Finally, a Chance to Erase Memory

It’s not true that when they found Roberto Duran, he was eating a zebra. It isn’t even true that he was living in a tree and that the first thing they had to do to get him ready to fight was remove the spots.

It’s just that, if you know Roberto Duran, that’s easy to believe. This was the most dangerous thing to come out of the jungle since the tsetse fly. Nothing this tough could ever talk before. Anything this swift and vicious had a tail and claws and probably a bounty on it.

The eyes, bold and fearless, probing for weaknesses, always managed to make him look like something crouched in the bushes at a water hole, waiting for his dinner to come along.

You felt sorry for anything that had to climb in the ring with this. You felt like covering your eyes. It was like watching a kitten wander out into freeway traffic.

The pattern of his fights was always the same: His opponent would dance into the ring, wave his arms, blow kisses to the crowd and bounce up and down in his corner waiting for the bell. Little Red Riding Hood on the way to grandmother’s house.

Then Roberto would hit him. And a look of horror and disbelief would cross the guy’s face. He would realize he had made a terrible mistake. He had locked himself in a room with a God-knows-what.

The best guess was, Roberto had been raised by a family of pumas and had to be trained not to drag his opponent back to the cave with him. Or to say, “No, thanks, I’ll eat it here.”

He looked a little bit like Jack Dempsey--if Dempsey’s mother had been a wolf. He fought like Dempsey, too. There was very little science to it. It was like being set upon by a pack of mad dogs. No one ever said that Roberto reminded him of Gentleman Jim.

He had fists of stone and a chin of granite. He made his fight like a guy stoning an embassy. He hurt you wherever he hit you.

The trouble was, he fought out of Panama City, and the only ink he got was in agate type under “Fights Last Night.” He was a legend from one end of the canal to the other. Even when he came north and destroyed the Scotsman Ken Buchanan for the lightweight title, he went back to Panama.

It was like burying the title in his back yard. It was like doing “Hamlet” for an audience of guys with bones in their noses.

The Norteamericanos stumbled on Duran when he fought a televised fight beamed to the United States from Panama against a pretty good Stateside lightweight, Ray Lampkin.

Lampkin twitched when he got knocked out, and it sent a chill through viewers from Maine to Colorado. Roberto was the only guy in the arena--or on television--who was hoping Lampkin would get up. Lampkin was lucky he ever got up.

They knew Roberto was box office then. Manslaughter sells. And they brought Roberto north and ultimately matched him with Sugar Ray Leonard for a big-money shot in Montreal (big money for Ray, who got $10 million--Roberto got $1 million).

It was Frank Merriwell against the town bully. St. George against the dragon. Sugar Ray was the darling of the yuppies and the television fight fans. He was the clean-cut Olympic hero, handsome, articulate, polite and civilized, an artist. Roberto was just a spike-haired, white-fanged throwback, the stone fist out of the Stone Age.

Sugar Ray, unaccountably, fought Roberto’s fight. It was like climbing a tree after a leopard, getting onto an ice floe with a polar bear. The surprise was, it was so close, one point on two cards and two points on the third.

But not as big a surprise as their rematch five months later.

Now, lots of guys have quit in the corner. It was considered perfectly honorable in parts of the world. Great Britain, for example. You’ve come to accept it from cerebral boxer types. If you’re beaten, pip, pip, salute your opponent and go get a shower, and back to the drawing boards.

But Central America is not the old school-tie fraternity. Retiring under fire is not the code of the vaquero, the campesino. And this was not the image of Roberto Duran. The leopard does not leave his kill, the tiger break off the hunt.

No one knows what Roberto was thinking of when he quit. He seemed to have this little crooked grin on his face as though he were playing a dirty trick on Leonard.

He was playing a dirty trick on Roberto Duran. He had broken the code of machismo. Everywhere he went, he got these hurt, reproachful looks, as if he had disgraced a region.

Scorn, he probably could have put up with but not the rebuke, “Roberto, you could have made us proud!” He let down the old neighborhood, all right. Losing, they could have taken. Quitting took some getting used to.

Roberto would have liked it better if they had thrown cabbages at him. Legend tells us he partied and giggled and sang--and drank--the night after the fight. But the next day, when the vote from the Canal Zone was in, he wept.

He fought valiantly to redeem himself, to overcome the terrible blot on his reputation. But no matter how many Pipino Cuevases he knocked out, no matter how many Davey Moores he flattened, titles he won, he couldn’t wipe out the memory of “No mas.” It went into the language--as a jeer not a salute, the Spanish equivalent of saying uncle.

He couldn’t have dreamed he’d get a chance to erase that humiliating moment, although he said sincerely at a press conference at the glittering new Mirage Hotel ballroom here Monday, “I always had faith Leonard would give me another chance and I had faith that God would give me another chance.”

Leonard did. No one is quite sure why. It’s an axiom that, when you shoot at a king--or a cougar--make sure you kill him. And when you kill him, leave him killed. If you only wound him, get the hell out of there.

Sugar Ray’s position seems to be that Roberto is older, tamer, milder now. At 38, he’s like one of those toothless old cats you see in the circus--fat, lazy, well fed, jumping through hoops on command and making just a token growl or clawless swipe at the trainer.

Maybe. But no self-respecting tamer ever turns his back on one for long. And, to a man, they will tell you the most dangerous thing in nature is a wounded animal.

Sugar Ray may wish along about the fifth round at the Mirage ring Thursday night that he had left this one in the cage, too.