Mike Tyson once revealed his favourite fighter not to be based on achievement, but relatability.
Of course, ‘Iron’ Mike still claims many number one spot in many fans’ minds – but your favourite fighter has to have a favourite fighter, doesn’t he?
In an interview posted by Fighting Centre, the youngest heavyweight champion in history was asked why he named Roberto Duran over Muhammad Ali as the person he looked up to most in the sport.
“He was a street fighter, like me. He’s crude and mean. I respected Ali and I worshipped Ali, but he was very tall and very handsome. I was very short and not so handsome and I wasn’t good looking. And he was very articulate and I spoke with a lisp.”
“Ali was a middle class kid. He had a mother and father that both worked. My mother and father was in the sex industry. So you know, and Roberto Duran’s mother, you know what I mean, out there as well – and so I related to that.”
“I didn’t have to change. I didn’t have to learn. how to talk polite. I didn’t have to be nice. If he can be accepted and be worshipped that way, I thought I would be able to as well.”
Duran – also known as Mano de Piedra, or Hands of Stone – was a four-weight world champion in a career spanning an incredible 119 fights. A versatile fighter, Duran could brawl and pressure as well as he could defend and cover.
Raised in the slums of Panama city, Duran competed over five decades, building an untouchable legacy in the sport that he started practicing at the age of eight. His trilogy of fights with Sugar Ray Leonard are still studied in boxing gyms worldwide to this day.
But it was his upbringing and struggles that made him the favourite of ‘The Baddest Man on the Planet.’ Tyson’s eloquent reasoning for Duran as a poster boy perhaps paints a bigger picture of boxing’s uncanny ability to make heroes out of those who were never given much of a chance.