I Am Duran by Roberto Duran

Author:Roberto Duran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-01T17:15:50+00:00

SIX

REDEMPTION ROAD

IT’S NOT HOW MANY TIMES you get knocked down; it’s how many times you get back up.

Everyone thought I was finished except me. Of course Don King was no longer kissing my ass, and he said the best he could do was get me a fight in August 1981 against Nino Gonzalez of Puerto Rico. My purse was $75,000 tax-free, a hundred times less than the last fight against Leonard: shit money, but King didn’t give me much choice. Gonzalez wasn’t what I wanted, but he was necessary to get to Wilfred Benítez and eventually get my revenge with Leonard. I didn’t care about Gonzalez, or any other guy. I only cared about Leonard. Indeed, all the American press wanted to talk about was Leonard. Eight months had gone by and still he didn’t want to give me the rematch I deserved. Maybe they should have asked him why.

Arcel was gone—he said he couldn’t face seeing me go through all that again—so now it was Carlos “Panama” Lewis in my corner, along with Plomo, of course, who would have walked through fire for me. The fight was set for the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, and it would be televised in the afternoon, about four hours before the start of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in the stadium there. I had to get down to 154 pounds, the super-middleweight limit, and by July, I was about 165, so making the weight was not going to be a problem. I wasn’t going to get caught out again.

I was determined to make it back to the top even though that summer had been very painful for me. Along with all the shit I was having to deal with, I was affected personally by an event with much wider significance. On July 31, 1981, a Panamanian air force plane with General Torrijos on board was flying in bad weather over western Panama, lost control, and went down; the general was killed. It was hard on me because we had so much history together, and I felt I owed much of what I’d achieved to his friendship. I visited his grave and made a pledge: “General, I came here to pay my respects. One thing I will promise: whenever I get my first chance to fight for the championship, I will bring it back to Panama. I will go in as a challenger and come out a champion.”

I’d sparred three rounds a while back with Gonzalez—then the welterweight champion of New Jersey—in preparation for the fight against Leonard in Montreal. He’d told reporters he could see my eyes flaming when we sparred, but he said I was a beautiful guy outside the ring. Too bad we weren’t going to be outside the ring. I didn’t care for him, or any Puerto Rican, and I was going to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. At the press conference, he got mad, screaming at me that “a Puerto Rican might go down but he doesn’t quit.

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