One night in Montreal: 40 years since Leonard-Durán I

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If Ray Leonard made a mistake that night, it was to choose to be a fighter. It was also a mistake that made him into a much-better boxer than he had been before.

Boxing is full of contradictions. That night was one of them.

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It was 1980, and Leonard, 27-0 (18), was the WBC welterweight champion of the world. He was young – 24 years old – and handsome, with an Olympic gold medal and a young, adorable son that formed part of his wholesome, boy-next-door brand.

The one thing that Leonard missed was the respect that came with blood-and-guts fighting. The biggest name on Leonard’s record – and one that looks increasingly better as time passes – was Wilfred Benitez, the Puerto Rican star and former youngest world champion in history, whom Leonard stopped in fifteen rounds.

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After beating Benitez, Leonard returned home to Maryland where he stopped the overmatched UK boxer Dave ‘Boy’ Green in four rounds.

Respectability, despite his accomplishments, was still a long way off for Leonard.

Durán, 71-1 (56), was different. From the streets of Panama, he had come up the hard way, fighting for every chance. Handsome when young, he had grown out his hair and his beard to the point where he looked like Charles Manson in boxing gloves. And his power was so mythic that rumours abounded that he had once knocked out a horse with one punch (it was, someone else later claimed, a Durán uncle who had accomplished such a feat).

The Panamanian had won the lightweight championship by stopping Ken Buchanan in the thirteenth round at Madison Square Garden, a sneaky left uppercut to the groin finishing the Scotsman. Durán had then eaten himself out of the lightweight division, steadily sneaking up the scales.

He lost, too, along the way, dropping a decision to Esteban De Jesus in 1972, back at the Garden. He won after that, though, and kept on winning, but by the time he was facing Leonard in Canada, 73 fights into his career, the consensus was that he was an undersized man far past his best.

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Durán saw things differently. He looked across at the taller Leonard and he knew instinctively that he, the challenger, was the inferior boxer. He lacked the speed and the footwork, the ability to control the tempo within the ring.

The one thing that Durán could do was fight. And he knew that to push Leonard into Durán’s own game, he needed to convince him to fight.

He got the chance days before the fight on a street in Montreal. Seeing Leonard and his wife walking together, Durán stepped out and yelled at Leonard to be a proper man, asking Leonard’s wife if she would like to be with the Panamanian instead.

It was a trick, and one that Leonard fell hard for. At the Olympic Stadium in Montreal , under the bright lights, an incensed Leonard stayed within the pocket and slugged and traded with Durán.

The decision was unanimous: 146-144, 145-144, 148-147 for Durán . The man from Panama had pulled out the most-narrow decision.

Leonard, years later, would remember the force of Durán’s punches, noting how they pushed back his upper teeth. “Hands of Stone?” he said, referring to Durán’s nickname. “That was true!”

They fought a rematch six months later and, in the meantime, Durán ate himself out of contention, having to crash the weight in the final few weeks. Bringing the fight to New Orleans, Leonard out-moved and out-thought Durán, who in the eighth round turned to the referee and said in Spanish, “That’s it. I’m no longer playing with this clown.”

The words were written down as ‘No mas’. No more. Possibly the single, most-infamous phrase in boxing. It tainted Durán with quitting, but his refusal to fight Leonard any further was not borne of cowardice or fear, but of frustration.

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The pair met a third time in 1989, but not many remember the fight. Leonard won a wide, twelve-round decision in Las Vegas for the WBC super-middleweight title. Few people, in hindsight, care about that evening.

Perhaps the most-wonderful result from all of it is that Leonard and Durán became friends.

The same year as their third fight, the pair were asked to do a 7UP commercial featuring both them and their young sons. Leonard made clear to the people involved that if he turned up and Durán started taunting him in front of his child that he would walk away, commercial or no commercial

The opposite happened. On entering the gym to be filmed, Leonard was greeted with a smiling Durán who hugged him, kissed him, and called him ‘my great champion’. Durán then knelt down, picked up Ray Jr, and hugged and kissed him, too.

Smiling when he told this story years later, Leonard remarked how, after all of it, Durán had proven away from the ring to be an absolute gentleman.

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