Roberto Duran and Marvin Hagler
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“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.
When Patterson and Liston met in the ring in 1962, it was more than a title bout — it was a collision of two black archetypes shaped by white America’s fears and fantasies, writes JOHN WIGHT
JOHN WIGHT previews the much-anticipated bout between Benn and Eubank Jnr where — unlike the fights between their fathers — spectacle has reigned over substance
