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Duran fought a fellow named Pedro “El Toro” Mendoza
in a non-title bout in Nicaragua. Mendoza was a local favorite, held in such
esteem by Nicaraguans that the country’s dictator, Gen. Anastasio Somoza,
had personally asked Duran to carry El Toro long enough to avoid embarrassing
him, but Cholo couldn’t help himself and knocked him out in the
first round. Bobby Goodman, then a Don King publicist, was in Managua
for a WBA convention, and had gone to watch Duran−along with another
of King’s fighters, Wilfredo Gomez−perform that night, and recalled a wild
melee in the ring afterward.
“Some woman, I think it was Mendoza’s wife, jumped in the ring and
made a beeline for Duran,” Goodman recounted to Al Goldstein in A Fistful
of Sugar. “He just whirled around and flattened the broad with a right hand,
better than the one he starched Mendoza with.
“The thing about it was, there was nothing contrived about any of it,”
Goodman recalled to me more than three decades later. “Some guys try to
create an image by acting like some kind of animal, but not Duran. He actually
was a ****ing beast.”
in a non-title bout in Nicaragua. Mendoza was a local favorite, held in such
esteem by Nicaraguans that the country’s dictator, Gen. Anastasio Somoza,
had personally asked Duran to carry El Toro long enough to avoid embarrassing
him, but Cholo couldn’t help himself and knocked him out in the
first round. Bobby Goodman, then a Don King publicist, was in Managua
for a WBA convention, and had gone to watch Duran−along with another
of King’s fighters, Wilfredo Gomez−perform that night, and recalled a wild
melee in the ring afterward.
“Some woman, I think it was Mendoza’s wife, jumped in the ring and
made a beeline for Duran,” Goodman recounted to Al Goldstein in A Fistful
of Sugar. “He just whirled around and flattened the broad with a right hand,
better than the one he starched Mendoza with.
“The thing about it was, there was nothing contrived about any of it,”
Goodman recalled to me more than three decades later. “Some guys try to
create an image by acting like some kind of animal, but not Duran. He actually
was a ****ing beast.”
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