Watching aged, grizzled, overmatched legend Roberto Duran take an unmerciful beating from young, scrappy, up-and-coming William Joppy a few weeks ago, I felt a little ashamed of myself for wanting to see what we all knew in advance had to be the humiliation, at age 47, of the greatest lightweight champion of the modern era. Unranked by the WBC, the IBF, the WBO and Father Time, in his 31st year in what my knowledgeable colleague Hugh McIlvanney of the Sunday Times calls ‘the hardest game’, the ancient Roberto was in there one more time to challenge Joppy for his WBA middleweight belt.
Alas, we doubt that even the hoary veteran from the mean streets of Panama City climbed into that Vegas ring believing he could win a sixth world title, thereby becoming the oldest man ever to gain such honours. Showtime’s own commentator, ‘Fight Doctor’ Ferdie Pacheco, set the tone in his preamble to the mismatch: ‘Hopefully, we won’t see a tragedy. But the very fact Duran’s still in there is a tragedy . . . This could be a very sad night for boxing.’
And so it was, with the quick-fisted, fast-moving Joppy hitting his aged opponent with all the punches in the repertoire – jabs, uppercuts, left hooks and a hard right hand to Duran’s battered head to end round one; the punishment continuing in round two with Duran wobbled by a series of left hooks; and finally, in what would be the ultimate round three, trapped in senile immobility, eating punches, unable to escape the flurries he used to slip, block, duck and neutralise. Never the conventional boxing master, in his good years he had developed his own street-fighter defensive style built into his ‘Manos de Piedra’ relentless aggression. ‘It’s heartbreaking to see a great fighter just stand there unable to get away from the punches,’ the Fight Doctor gave it to us straight, honourably foreswearing the conventional commentator hype. And when referee Joe Cortez finally moved in belatedly to save the Viejo any more unanswered blows from what had become an exercise in brutalised futility at the end of round three, Pacheco summed up the floundering mess that had once been the indomitable Roberto Duran: ‘Unfortunately, he’ll pay the price later on, as they all do.’
As he delivered this requiem for the forty-seven-year-old wreck of what had been the pocket-sized terror of the late 1970s, I was reminded of McIlvanney’s tough-love farewell on watching a used-up forty-year-old Ali labouring through ten lacklustre rounds with an out-of-shape journeyman, Trevor Berbick. ‘A king rode into permanent retirement on the back of a garbage truck.’
As I sorrowed for the retrogressed Roberto, I remembered glory nights, when he savaged the nifty Scot, Ken Buchanan, to become the twenty-one-year-old lightweight champion of the world; how he took the welterweight crown from Sugar Ray Leonard in a trademark Duran performance eight years later; and, in his early thirties, when he knocked out that very tough Mexican Pipino Cuevas and beat Davey Moore into insensibility for the WBA junior middleweight crown.
But there’s always that night, if you must fight on into your late 30s and 40s, when suddenly the magic’s gone and all that pretty fistic music becomes a terrible silence. Great fighters are able to fight from memory for a few years past what their bodies are trying to tell them is their natural retirement. As I watched our once matchless Roberto succumb to fistic Alzheimer’s, I found myself drawing up a misery list of all-time champions I have had the upsetting experience of seeing on the dark night that prompts this observation: old fighters don’t fade away, they just slowly die in front of our eyes.
My first geriatric champ was Benny Leonard. The Great Benny Leonard. The boxer my fight-fan father loved to boast about as the best he ever saw. I had seen all those Leonardian triumphs through the eyes of my doting old man. And when Benny retired as undefeated lightweight champion when I was ten years old, I despaired that I would never see him. But came the depression, the loss of Benny’s savings and he was back at his old trade again. When they matched him with the young boxer-puncher I had followed as a kid in Hollywood, Jimmy McLarnin, I remember the excitement as I drove down from Dartmouth College to see father’s idol in action at last. Alas, my Benny Leonard was a faint carbon of my old man’s hero. No magic, no music: begloved Alzheimer’s. The thirty-six-year-old ghost of Great Benny was knocked down and out in the sixth, the first time he had suffered that humiliation since he was a teenage novice two hundred fights ago.
The tragedy becomes the ritual sacrifice of the king. I saw the greatest before the Greatest, Joe Louis, run through his money, including a fixed fight with the IRS, a tired fighter when he took a pasting from Ezzard Charles in what should have been an unnecessary comeback, and then back again, fat, old and damaged, against the hungry and ferocious Rocky Marciano. If you were not there to see old Joe on his back with his leg trembling over the lowest strand of the ropes, you were spared another of those royal rides on the back of the garbage truck.
Take our twentieth-century nonpareil who for his weight could punch like Louis while moving like Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson. How I wondered at his genius, able to lick great fighters – Fritzie Zivic, Sammy Angott, Henry Armstrong, Jake LaMotta – while still in his early 20s, able to come out of retirement in his mid-30s and win middleweight titles from Bobo Olson, Gene Fullmer and Carmen Basilio. Did I have to see him follow the downward path of great champions out of money and fighting for chump change in his 40s? Did I have to see him lose a dreary ten-rounder to journeyman Phil Moyer (at least Moyer didn’t have the power to chop him up, as Joppy chopped Duran)? And was it masochism or boxing history that led me to what some people called ‘the outhouse for San Diego’, Tijuana, to see a 44-year-old impersonator of the greatest fighter I ever saw get cuffed around in losing to a Mexican middleweight who might once have qualified as a willing sparring partner, Memo Ayon?
Yes, Ray spent money as if he had his own private press for grinding out the green. Yes, if you travelled to Europe with your own private barber, your private court jester, musicians and enough friends to fill the entire floor of a world-class hotel, one of those days you were going to run out of time and money.
One of the most remarkable figures of all time is boxing’s Old Man River Archie Moore, who kept rolling along for twenty-seven years and two hundred and twenty-nine fights with one hundred and thirty-one KOs, who didn’t even get a shot at the light heavyweight title until he was past the age when most fighters have retired, thirty-nine, who knocked down and almost stopped the unstoppable heavyweight champ, Rocky Marciano, when he was forty-two, and then went on to defend his light heavyweight championship nine times in the next nine years, his final successful defence at the unbelievable age of forty-eight – and if this is a long sentence, so was Archie’s career. Did we really have to see the weary ghost of this venerable champion, almost 50 years old, humiliated and knocked out by the 20-year-old new kid on the block, Cassius Clay, on his way to becoming the iconic Muhammad Ali? No, and remembering fights I wish I had never had to see, flash forward 18 years to see the proud but fistically senile Ali take an unmerciful beating from Ali’s able successor and former sparring partner, Larry Holmes. Holmes didn’t want to hit him any more, and Ali had nothing left except pride. When trainer Angelo Dundee tried to stop it, the dead-tired, dead-game Ali refused to quit. What motivated this ill-advised comeback? Well, in that whirlpool of a mind, he was still The Greatest. And let’s face it, no matter how many big paynights he shared with his manager, Herbert Muhammad, his three wives, promoter Don King, and all those hangers-on his loyal and savvy business and camp manager Gene Kilroy tried to jettison, he needed the money.
That’s the epitaph to almost every great fighter’s career. ‘He was a true champion, but at the end he needed the money.’
And thinking of all those humbled champions, I keep harking back to pensions. Boxers are the only professional athletes without a pension fund. A point or two off the top, honestly administered, would have afforded those great if prodigal athletes the dignity they deserved in retirement. As the original and irrepressible Golden Boy, Art Aragon, once said to me, ‘When you quit the ring, if you’re a big success you’re only a few thousand dollars in debt and only a little bit brain-damaged. Now, how can you knock a sport like that?’ I wasn’t knocking the sport, but I couldn’t help thinking of its hero–victims as I watched poor old, great old Roberto Duran take his lumps and, with what’s left of his $300,000 purse after IRS and child-support attachments, shamble out of the ring for what we hope for his and boxing’s sake is the last time. From Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux 200 years ago to more recent champions like Ike Williams and Riddick Bowe, it’s the same old downward path.
Old fighters never fade away. They simply die slowly in front of our eyes. Sophocles had his tragic heroes. We have Sam Langford and Joe Louis and Roberto Duran and Beau Jack, and now, pathetically dreaming of still another comeback, talking of his vainglorious hope of winning a fourth heavyweight championship when he is getting beaten up by second-raters, the man who once lived up to his fistic hype as the Real Deal and has now played out all his cards but refuses to leave the table will finally go back to that beautiful estate outside Atlanta with chronic bells beating in what’s left of that warrior’s brain. Evander, Evander Holyfield for God’s sake, for your sake, for all our sakes, go home. Once a role model for boxing integrity, you’re going out as a role model for boxing senility. We remember you when. Please, please stop asking your old admirers to remember you now.
[1998]