Another excerpt from George Kimball’s FOUR KINGS: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran, and the Last Great Era of Boxing

Amid the post-mortems following the first fight in Montreal, Don King conceded that Ray Leonard’s representatives had done a superior job of negotiating.  Now, King reminded the press the following morning (neither boxer was present), Roberto Duran was in a position to dictate the terms of a rematch. “We assume they’re going to be fair,” said King, who held the promotional rights to Duran-Leonard II. “It’s like a mirror. Mr. Trainer was quite adamant in his negotiations for the first fight, and did a splendid job for Sugar Ray Leonard. I’m sure that Mr. Eleta and I can do the same for Roberto Duran.”

Initially it was by no means clear that there would be a rematch. As Duran embarked on profligate celebratory tour that would take him and his partying posse from Montreal to Panama and then back to New York, a disappointed and confused Leonard headed off to Hawaii to ponder his own future.

There were days of solitary walks on the beach, evenings in which he seemed to stare for hours at the ocean. But all the while his mind was churning as he replayed the events of Montreal in his mind.

Even though he had willingly walked into Duran’s trap, he began to realize, it had still been a very close fight. If he could come that close to beating Manos De Piedra fighting Duran’s fight, what would happen if he fought his own?

“For a week Ray never said anything,” Juanita Leonard told Duran’s biographer Christian Guidice. “Then one day he said ‘I’ve got something to tell you, sweetheart. I can’t quit fighting.’
“I just looked at him and said ‘It took you a while, didn’t it?’ He was 25 years old. There’s no way he was going to quit.”
Leonard picked up the phone and called Mike Trainer.
“Let’s go back and fight him,” he said. “Now. Right away.”
*  *  *
Four days after defeating Leonard, Duran was greeted by 700,000 of his countrymen at a rally in Panama.  He wore about his waist the green WBC belt he had “given” to Freddie Brown a few nights earlier.
On several occasions Duran pointed down to the belt as he spoke, reminding the throng that “this does not really belong to me, it belongs to you, my people,” and, more colloquially, that “this thing is hanging there for you guys.”
Only later, Duran related to Giudice, did he realize that a sizable portion of his audience assumed from the animated gestures that he was referring not to the championship belt, but to his “monstruo” – his prick.
From Panama, Duran returned to New York, where he and his friends continued a celebration that lasted the entire summer. By September the welterweight champion weighed in excess of 180 pounds.
King and Eleta had, in the meantime, managed to strike a bargain with Trainer that was favorable to their client in every respect save one. Duran would indeed earn the champion’s share, an $8 million guarantee that exceeded his wildest expectations.
The catch was that the rematch would take place in November.
Eleta was subsequently criticized for taking the autumn date even though he knew how badly out of shape Duran was. The manager later explained that he agreed to the timetable not because Leonard had demanded it, but because if he hadn’t, he feared, Duran might never have stopped partying.
“In our country, Duran is like a god,” Eleta later explained to Dave Anderson. “Everybody is after him to do this or do that, and he is very difficult to control. After he won the title from Leonard in Montreal and returned home to Panama, everyone invited him to parties and his home was turned into a hotel. Training in Panama became impossible. He was 183 pounds before we got him out of the country.”
Duran-Leonard II was once again officially announced at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria. At its conclusion, Katz approached Duran, and thanked him for the score he’d made in Montreal.
“Thees time, bet dobble,” a smiling Duran replied, in English.
“So I did,” said the Wolf Man.
At that same New York press conference, Duran foreshadowed the events of what would prove the critical moment of his life, providing a glimpse into his psyche as he voiced his disdain for Leonard.
“I don’t like to see clowns in the ring,” said Duran. “I like to see boxers. To fight and beat me, you have to come into the ring and fight me. He goes into the ring and tries to imitate Ali, but an imitator is a loser.”
* * *
“It was a little tougher getting Duran into camp,” recalled Bobby Goodman. “He had celebrated his win over Leonard with, shall we say, gusto and enthusiasm.
“You’ve got to remember that now Duran was even bigger in the boxing world than he’d been before. He had now reached a legendary status that transcended the Latino community, and even the sport itself. It made no difference that he didn’t speak English. He was Roberto Duran.”
“Once we got him up to Grossinger’s he went to work –  though it was evident it wasn’t as hard as he worked for the first fight. It was fall, and the mornings were getting colder. Sometimes Freddie had a hard time getting him out of bed.”
This time Don Morgan served as Duran’s principal sparring partner. Goodman also recalls Kevin Rooney that journeyed over from Catskill on several occasions as well.
“He did the things he’d done that spring – interacting with the hotel guests, meeting with the media, but there seemed to be even more family and friends around,” continued Goodman. “Duran went through the motions and got himself into decent shape, but it seemed he didn’t spar quite as hard or exercise with the same abandon. He was so sure he could handle Leonard again that this time there was no sense of urgency to his preparations.”
When it came time to break camp and move on to New Orleans, no one was happier than Duran.  Not necessarily because he was anxious to fight, but because it was getting cold up in the Catskills, and he was eager to get back to a more hospitable climate.
If Freddie Brown, who had done the hands-on training at Grosssinger’s, was concerned, he apparently didn’t tell Ray Arcel. When the older man was asked about the possibility of an upset, he replied “if Duran lost to Leonard, he’d be ready to commit suicide.”
*  *   *
Leonard had taken much of the summer off, dabbling in television work for both HBO and CBS, in addition to a part-time gig as a sports reporter for a Washington station. He’d done a couple of commercials as well, including one for 7-Up  in which he and Duran were featured. Their two young sons accompanied the boxers to the photo shoot.
As the two boys playfully scrapped during the taping, Duran at one point turned to Leonard in apparent seriousness to warn: “if your kid hurts my kid, I’m going to kill you.”
Leonard once again trained in New Carrollton, but this time his preparations were Duran-specific. One of his sparring partners, Dale Staley, described himself as “The American Assassin.”
In a bout against Leo Thomas at Washington’s Starplex the previous February, the American Assassin had been disqualified for taking a bite out of his opponent. It cost him the fight, but it won him a job in the Leonard camp, where he was encouraged to use his ample arsenal of dirty tricks to emulate Duran.
In camp Staley was free to employ his elbows, arms, and head. John Schulian described one sparring session in which Staley grabbed the ropes for leverage and then butted Leonard squarely in the head. Leonard responded in kind, grasping the ropes with one hand and smacking the Assassin the face with the other.
After Leonard’s loss to Duran in Montreal, Dave Jacobs had so strongly opposed the idea of an immediate rematch that he threatened to quit, and did, when Trainer and Dundee signed to go back up against Duran without a tuneup fight.

“Some people wanted him to fight again before the rematch with Duran, but that would have been useless,” Dundee explained. “You don’t gain anything by fighting less than the best. We know what we have to do to beat Duran.”

The disagreement over the wisdom of the rematch was the stated reason, at least for public consumption, for Jacobs’ departure, but there was obviously more to It than that. Jacobs had been Leonard’s first boxing coach and his father-confessor at every step of the way, but he had increasingly chafed as he saw his position of influence waning.

Trainer was making the management decisions, Dundee the boxing decisions, and Morton seemed to increasingly have Ray’s ear as well. Jacobs still had the title of ‘trainer,’ but he wasn’t allowed to perform a trainer’s normal duties, nor was he paid like he thought a man in his position ought to be.

Jacobs’ departure was a disappointment, “because at one time he and Ray had been very close,” said Mike Trainer, “but the important thing to remember is that Ray didn’t fire him. Ray fired a lot of people over the years, but Dave Jacobs quit.” 

Since Dundee wouldn’t arrive in Washington until early November, this left Janks Morton in charge of the early preparations. Leonard, who had often sparred as many as 15 rounds a day before the first fight, never worked more than nine for this one.
In contrast to the corpulent state in which Duran opened camp, Leonard was a model of fitness. He weighed 173 pounds the day he commenced his workouts in earnest, and was already down to 160 by the time Dundee arrived, three weeks ahead of the fight.
Angelo, plainly pleased by what he saw, warned that the first time around  Duran had mistaken decency for weakness.
“No more Mister Nice Guy,” said Dundee.
“I know  what I have to do to beat him this time,” said Leonard. “It will be completely different.”
Besides, he wondered, “if he’s so tough, how come he didn’t knock me out in the first fight, even when I was fighting his style of fight?”
*   *    *
In 1923, seeking the largest possible purse for what was by any standard an ordinary defense by his heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey’s legendary manager Jack (Doc) Kearns had found willing accomplices among the citizenry of Shelby, Montana.

Appealing to the spirit of boosterism among the frontiersman, Kearns persuaded several of the Montana town’s leading civic lights to put up what eventually turned out to be $300,000, in addition to erecting from virgin local timber a temporary stadium that would accommodate what was hoped would be a crowd of 40,000 to watch Dempsey defend his title on the Fourth of July against a challenger named Tom Gibbons.

Although the Shelby civic leaders, hoping to put their town on the map, had initiated the entreaty, they were clearly overmatched. As John Lardner described it, “these men marveled at Kearns’ almost religious attachment to the principle of collecting all the cash in Montana that was not nailed down.”

No one had held a gun to the heads of the citizenry of Shelby -- initially, it had been they who approached Kearns -- but they shortly found themselves throwing good money after bad, having been persuaded that “the honor of all Montana” was at stake. After Dempsey decisioned Gibbons over 15 lackluster rounds, he and Kearns (who was somewhat weighted down with two large bagfuls of silver) slipped out of town on separate trains, and reconvened in Salt Lake City a few days later. By then the first of what would be four Shelby banks to fail as a direct result of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight had already shuttered its doors.

The town fathers who had hoped to render the town’s name a household word had inadvertently done so. Forevermore, “Shelby,” both as a noun and as a verb, would be ingrained in the lexicon of boxing.

And nobody could Shelby the way Don King could Shelby.

Whether King had Kearns’ example or his own experience with the Republic of Zaire in mind when he set out to Shelby New Orleans is unclear, but early on in the proceedings it became clear to the World’s Greatest Promoter that in spite of the intense interest in the Duran-Leonard rematch, he had a box-office dog on his hands.

As the half of BADK left standing after Duran’s victory in Montreal, King had the promotional rights to the return bout. Duran, as the winner of that fight, was seeking a purse comparable to what Leonard had commanded when he had been the champion. And Leonard, though willing to take a cosmetic pay cut as the challenger, had already set a high bar for himself with his unprecedented purse in June.

By the time he had both men’s signatures on contracts, King was on the hook for an $8 million guarantee to Duran, and another $6 million to Leonard. Now all he had to do was find fourteen million dollars.

In Montana back in 1923, Kearns had driven up the price of poker with fictitious reports of a half-million dollar offer from Madison Square Garden to stage the Dempsey-Gibbons fight. In 1980, King fueled a similar bidding war by first obtaining a modest site fee offer from Caesars Palace and then using it to play the Astrodome in Houston and the Louisiana Superdome off against one another.

The latter “won” by agreeing to take 90 per cent of the promotion off King’s hands for a mere $17.5 million. This obligation was directly assumed by the Hyatt Corporation, whose hotel abutted the Superdome.

Having absolved himself of the attendant financial obligations, King remained the hands-on promoter, and retained for himself foreign-rights television sales, which he shared with Neil Gunn, the Superdome official who had been the point man in putting together the financing of the New Orleans enterprise.

In addition to making its pitch for New Orleans civic pride and the anticipated boost the event would provide to local tourism, the Hyatt people were relying on the gate receipts at the 79,000-seat Superdome, where a capacity, or even near-capacity crowd would have covered their financial stake. That they their projections were wildly off the mark did not become apparent until the week of the fight.

Roberto Duran wouldn’t be the only one to say “No Mas” in connection with this fight. The Hyatt Corporation never promoted another boxing event.

“Neil Gunn was an awfully nice fellow, and we did our best to help him out, but they had vastly overpaid for that fight,” said Trainer. “They took a beating.”

*   *    *

Both men talked a good fight that week.
“I will beat him worse than the first time,” vowed Duran, who undoubtedly meant it. “This time I’m going to shut his mouth with my gloves.”
Leonard, noting that he had gotten “five years’ worth of experience in one night” in Montreal, lapsed into the third person when he said "I knew that if Sugar Ray fights his fight, he wins. But in that first fight he got into my head, took me out of my game plan.”

Howard Cosell was performing double-duty in New Orleans that week. The night before the fight, the Saints hosted the Rams in a nationally televised Monday Night Football game.
The Superdome press box was filled to capacity with boxing writers. After the game we ended up, en masse, at the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street.

Don King had provided complimentary tickets for Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, Michael Spinks, and Saoul Mamby, and made sure that the boxers were seated together in a prominent ringside position. Hearns and Emanuel Steward had also traveled to New Orleans. When word reached King that Thomas Hearns was in town, King had a message for the WBA welterweight champion.
“If Hearns wants a ticket,” said the World’s Greatest Promoter, “let him buy one.”
“We were just there to create some attention,” said Steward. “It was clear to me by then that Tommy and Ray were going to fight eventually, and I truly expected Ray to win the rematch.”
*   *   *
On the morning of the Duran-Leonard rematch, rumors abounded that both contestants were having trouble making weight. That morning Leonard had been spotted jogging through the French Quarter in what many assumed to have been a last-minute effort to shed excess poundage. Duran, who had trained in a rubber corset until a few days before the fight, was reported to be dehydrated and under a physician’s care.
Duran was accompanied to the weigh-in by an army of sycophants whose size, noted Bill Nack, “would have befitted Montezuma.” The oversized posse weaved its way in a procession to a ballroom on the ground floor of the Hyatt. Only two uniformed security guards had been assigned to the ritual, and they were quickly overpowered by the Panamanian’s entourage.
The result was that the weigh-in, we noted in our dispatch to the Boston Herald-American, “was witnessed by more pickpockets than reporters.”
Leonard weighed in without incident, at 146.
Duran peeled off his black motorcycle jacket, t-shirt, and Levis, and also made the welterweight limit with a pound to spare. He then immediately drained the contents of a thermos of beef broth provided by a waiting attendant and then attacked two large oranges he had brought along to the weigh-in before heading back to the Hyatt to eat some more.
“He’s dehydrated,” whispered Angelo Dundee.
Janks Morton had been assigned as the representative of Leonard’s team to monitor the enemy’s trip to the scale. On his way out of the room, Duran glared menacingly at Morton, slammed his fist into his palm, and gave him the finger.
By the time we got back up the escalator to the atrium, Duran was making a spectacle of himself in the coffee shop. Having made weight just a few minutes earlier, he was already seated at a table, and, having speared a thick sirloin steak with a fork, he held the slab of meat suspended before him as he leaned forward to rip off huge chunks, which he devoured like a ravenous animal.

At the afternoon rules meeting, Dundee protested Duran’s chin-whiskers and asked that he be ordered to shave.
 “That beard nauseates me,” said Dundee. “It isn’t good for the clean image of boxing. Besides, beards are unsanitary.”
The common assumption was that Dundee had raised the issue as a psychological ploy, hoping to get under Duran’s skin. Jose Sulaiman cited the WBC rule on the subject, which read, specifically, that “a beard on a fighter will only be accepted if its thickness is not considered a cushion, or that it could cause a cut or a hurt over a cut over his rival.”
Sulaiman explained that Duran’s beard would be okayed profided it were “reasonably trimmed.”
What was “reasonable,” we asked.
“Oh, a half-inch, maybe, as long as it’s not a cushion.”
With that he reached out and tugged on my beard.
“Yours, for example, would probably be all right.”
“Watch out,” I told him, jumping back. “Beards are unsanitary, remember?”
At the rules meeting Carlos Eleta asked “Is it a foul if you hold the other guy behind the neck and pull him toward you while you hit him?”
The question was greeted with some amusement, since the tactic was one not unfamiliar to Duran.
Octavio Meyran of Mexico was named the referee, Mike Jacobs, James Brimmel, and Jean Deswerts the ringside judges. Neither side voiced any objection to the officials.
Before the parties were dismissed, the WBC reaffirmed its policy prohibiting “profane or abusive language,” although, we noted at the time, they didn’t specify which language.
Afterward, reporters flocked around the chief seconds.
“Duran is a real cutie, but he has his own rhythm he likes to fight to,” said Dundee, who predicted the Leonard we would see the next night would be a dramatic departure from the one who fought Duran in its predecessor. “If you want to beat Roberto Duran, he’s the type of guy who will get frustrated if he can’t do what he wants to do.”
“It’s been six months and only one thing has changed,” said Arcel. “Now Leonard will walk into the ring knowing he can’t win.”
Only one of them would be right.
The Superdome had been scaled from $20 to $1000, and with the prime seats spread across what would normally be the football field, the organizers had developed a unique configuration to improve the sight-lines. The ring had been raised, with a second set of ring-posts piggy-backed atop one another and securely bolted together.

The rows of the media section surrounding the ring were stepped down, and the ringside photographers assigned to shoot from a ‘well’ beneath the ring, thus ensuring the best possible view for the patrons with floor-level tickets.

“It seemed like a great idea at the time,” recalls Bobby Goodman.

Goodman had arranged to beef up the Superdome security force by contacting the athletic departments at several local universities and hiring a number of students from Tulane and Loyola, who were given a crash-course in pickpocket-spotting and issued matching t-shirts. The college boys were happy enough with the chance to earn a small paycheck and to watch the fight for free.

Roger Leonard once again fought on the undercard, as did the brother of another world champion, Larry Holmes. Roger outpointed Melvin Dennis over ten rounds, while Mark Holmes knocked out a local middleweight, Bruce Calloway, in five. Two New Orleans boxers who would later challenge for world titles also boxed in that night’s prelims: Jerry Celestine dispatched Pablo Ramos in the ninth round of their light-heavyweight fight, and lightweight Melvin Paul knocked out Chubby Johnson in four.

In the co-feature, Marvin Camel, an Eddie Futch-trained Indian from Montana, became the first man in boxing history to lose a cruiserweight title. Camel, who earlier in the year had won the newly-minted championship on his second try (his first bout against Mate Parlov, in Yugoslavia, had ended in a draw), lost a majority decision to Carlos De Leon.

The crowd eventually reached 20,000, a figure that might have been impressive in another venue. The NBA Jazz had routinely drawn larger audiences to the Superdome during the Pete Maravich era, but had nonetheless been forced to move out of town because they were losing money. When Hyatt executives stood on the floor and looked around the stadium what they saw was 60,000 empty seats.

A buzz filled the stadium as the combatants made their entrances.  In Montreal, both Leonard and Duran had worn white trunks. This time Leonard came out in what Ed Schuyler’s AP dispatch described as “villain black” – black trunks and a tattered pair of black low-cuts, whose gold laces matched the stripes on his trunks.

Duran and his substantial entourage were decked out in matching white track suits, and as the procession made its way to the ring there they looked like they were on their way to a Moonie wedding. An alarming number of them made it into the ring with the champion, and they gleefully waved Panamanian flags as that nation’s anthem was played.

Nobody thought of it at the time, but all that excess weight in the ring undoubtedly put an extra strain on the jury-rigged ring supports, and probably contributed to the engineering disaster that nearly brought the fight to a halt a few minutes later.

Duran and King might have dictated most of the terms of the rematch, but Leonard retained one psychological ploy. In lieu of a national anthem, the bout was preceded by Ray Charles, the man for whom Leonard had been named, singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a moving rendition, and an approving Ray Charles Leonard, a confident smile on his face, danced an accompanying shuffle in the corner.

Although Bobby Goodman’s loyalties were with Duran, he recalled, “We got goose bumps” at that moment.

“You could hear a pin drop in the ‘Dome,” said Goodman. “All you could hear was Ray and the music.  I’d never put it together that Ray Leonard was named Ray Charles Leonard, but it was like he was singing the song just for Leonard and it must have added a lot of inspiration.”

In the return bout, Leonard was determined to correct his strategic failings in Montreal, and did so in spectacular fashion. Refusing to be drawn into another street battle, be used his speed and superior boxing gifts to frustrate Duran.

“You could see it right from the opening bell,” recalls Bobby Goodman. “Duran came out in aggressive mode, but Leonard was dancing, flicking with his jab, moving around in circles as he changed direction. Duran had expected to be meeting the Leonard he faced in Montreal, but it was almost as if he’d been replaced by a different boxer. You could almost watch the frustration spread across Roberto’s face.”

Midway through the opening stanza, Duran lowered his head and bull-rushed Leonard into the ropes. It was a move reminiscent of their first fight, but this time Ray spun around in a graceful pirouette and landed a right hand as he danced away. Near the end of the round Leonard stopped circling long enough to land a solid left-right combination.

At one point in the second round Leonard dazzled Duran with three straight rights, one of which snapped the Panamanian’s head back. When Duran charged, Leonard quickly tied him up, and, as if to remove all doubt from the judges’ minds, Ray finished up by landing two stiff jabs at the end of the round.

Midway through the second round, the middle of the ring abruptly collapsed as if it had developed a sinkhole. The spectators were oblivious to this development, and few of us in the press row noticed it right away.

Bobby Goodman raced from his seat and crawled under the ring. The bolts holding the center support of the jury-rigged structure had snapped under the tension. The ring was sagging in the middle.

“I’ve often though later that this could have given Duran an out,” said Goodman. “He could have avoided the embarrassing outcome if he’d said he’d twisted his ankle when the ring dropped -- or he could have said it was too dangerous and refused to continue.  But Duran was too much of a macho guy for that. He just wanted Leonard to be a man and fight.”

Between rounds, Goodman hastily summoned a platoon of the burly football players he had recruited as security guards. They managed to reposition the center column, and then were ordered to remain there, with the weight of the promotion literally on their shoulders, for the remainder of the fight.

“There must have been ten or twelve of them standing underneath the ring, holding it up,” recalled Goodman. “They did a great job.”

Duran was still trying to play the bully in the third round, and in most respects did a better job of it, winning the round on all three scorecards. He was able to push Leonard around a bit, landed a few blows to the body, and at one point swatted Leonard with a punch to the face. Ray responded by sticking out his tongue.

Manos de Piedra continued his body attack in the fourth. As he pushed Leonard into the ropes, Duran fell down.

A round later, it was Leonard’s turn to hit the deck. As he backed into a corner trying to fend off Duran’s body attack, Ray also fell down. Both trips to the canvas were ruled slips by Meyran, and when Leonard got up from his pratfall he tagged Duran with a left-right combination. Duran landed two glancing body shots and a right to the head just before the bell to solidify his claim on the round, which he won on two scorecards.

In their first fight Duran had mocked Leonard. Now it was Sugar Ray’s turn.

“Round after round you could see the frustration building on Duran,” said Bobby Goodman. “This was a fight that neither ne nor his braintrust had ever imagined. Leonard’s strategy was brilliant, but it was like he was making fun of Duran. Duran felt disrespected by his tactics.”

In the seventh round Leonard dropped his hands and pointed at his chin. A seething Duran fired with his right, but Leonard pulled his head back and allowed the punch to sail harmlessly past.

Then he stopped in mid-ring and wound up his right arm in windmill fashion, as if he were going to deliver a bolo punch. Instead he punched his seemingly mesmerized opponent right in the snout with a jab stiff enough to make Duran’s eyes water.

The late Pete Axthelm, covering the fight for Newsweek, was seated next to me. We turned to one another, shaking our heads over the act of provocation. 

“He might as well have pulled the tail of Duran’s lion,” I said knowingly.

Axthelm agreed.

“Doesn’t he know,” he said, “that this is Roberto Duran?”

Our thinking was that taunting Duran seemed particularly unwise, because if you really pissed him off, he just might kill you.

Retrospectively, though, “it may have been the most painful blow of Duran’s life,” said Sports Illustrated’s Bill Nack. “It drew hooting laugher from the crowd and made Duran a public spectacle – a laughingstock.”

“Leonard could not have  shamed Duran more thoroughly if he had reached over and pulled down his trunks,” wrote Ray Didinger.

Calling the fight from his ringside position, Howard Cosell exclaimed “Duran is completely bewildered!”

Leonard continued to mug at Duran, skipping his feet as he went into an Ali shuffle, as he shouted at his foe. Duran was seething as he returned to his corner.

Leonard was clearly winning the psychological battle, but on the official scorecards it was still a fairly close fight after seven rounds. Brimmel had Leonard ahead by a single point, Jacobs and Deswarts by two.

The judges’ opinions would became moot a few moments later.

The start of the eighth was momentarily delayed when Meyran sent Duran back to his corner and ordered Brown to remove what the referee had deemed an excessive coat of Vaseline from his face, but when action resumed, the fight had taken yet another turn: In the seventh Leonard had taunted and teased Duran, but in the eighth he was inflicting actual damage as well.

As Ray danced from side to side, keeping his opponent at bay with a graceful jab, an enraged Duran lowered his head and charged the matador. Leonard stepped back and countered with a hard right to the face.

A chastened Duran withdrew to ponder his fate, once again allowing Leonard to keep him at the end of his jab. As Leonard pressed forward, Duran backed toward the ropes, where he became the recipient of a three-punch combination delivered with lightning speed.

Late in the round, as Leonard once again herded him toward the ropes, Duran abruptly threw up his arms, muttered something to the referee, and began to talk away.

From our ringside positions it was impossible to hear what he had said.  It would be left to Meyran to explain to the press that Duran had told him “No mas. No mas box!”

Even though the statement had been uttered in his own language, the Mexican referee did not immediately comprehend that Duran was trying to quit, and tried to wave him back into action. Leonard did not seem to grasp it either. He chased Duran across the ring and landed two punches to the midsection. There was no response from Duran, other than to wave him away as if to say “I’m not going to do this any more.”

“He’s quitting!” Roger Leonard shouted to his brother from the corner.

It took even longer for the crowd and ringside reporters to figure out the perplexing turn of events, but when Leonard went cartwheeling across the ring and began to climb the ring ropes in celebration it was clear that the fight was over.

 “There was a look of disgust and frustration on Duran’s face when he said ‘No Mas,’” recalled Bobby Goodman. “Everyone was stunned, including me. The great Duran, quitting in the middle of a world title defense? No way, I thought, but it was true.”

Duran disappeared in the pandemonium. The press was left to besiege Arcel and Brown for explanations, but in the immediate aftermath the Panamanian’s elderly cornermen appeared to be as befuddled as the rest of us.

“The guy’s supposed  to be an animal, and he quit,” said Freddie Brown moments afterward.  “You’d think that an animal would fight right up to the end.”

“Something happened in the ring, and I don’t know what it was,” Arcel shook his head. “I thought he’d broke his arm or something. I’ve never seen anything like it. After the sixth he said something about his arms feeling stiff, but he’s never done anything like this, ever.”

Perhaps, it was suggested, Leonard making a monkey out of him might have had something to do with it.

“I don’t rule it out,” conceded Arcel. “Leonard controlled the fight, and it frustrated him. He just quit.”

Half an hour later an alternate theory, which blamed a ‘stomach-ache’ resulting from Duran’s post weigh-in gluttony, quickly spread around the press room.

Duran was reported to have blamed “cramps in my stomach and in my and right arm.

“I got so weak I couldn’t go on,” Duran was said to have explained. “Leonard was weak, but I didn’t have the strength to pressure him.”

Duran never met with the press that night to offer his own explanation. Purported quotes, often contradictory, were supplied by his team.

Although the post-fight press conference took place in Duran’s absence, the ‘other’ welterweight champion made himself available. Tommy Hearns, correctly anticipating a Leonard victory, had brought along a rubber chicken, which he flung at Leonard by way of challenge.

Had Leonard’s triumph been accomplished by more traditional means, this might have proved an inspired tactic, but in the midst of the confusion that reigned in New Orleans that night it was a meaningless ploy, and few reporters even took note of it, and, apart from a look of mild annoyance, Leonard appeared to ignore it entirely.

“But just by being there we created more attention than if we hadn’t been there,” said Steward.

Even in his moment of triumph, Leonard refused to gloat. The memory of his own feelings in Montreal five months earlier still resonated, and when someone suggested that Duran’s actions had been those of a coward, Leonard sternly warned his interlocutor “Don’t put words into my mouth.”

And, Oh, yes, there was a concomitant communiquÈ from Duran that night:

“I will never fight again. I am retiring from boxing now.”

That night over a hundred sportswriters found themselves faced with the prospect of explaining to their readers something they could barely comprehend themselves.
 
“It was as if John Wayne, faced by the guy in the black hat, got a case of shaky knees,” I began to type.
 
Once I had finished and filed my story I turned to the scribe next to me.

“Look at the bright side of it,” I sighed.  “It’ll be a long time before we have to sit through the Panamanian National Anthem again.”

* * *

Why Roberto Duran turned tail in New Orleans remains a subject of debate to this day.

“I think it was just frustration,” Leonard told Al Goldstein. “Duran is like a clock. You wind it too tight, it’ll break. I think that’s what happened. His spring broke.”

My own view was that Duran at the time actually believed himself to be committing the ultimate macho act. Emanuel Steward concurs.

“Duran was completely frustrated,” said Steward. “It was like he was saying ‘If you don’t want to fight, then fuck you. I’m not going to stand here jumping all around after you.’ In Duran’s mind I think he expected that the crowd would condemn Leonard for having made a mockery of the fight, rather than him for quitting.”

*  *   *

Later, word came to Duran’s dressing room that Emile Bruneau, the chairman of the Louisiana Boxing Commission, wanted an immediate meeting with Duran and his handlers.
   
Bobby Goodman hastily conferred with King, Duran, Arcel, and Eleta, essentially to make sure everyone was on the same page and would have their stories straight. The ‘cramps’ excuse concocted by Freddie Brown sounded as good as anything else, and would be difficult to disprove.
     
In an anteroom in the bowels of the Superdome, Bruneau had set up a table and chairs, arranged conference-style.
     
“As soon as I walked in, Bruneau told me they were going to have to hold the purse pending an investigation,” recalled Goodman. “I explained that they couldn’t hold Duran’s purse. It had already been paid by a letter of credit lodged with a bank in Panama. All that was required to release it was a newspaper article confirming that Duran had showed up and that the fight had taken place, and it had taken place.”
     
“Well, we’re going to have to determine just what we can do to penalize this boxer.  We have a responsibility to the fans,” argued Bruneau.
      
Arcel reminded the chairman that if Duran had indeed become ill it was just as if he had been injured during the fight.
      
“Duran is a gallant warrior,” pleaded Eleta. “He would never quit.”
       
Bruneau informed the assembled parties that  there would be an official meeting of the commission at 10 o’clock the next morning. He then dismissed the group, asking Goodman and Duke Durden to remain behind.
     
A former minor league ballplayer who had reached the Triple A level in the Dodgers’ organization, Durden was in 1980 the Chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, in which role he had often seemed unconscionably close to King. He would later make that relationship official by resigning his NSAC position to become a vice president of Don King Productions. Since he lacked any jurisdiction at what would become known as the ‘No Mas’ fight we must assume that he was asked to participate in an ex officio capacity.
 
And, given subsequent developments, it is also reasonable to assume that whatever advice he offered was likely to benefit King’s interest.

Conceding that he wouldn’t be able to impede the letter of credit in Panama, Bruneau determined that he would impose the maximum fine allowed under Louisiana law, which at the time was $7,500.

After the impromptu meeting with Goodman and Durden, Bruneau met with the press, where he exclaimed “I’ve never seen anything like this in all my days around boxing, and we owe it to the people of Louisiana who paid to see this fight to investigate the whole matter.”

While the meeting was taking place beneath the Superdome, Duran had returned to his suite at the Hyatt. Ray Arcel’s wife Stevie went to visit him there, expecting to offer her commiseration and check on his condition. To her surprise, she found a lively party underway. Surrounded by an entourage that included several National Guard colonels, Duran and his wife were singing and dancing. From all appearances you’d have thought he’d won the fight.

Before he left his dressing room, Duran had been examined by his personal physician, Dr. Orlando Nunez, who had, the press had been told, diagnosed Duran’s malady as “acute abdominal cramps.”

Many of us remained skeptical.

 “Millions of American women take Midol every day for this complaint,” I noted at time.

Thom Greer was moved to recall an occasion several years earlier when he’d been covering a fight at the D.C. Arena and Jackie Tonawanda’s opponent had to quit because of menstrual cramps.

Another scribe, recalled Al Goldstein, said “if Duran had stomach cramps, it must have been his guts shrinking.”

After he was dismissed from the meeting, leaving Goodman and Durden to sort things out with Emile Bruneau, Carlos Eleta returned to the hotel, where, like Stevie Arcel, he was shocked to find Duran in the midst of what had all the trappings of a wild celebration.

Eleta angrily drove the money-changers from the temple, and then ordered Duran to change clothes. At 2:30 am, Manos de Piedra accompanied his manager to Southern Baptist Hospital, where he was examined for the next several hours.

That the tests Duran underwent at the hospital during those early morning hours were unable to exclude the ‘cramps’ diagnosis confirmed Freddie Brown’s quick thinking in concocting an excuse that could not be medically disproved.

Brown later confirmed to Michael Katz that the “cramps” story had been his own invention.

“If they knew he’d quit back in Panama, they’d have moidered him,” said Brown.

A variant explanation promulgated in the hours immediately following the fight held that Duran had become “nauseous” from something in his diet.

If so, we pointed out, that would make him the first visitor since Andrew Jackson expelled the British in 1815 to leave New Orleans complaining abut the food.

Duran’s first stop after leaving the hospital was the Hyatt coffee shop, where he polished off yet another plate of steak and eggs. When he appeared before the Commission a few hours later, Duran apologized and insisted that be had become ill with cramps, which had prompted his withdrawal.

Bruneau then announced that he was fining Duran $7,500 as the result of his “unsatisfactory performance.” Bobby Goodman reached into his pocket and produced a check in that precise amount, which he had already had cut. It was made out to the Louisiana Boxing Commission, and the funds were drawn on the account of Don King Productions.

Although Duran was sticking to his story, the elder half of his brain trust viewed it with some cynicism.

“Doctor?” exclaimed Arcel. “This guy needs a psychiatrist more than anything else. If anyone had ever come to Freddie and me and said ‘this guy will quit on you,” I’d have spit in his eye. Duran? Quit? Never!”

Three years later Duran would tell Sports Illustrated’s Bill Nack “Leonard knew I had nothing. He was running and clowning because he knew I couldn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to let myself get knocked out and look ridiculous in the ring.”

“What he did was so much worse,” added Carlos Eleta.  “But he didn’t think about that.”

 “I think something really was wrong with him,” Don King told the assembled press. “People talk about all the money he made and say he wasn’t hungry enough this time. Money comes and goes, but words will follow you forever – especially in Latin America.”

“Yeah, they’re checking Duran’s birth certificate back in Panama,” cracked Fast Eddie Schuyler. “They think now he may be a Guatemalan.”

“You guys will write about all this now and cut him up a little bit for a week or two, and then everybody will forget about it,” predicted King. “But in Panama, they’ll never forget it.”

A few nights later Johnny Carson told his “Tonight Show” audience that he had considered inviting Duran to appear on his show to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

“But I’m afraid he’ll quit by the eighth day,” quipped Carson.

Duran’s surrender had been so stunning that it all but overshadowed the brilliance of Leonard’s performance, but, Ray pointed out, “I made him quit – and making Roberto Duran quit was even better than knocking him out. The fact that he quit and the way he did it doesn’t take anything away from my victory. I’m the champion because he couldn’t change and I could.”

Interestingly, the term “No Mas” did not immediately enter the lexicon.  Although the Spanish phrase would become synonymous with the New Orleans rematch and Duran’s fall from grace, the words “No Mas” were nowhere to be found in Ed Schuyler’s AP story read by millions of Americans the next morning, nor did they appear in mine.

Since the fight had occurred on a Tuesday night, the issue of Sports Illustrated with Bill Nack’s account didn’t appear until eight days later, and then it was under a headline – “The Big Belly-Ache” – which still appeared to buy the ‘cramps’ story.

The morning after the ‘No Mas’ fight, Gen. Omar Torrijos angrily ordered Duran and his entire 36-member traveling party to return to Panama immediately, but the boxer ignored his country’s ruler and went to Miami instead. It was weeks later that he went back to Panama, only to discover that in his absence his mother’s home had had been vandalized, his own house stoned. Newspapers questioned not only his courage, but his masculinity. A makeshift billboard reading “Duran is a Traitor” was painted on the seawall alongside La Avenue Balboa. He heard himself described, variously, as un cobarde (a coward), una gallina (a chicken), and as, simply, Maricon, or homosexual.

And in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, the Panamanian government had repealed the special tax exemption it had granted Duran as a “National Hero.” When he came home and tried to cash his $8 million letter of credit, the government grabbed the first $2 million off the top.

Whatever might actually have been going on in Roberto Duran’s mind when he said ‘No Mas,’ he could hardly have anticipated the consequences. It was widely interpreted as an act of abject cowardice. He became the butt of jokes, and even his most ardent admirers deserted him in droves.

“His image had been destroyed in a single moment,” said Bobby Goodman. “When he got back to Panama, he didn’t even dare show his face. He lived like a prisoner in his own home.”

Goodman had been with Duran every day for months on end at his training camps for the two Leonard fights, and knew him as well as anyone.

“Duran had great pride, and the heart and soul of a warrior,” said Goodman over a quarter-century later. “He was the ultimate warrior, who had come ready to do battle, but his opponent changed the rules and he wouldn’t submit to being humiliated like that.”

It was, in any case, a moment that would haunt Duran for the rest of his life. Worse still, he had turned his despised adversary into a boxing hero.

Sugar Ray Leonard would no longer be regarded as boxing’s pretty boy. He had added a new scalp to his collection. He was now the man who had made Roberto Duran quit.

M

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