“I AM not God, but I am something similar.”

These words were once spoken by Panamanian legend Roberto Duran, whose ring name Hands of Stone captured the primal character of a man who faced nothing in the ring that ever came close to what he faced out of it. 

Having just defeated his latest and perhaps most deadly opponent, Covid-19, Duran is a man for whom the label ATG (all-time great) most accurately applies — who even in his most humiliating moment — his “no mas” surrender to Sugar Ray Leonard in their 1976 rematch in New Orleans — retained an aura of dignity consonant with the struggle for survival and to escape the grinding poverty from whence he had come.