Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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Durán, born in 1951, was too old to have benefited from the social programs of Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian strongman who seized power in 1968. As a child, he hustled around on the dusty streets of El Chorrillo, a Panama City slum that could have doubled as the setting for a Graham Greene novel. For the rest of his life, Durán would be hungry—for money, for women, for celebrity, for combat. In the years to come, he would kayo a woman who charged him after a fight, brawl with opposing trainers during gym sessions, turn press conferences into impromptu melees, and publicly greet Juanita Leonard—married to Sugar Ray, boxing royalty in his heyday—with a middle finger. Most infamously, perhaps, Durán chilled a national audience when he spoke disdainfully about Ray Lampkin, still in distress and soon to be carried out of the ring on a stretcher after Durán had nearly decapitated him with a wrecking ball hook. “I was not in my best condition,” he told a live television audience. “Today I sent him to the hospital. Next time I will send him to the morgue.” But winning the title had given Durán a chance to satiate some of his pangs, and his gluttony would cost him the next time he fought in Manhattan.