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He That Was Lost Has Been
Found
By beating the WBA junior middleweight champ, Davey Moore,
Roberto Duran won his third title and recaptured his good
name
by William
Nack
Issue date: June 27,
1983
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(Tony Triolo)
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Forty-five floors above Manhattan Island, in his room at
the Sheraton Centre Hotel, Roberto Duran shifted in his
chair and threw a quick left uppercut, and another,
muffling a cry with each flash of his hand.
"¡Ay!
¡Ay!" Then up came the right. "Pow!" A second
right. "Pow!
¡Duro! [Hard]
¡Duro!"
It had been a long day of celebration, and Duran was still
flying. Almost 24 hours earlier, before an aroused,
near-record Madison Square Garden crowd of 20,061, Duran, a
former lightweight and welterweight champion of the world,
had won the WBA
junior middleweight title by stopping Davey Moore at 2:02 of the
eighth round. Now, sitting in his room, sipping from a
glass of Moet & Chandon champagne, Duran was watching a
tape of the fight, witnessing for the first time—and with
evident relish—this
sublimely crowning moment of his professional life.
What happened in ther Garden last Thursday night had about
it a magical quality rarely felt at a sporting event. Most,
but not all, of it could be attributed to the quest of this
apparently spent bullet, a man seemingly with a future
no
más. Here he was, a discredited, aging—he turned 32 on the
day of the fight—5-2 underdog who had come back to New
York insisting that it believe in him again, as it had when
he swaggered into the Garden on June 26, 1972—almost 11
years before—and
separated Scotland's Ken Buchanan from his world lightweight title.
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Moore was no match for a Duran who was eager to prove himself after quitting against Leonard.
(Tony Triolo)
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The crowds came hoping to see the reincarnation, and the
evening became electric. Muhammad Ali himself set the
current humming. As Alfredo Escalera and Gene Hatcher
pounded each other in a preliminary, he entered the arena,
and the chanting began:
"Ah-LEE! Ah-LEE! Ah-LEE!" By the time Duran entered the
ring, dancing—after former middleweight champ Jake LaMotta
had kissed his wife, Vicki, at ringside—the place reminded
some in the crowd of old Garden fight nights. "It had
the flavor of the Joe Louis
nights," said veteran boxing writer Barney Nagler.
"The exuberance, the sound and the fervor were
old-fashoined."
And so, in a sense, was the way Duran fought, using every
move and trick he knew. Duran made the attack from the
outset, taking the fight where he wanted it to go, slipping
punches deftly while beginning his work on Moore's body.
Near the end of the
first round, he struck the most telling blow of the fight—a
thumb poked in Moore's right eye. It closed gradually in
the next few rounds as Duran made a target of it with his
jab. Duran shook off whatever Moore landed and continued to
press the issue inside
and to the body. In the second round, he began pounding
Moore's body with uppercuts. Then, coming over with a
right, he bloodied Moore's nose. "I wanted to keep up
the pressure," Duran said. He did just that. With
Duran's back to the ropes, after Moore
hit him with a right, he spun Moore around, putting him on
the ropes, and ripped back at him with a flurry. "I
hit him back in payment for what he hit me with,"
Duran
said.
Feeling sluggish, Duran relaxed his attack in the third and
fourth rounds, and Moore became the aggressor. "Then
I began to get air and began to box, and the boxing renewed
my speed," said Duran. He never stopped punishing
Moore's body, but now he went
after the head, too. By the fourth round, the right eye had
closed, and Moore was bleeding from the nose and lip; by
the seventh he was all target. Duran buckled Moore's legs
with a combination to the head. As the champion backed up,
Duran dropped him
with a hard right hand, sending him to the floor with his back
on the ropes. There he simply sat with his lower lipped
puffed out, dazed and helpless. "That punch came from
nowhere," Moore said later. He gamely climbed to his
feet at the count of eight,
and then the bell
rang.
At ringside, Moore's mother and girlfriend had fainted,
slumping in their seats, and now there were cries to stop
the bloodbath. But the referee, Ernesto Magaña of
Mexico, appeared blind to what was going on. He kept
looking at Moore's closed eye, as if
waiting for it to fall out before he would stop the fight.
Leave it to the WBA to hire a turkey to run a cockfight.
That is what it had become, and Duran had all the
talons.
"Finish him off now," Duran's trainer, Nestor
Quiñones, told him before the eighth. It took Duran
two minutes and two seconds to convince Moore's trainer,
Leon Washington, to throw a blood-spattered white towel of
surrender into the ring. If Magaña saw
it, he ignored it. Finally, Jay Edson, a Top Rank
representative, clambered into the ring and called a halt
to the proceedings. "The worst ref I've looked at for
a long
time," said Duran's former trainer, 83-year-old Ray Arcel. On top
of that, the two
Japanese judges, Kasumasa Kuwata and Tashikawa Yoshida,
apparently were content to spend the night looking at
Magaña looking at Moore's eye. They both called four
of the seven rounds
even.
Down in Panama, where Duran had returned in disgrace after
the fiasco against Sugar Ray Leonard, there was rejoicing
in the streets. Schools and offices had closed early on
Thursday to allow students and workers to watch the fight
live on television, so
Panama City was ready to play. When the bout ended and
Duran had won, rockets exploded over the city and
firecrackers popped everywhere.
Estrella De
Panama was promptly being hawked with the banner headline
GRANDIOSA NOCHE DE REDENCIÓN/DURAN
REINA NUEVAMENTE [Grand Night of Redemption/Duran Reigns
Again].
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CNN/SI followed Holyfield through a typical day of training.
Check out the video clips, but be sure to come back to Evander's
Believe It Or Not.