Just five months after one of the greatest
fights in modern boxing history, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran met
in a rematch that somehow managed to transcend the original. No classic
in the ring, it was well on its way to being a notable fiasco. Had the
bout gone to a decision as seemed its destiny, it would be remembered
merely as a disappointment, proof that lightning rarely manages to
strike twice.
Around 60,000 tickets remained unsold as the two entered the ring,
and in the second round, the jury-rigged ring buckled. Leonard, after a
courageous showing in the first bout, was content to dance. Duran, fat
and tired after months of celebrating, was either too disinterested or
too exhausted to chase him all that hard.
But all was forgotten when, in the eighth round, Duran simply waved
Leonard away, telling the referee he didn't want to box anymore. Did he
really say "
No Mas," a
phrase that has entered the popular consciousness? And why did the most
fearsome man in boxing walk away from the biggest fight of his Hall of
Fame career?
Thirty-five years later, the best we can do is speculate. In boxing,
history is part truth and part mythology. When discussing "No Mas," it's
not always easy to separate the two. Even the existence of a "No Mas"
moment is hotly disputed.
"From his mouth, he never actually said 'no mas.' The actual words no
mas," Duran's son, Robin, said at the New York screening of a
documentary about the fight. "It's very hard for a fighter to speak with
a mouthpiece on. He just waved his hand."
Although little is steeped in certainty, we know this much—it's a story that begins not in the then-Louisiana
Superdome on the night of November 25, 1980, but months earlier in Montreal, where the two men began their famous feud.
Dos Manos de Peidro
Juanita Leonard finally couldn't stand to look anymore. Tears ran
down her face as the implacable and cruel Duran did exactly what he said
he would do in a series of ugly
pre-fight confrontations. In the eighth round, she fainted. Her husband, however, was forced to endure seven more grueling rounds.
Leonard chose to stay flat-footed with Duran and slug it out. His
belief in his punching power ultimately proved to be his downfall. In an
all-out war, Leonard lost the decision, even as he gained the respect
and admiration of boxing fans for the manner in which he fought.
Ray had given it his all. For the first time in his professional life, that hadn't been enough.
"He threw his best," a shaken Leonard said at the post-fight press conference. "I threw my best. The best man came out on top."
Some fighters are classy in victory. Duran was not one of those
fighters. Immediately after the bout, he pointed to his crotch and
called Leonard a "p---y" in Spanish. Incensed, Ray's brother, Roger,
came charging across the ring and got dropped by a right hand. Such was
the bedlam in the ring, few even noticed.
"I knew I was going to beat him," Duran told the press. "I'm more of a man than he is."
While Leonard considered retirement in the immediate aftermath of his
first career loss, it didn't take long for him to recommit himself to
the sport. As William
Nack wrote in
Sports Illustrated, a vacation with his wife to escape boxing soon turned into a working trip of sorts:
The loser sulked and reconsidered his life. The victor, meanwhile,
reveled. Nearly 700,000 fans greeted him at the airport in Panama after
the fight. Already a folk hero, he became something more. A walking
party, he took a huge entourage back with him to New York and proceeded
to redefine the word indulgence.
Duran, who once punched out a horse on a bet to pay for a bar tab,
was suddenly flush. Decked out in Armani, he hit the town instead,
spending $100,000 in just a few months by picking up every bar and
restaurant tab for an expanding entourage.
While the champion ate and drank through the night, Leonard's team started putting the rematch together.
Janks Morton,
Leonard's bodyguard, had seen Duran in New York and told him that the
champion was partying every night and approaching 200 pounds. Leonard,
never one to let an advantage slide, pushed for an immediate rematch and
hit the gym.
"It was calculated on my part," Leonard told author George Kimball in
Four Kings.
"I knew Duran was overweight and partying big time. I've done some
partying myself, but I know when to cut it out. I said to Mike 'Let's do
it now, as soon as possible.' In retrospect, it was pretty clever of
me."
Suzanne Vlamis/Associated Press
The party for Duran never stopped.
While Duran's camp has been criticized for agreeing to the rematch
despite knowing he was in poor condition, it's not quite that simple.
Duran was so out of control, there was a real fear that even a tuneup
fight could cost him dearly.
"I made that rematch in three months because he started drinking," Duran's manager and patron Carlos
Eleta told Duran's biographer, Christian
Giudice. "I worried if he fought again, he would lose to a second-rate fighter."
Either Duran would find the will to train again or he would lose.
Better, his inner circle thought, to lose to Leonard for a record payday
than to lose to a lesser fighter for a fraction of the financial gain.
The Money
Don King had the rights to the fight and committed an astronomical
$15 million to get both fighters' signatures on the bottom line. Somehow
he managed to get the
Superdome and Houston's
Astrodome into a bidding war that Louisiana "won." According to Kimball, for $17.5 million, they got 90 percent of the promotion.
MARTY LEDERHANDLER/Associated Press
King with both fighters.
Not only was King off the hook for the huge fighter salaries, but he
kept the foreign television rights for himself. Had every ticket been
sold, including the front row seats at $1,000 a piece, the Hyatt
Corporation could have turned a small profit. But on the night of the
fight, 60,000 empty seats stared back at them no matter how many times
they blinked their eyes in disbelief.
Local fans who weren't on the road for Thanksgiving, it seems, were
happy to stay home on a Tuesday night and watch the fight with the rest
of the world 30 days later on ABC, which paid a record $2.5 million to
air the bout. That was bad news for executive Neil
Gunn, who had spearheaded the deal.
"Neil
Gunn
was an awfully nice fellow, and we did our best to help him out,"
Leonard's manager, Mike Trainer, told Kimball. "But they had vastly
overpaid for that fight. They took a beating."
In Leonard's camp, intensity was the watch word. His original
trainer, Dave Jacobs, was out. He'd wanted a tuneup before the Duran
rematch and split when the fighter insisted on an immediate rematch.
His chief sparring partner was Dale Staley, a fighter who not only
worshipped Duran but may have been even meaner. In a 1979 fight, he was
disqualified for biting an opponent. While that was beyond the pale for
the training room, he was encouraged to employ every dirty trick in an
outlaw boxer's repertoire.
"He fought like Roberto Duran," Leonard told NPR.
"He used his head and dirty tactics and what-have-you. And it made me
more aware, from a defensive standpoint, so when I faced Duran, I was
prepared."
The Fight
Duran's downfall began the moment moment the Panamanian national
anthem played. "Like the noise made by two gypsy wagons rolling over on
their own violins," the estimable Bert Sugar wrote in
The Ring, a contrast to the magical musical moment to follow.
Ray Charles, Leonard's namesake, then entered the ring for a rousing rendition of "America the Beautiful."
"If that didn't touch, didn't move, didn't cause a chill along your spine," television announcer Howard
Cosell said, "I don't suppose anything could."
It was a gorgeous moment, made even more special for Leonard when the
blind singer hugged him after it was done and passed on a message.
"Kick his ass."
As the bell sounded for their rematch, Leonard immediately began to
display the lateral movement lacking in their first fight. Duran, as
hard a puncher and excellent a boxer as he was, seemed flummoxed. Rather
than properly cut the ring off, Duran began to follow Leonard, eating
jabs and check left hooks as he bounded in.
"Duran's pace was not the same," Showtime boxing analyst Steve
Farhood said in
30 for 30: No Mas.
"Because he wasn't facing that pace, Leonard was able to box. There was
no running. It wasn't a track meet. Ray Leonard was giving him a boxing
lesson."
The fight, later a disaster for Duran, was almost a disaster for
everyone in the second round. The premium tickets for the fight were set
up on what would have normally been the football field. To help improve
sightlines, promoters actually bolted the ring on top of another set of ring posts, raising the whole contraption 10 feet into the air.
Already strained to its limits by the enormous entourage that
followed the champion into the ring, the middle of the ring collapsed as
the fighters alternately danced and shuffled around. As Kimball
reported, though most failed to notice, the ring was sagging in the
middle:
Between rounds (promoters) hastily summoned a platoon of the football
players recruited as security guards. The college boys 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.
Crisis averted, it was a close fight in the early rounds. Duran was
throwing more punches and landing fewer. As time passed, however, Duran
was simply unable to keep Leonard pinned to the ropes. His body attack
disappeared, and Duran began to head hunt with single shots, all full
power and speed.
He looked lost, mouth open, his famed sneer replaced by a sad gasping
for air. All the while, Leonard bounced around the ring, countering
effectively and rolling off Duran's punches.
In the seventh round, Leonard's clowning, until that moment present
but not predominant, took center stage. He stuck his chin out and dared
Duran to hit him. The champion couldn't. Leonard was mimicking
Neo in
The Matrix before such a thing existed.
No longer fearful of Duran's power, Leonard began to mock the
legendary Panamanian. First, a shrug of the shoulders. Then an Ali
Shuffle. Before long, Leonard faked a
bolo punch and popped a seemingly awestruck Duran dead in the face with the jab.
While the punch did its work, making Duran's eyes water, according to Leonard,
Nack believes it was the psychic damage that did the most harm:
Leonard may have hurt Duran with blows to the body and brought water
to his eyes with stinging jabs to the nose, but Leonard knew where to
sink the blade to make the deepest wound. That slip-jab off the mock bolo
in the seventh round may have been the most painful blow of Duran's
life, because it drew hooting laughter from the crowd and made Duran a
public spectacle—a laughingstock.
Despite the objections of the
boxing purists, Leonard's taunting of Duran did its wicked work; it was
undoubtedly the most sustained humiliation Duran ever suffered. Leonard
had his number, and Duran knew it. Perhaps, as Arcel
suggests, "something snapped." And so, facing seven more rounds, Duran
turned and raised his arms in the eighth, as if emerging from a trench.
Associated Press
For the first time in his career, Duran looked less the killer and more the unwitting prey. Howard
Cosell's
shouts above the din of the crowd suggested Duran was still an enormous
threat to Leonard. Instead, the taunting seemed to have an emasculating
effect on the great Duran. As he sat on his stool, tended to by his
team, the look in his eyes ceased to be that of confidence. It was fear.
"I did everything I said I was going to do, and he couldn't accept
it," Leonard said after the fight. "He was frustrated, confused. I did
everything I could to make him go off, like a clock wound up too tight.
He got wound up so tight, he blew a spring."
In the eighth round, Leonard remained firmly in control. As seconds
wound down, the bell just 30 ticks from ending the round, Duran turned
to his left and raised his right hand. Octavio
Meyran, the third man in the ring, signaled repeatedly for the fight to continue. He, like
Cosell, the ticket-buying audience and the millions watching on closed-circuit TV, refused to believe what he was seeing.
Leonard, with Duran's back turned, pounced. But Duran was through and
Meyran
called the fight off at the 2:44 mark. Roberto Duran, the most
dangerous fighter pound-for-pound in the world, was committing boxing's
biggest sin.
"He quit," Leonard's brother Roger shouted as his brother looked around befuddled. "He quit on you, Ray."
The Aftermath
AFP/Getty Images
The crowd, like the millions who would later watch on television, was confused. Confused and eventually furious.
"Quitter, quitter," they chanted, according to the
New York Daily News' Phil Pepe. "Fix, fix, fix."
Confusion reigned ringside as well, with Duran's corner as perplexed as anyone.
"He just quit," Duran's veteran trainer, Freddie Brown, told
Nack.
"I been with the guy nine years and I can't answer it. The guy's
supposed to be an animal, right? And he quit. You'd think that an animal
would fight right up to the end."
In
The Ring, the dean of boxing writers was aghast. Machismo, Bert Sugar believed, died that night in New Orleans:
It was thought there were but four immutable laws which governed the
universe: That the Earth always goes around the sun; That lawyers always
get paid first; That every action has an equal and opposite reaction;
And that Roberto Duran would have to be carried out on his shield, blood
streaming out of his ears, before he would ever quit. Now you can
scratch one of the above.
While two words, "No Mas," would eventually come to define the fight, only one seemed to matter
in the aftermath—why? The story shifted with time. World Boxing Council President Jose
Sulaiman
claimed an injured right shoulder was the culprit. In Duran's locker
room, attention turned to stomach cramps, blamed on the enormous meal
he'd eaten after the weigh-ins that same day.
As Thomas Boswell reported in the
Washington Post, Duran began gorging himself almost immediately after leaving the stage:
As soon as the breakfast steak hit his plate this morning, Duran, the
fork encircled by his fist and held backhand like a death instrument,
impaled the meat as though it might try to wriggle away. Once
center-shot and speared, the steak was never allowed to leave the fork
as Duran simply picked up the slab and gnawed around the fork, tearing
the meat off with a twist of his head. Anybody can have good manners;
only Duran, in his leather jacket, wool stocking cap, diamond earring,
collar-length black mane, piratical beard and white neckerchief, can
make eating seem so carnal that it ought to be X-rated. This is boxing's
ignoble savage.
But no matter which story was for sale, few were buying, even within Duran's camp.
"He said, 'To hell with this fellow. He's making fun of me and I'm
not going to fight anymore.' Stomach Cramps? Maybe that's true, maybe
it's not,"
Eleta
told reporters. "But Duran didn't quit because of stomach cramps. He
quit because he was embarrassed. I know this. Roberto was crying after
the fight when I took him to the hospital for a checkup. In the car, he
said to me, 'I'm ashamed of myself. I never should have done that.
That's not me. I am not proud of myself.'"
Later that night, before a perfunctory trip to the hospital, Duran
was seen partying in his hotel room. Down the hall, his 81-year old
trainer, Ray
Arcel, wept.
"The whole situation was more than I could take," he told biographer Donald Dewey in
Ray Arcel: A Boxing Biography. "It took a long time for me to get over it, if I ever did."
Famed columnist Mike
Lupica, writing in the
New York Daily News,
was hyperbolic to the point of cruelty, but reflected the general
consensus. Duran didn't just lose a fight, he wrote. He betrayed the
very essence of his sport:
Roberto Duran was indeed a quitter in the Superdome
Tuesday night. Duran, who was supposed to be the greatest street
fighter of them all, with a fighting heart the size of Panama, turned
one of the most anticipated boxing rematches in years into something
foul-smelling and dirty.
Former light heavyweight champion Jose Torres, writing in
The Ring months later, explained that Duran's decision stung worse because of how he'd been built up in the media:
Duran played this part quite well. He spoke about killing opponents.
He grunted like an animal and his eyes would become cold as ice. There
was foam in the corners of his mouth as he snarled at his rivals.
... Given the social background of Duran—growing up very poor in the ghettos of Panama and shining shoes to survive—old philosophies were revived and new ones were developed about "Hispanic machismo."
At a press conference afterward, as Duran attempted to explain
himself, a lone voice can be heard clearly from the peanut gallery
yelling "You're a disgrace." Things were worse in Panama, where the
former champion was forced to remain a virtual prisoner in his own home.
"I am retired from boxing right now," Duran said at the time. "I don't want to fight anymore."
That promise, however real it may have felt at the time, of course
couldn't hold. Duran would return to the ring 45 more times in his
career, earning redemption of sorts in a middleweight title fight
against Iran Barkley and even facing Leonard in a best-forgotten 1989
rubber match.
It wouldn't matter. To boxing fans, No Mas overshadowed all that
preceded it and all that was to come. For Leonard, it was the ultimate
revenge.
"I made him quit," Leonard said. "To make a man quit, to make a Roberto Duran quit, was better than knocking him out."
