez and took his title. They fought separately on the Larry Holmes-Ernie Shavers undercard and Leonard’s trainer Angelo Dundee watched the Duran bout very carefully. “Duran is thought of as a rough guy, but he’s not rough,” he observed, “he’s smart and slick.”

Arcel, 81 and Brown, 73 were watching Leonard as well, though they were very familiar with his style and how to beat it. They had already trained about thirty world champions between them, while the fifty-eight year old Dundee had nine on his resume. In fact, Dundee’s novitiate was at Stillman’s gym where he handed towels to the two masters he now matched wits with.

The posturing began soon enough. At Gleason’s gym, Leonard was watching Duran skip rope when Duran spotted him and began lashing the rope with uncanny speed –while squatting. At a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, Leonard was cuffed by Duran, who claimed that Leonard put his hand near his face. Two days before the fight, both men were at an indoor mall in Montreal and Duran learned just enough English to yell “two more days! Two more days!” Leonard blew a kiss and Duran charged at him and had to be restrained.
 
Duran was getting mean, but it was Leonard who had every physical advantage in his favor. He was younger, faster, taller, and bigger. “I’m not Ali,” he insisted to the pundits, “Sure, maybe at the start I was trying to do his shuffle or his rope-a-dope, but not now.” In his last two outings, Duran looked pudgy as he struggled against two comparative novices before stopping them. The previous three welterweights he faced went the full ten rounds. Never before had three opponents in a row gone the distance with him and there was chatter about not only his power at 147 lbs. but his motivation. Duran himself admitted that he was not always committed to training and his trainers did too, though a warning was attached: “When you’re fighting smear cases and you’re the best fighter around, it’s hard to be interested, but now he’s inspired and when he’s inspired, he’s relentless,” Arcel said, “Leonard can’t beat this guy.”

The odds makers disagreed. Duran was a 9-5 underdog.

Leonard was confident enough (and good enough) to ask permission from an aging Sugar Ray Robinson to borrow “Sugar.” But he couldn’t have anticipated how many lumps he’d get from a man who had more in common with fighters from Robinson’s era than he ever would. As Leonard made his way toward the ring on June 20th 1980, Roberto Duran shadow boxed his own demons in the red corner. Both were in the best condition of their lives, but one of them exuded almost preternatural malevolence.

Arcel had already promised that we’d witness “the darndest fight” we’ve “ever seen” –and we did.

Duran had promised to use “old tricks” against Leonard. Old tricks. Freddie Brown’s fingerprints were all over the Duran-Leonard fight. He trained Duran at Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where he worked with Rocky Marciano in the fifties and Joey Archer in the sixties. Brown had more tricks than a cathouse, such as how to hold an opponent in the crook of the arm to stop incoming shots and create the perception that the opponent was doing nothing. Then there was the “Fitzsimmons shift.” Dundee himself might never have heard of it, but he saw it alright: “…if [Duran] missed you with an overhand right,” he observed, “he’d turn southpaw and come back with a left hook to the body.” Duran can be seen executing this against Leonard in the fifth, seventh, and eighth rounds. Bob Fitzsimmons invented it and used it to implode heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett in 1897. It’s a peach of a move; and it’s older than Ray Arcel himself.

Stone Hands controlled the action in this career-defining bout, but make no mistake, his savvy was no less a deciding factor than his savagery; and the Sugar Man pushed him almost beyond his limits. The crowd was his. Every now and then a thin and solitary Nicaraguan with a mustache could be seen standing up from his seat and waving a little Panamanian flag. It was Alexis Arguello, another fan of the great Duran.

MYTHS
Duran’s strategy was drilled into him. He was instructed to be elusive against the jab, close the distance, crowd Leonard, and hammer the body. Leonard’s aggressive strategy was not expected. It made things more not less difficult to cope with for precisely the reasons that Dundee had alluded to –good little guys don’t beat good big guys. “In this fight, Duran’s not the puncher,” he added, “my guy is.” Their respective knockout percentages over their previous five fights confirmed this: Duran’s was 40%, Leonard’s was 100%. Leonard stated that he planned on “standing and fighting more than expected.” “They all think I’m going to run. I’m not,” he said to New York Magazine, “I’m not changing my style at all… he’ll be beaten to the punch…those are the facts,” he continued, “What’s going to beat Roberto Duran is Sugar Ray Leonard.”

Dundee substantiated this in his autobiography. Leonard’s strategy became certain from the moment that he watched the films and deconstructed Duran’s style. Duran, he said, was a “heel-to-toe guy. He takes two steps to get to you. So the idea was not to give him those two steps, not to move too far away because the more distance you gave him, the more effective he was. What you can’t do in the face of Duran’s aggression was run from it, because then he picks up momentum. My guy wasn’t going to run from him.”

So there you have it.

Leonard’s strategy in Montreal was deliberate, and sound. After the fight, Dundee and Leonard revised history and a willing press has gone along with it ever since. We’ve been spoon-fed a fable that has long since crystallized into orthodox boxing lore. It is the archetypal image of the Latin bully who “tricked” the All-American Hero into an alley fight, and it sprang from the idea that Leonard “did not fight his fight” because Duran challenged his masculinity. The problem is that it is at complete odds with statements made by Leonard and Dundee about Leonard’s clear physical advantages and the strategy that would be formed around those advantages. It contradicts Dundee’s earlier statements about Duran’s high level of skill and it contradicts statements that both had made immediately after the bout –before they had time to think about posterity: “You’ve got to give credit to Duran,” Dundee told journalists, “he makes you fight his fight.” When asked why he fought Duran’s fight, Leonard said he had “no alternative.”

Since then, Leonard’s loss to Duran has been cleverly spun, re-packaged, and sold at a reduced price. It’s time to find our receipt and exchange a fable for the facts. And the facts begin with this: when both fighters were at their best, Duran was better. 

MEMENTO MORI
Duran’s record now stood at 72-1 (56). As he simmered down in the aftermath, the magnitude of what had just happened set in. He knew that Leonard was great. At the post-fight press conference he was asked if Ray Leonard was the toughest opponent he ever faced. Duran, his face scuffed and swollen, hesitated and thought for a moment. “Si,” he softly said, “…si.” 

And then something changed. Whatever it was that raged inside Roberto Duran –a legion of devils, his hatred of Leonard, the memory of a child begging on the streets of Chorrillo– faded from that moment. 

He became more sedate. After thirteen years of pasion violenta and after a victory that is almost without equal in the annals of boxing history, he fell like all who forget that they are mortal; and his humiliation would be so complete that it would obscure everything else.

Old embers would flare up only sporadically after the fateful year of 1980. Three times more he would remind the world of his greatness against men that no lightweight in his right mind would ever face. By then his trainers had walked away and soon retired for keeps. They joined us and watched a melting legend fight youngsters. As the curtain slowly dropped on a career that would span over thirty years, there was little left that recalled what he was; just some old tricks in an arsenal ransacked by age and an unbecoming appetite.

But what he was should not be eclipsed.

It should be remembered.

When the splendor that was Sugar Ray Leonard had the whole sports world squinting, Freddie Brown and Ray Arcel applied that old school method in the shadow of Stillman’s gym. They brought the Panamanian to a peak of human performance so perfect in its blend of science and ferocity that it would never be approached again –by Duran or anyone else.

Fifteen rounds unveiled a god of war.

After the final bell, a jubilant Duran leaps into the air. Before he lands he sees Leonard daring to raise his arms in victory and the coals of his eyes burn. He shoves and spits at his adversary, then stalks toward the ropes at ringside and grabs his crotch as he hurls Spanish epithets. Arcel tries to calm him down. Leonard’s brother Roger rushes him and is knocked flat with one shot. The announcer shouts “le nouveau--” into the microphone, and victorious, the raging champion is hoisted up above the crowd –above the world, still cursing the vanquished.

This is Duran.                                                                                                                                                                             *************** 

ROBERTO DURAN'S SCORECARD                                                                                                                                                        

-25 points-
Experience: 25

-15 points-                               
Ring Generalship: 14
Longevity: 14
Dominance: 13

-10 points-
Durability: 9
P/LO: 9
Intangibles: 5

TOTAL: 89  

…..
The graphic enhancements are the work of Jason McMann of Plymouth, MA.

The author is indebted to Ronald K. Fried’s Corner Men and to Pete Hamill, Michael Katz and Dave Anderson for their expert coverage of the Duran-Leonard bout in 1980. Anderson’s In the Corner, Christian Giudice’s biography Hands of Stone and George Kimball’s outstanding Four Kings were also valuable resources.

Springs Toledo can be contacted at scalinatella@hotmail.com.