By Bart Barry-
Last week while reading The Wind in the Reeds by Wendell Pierce, I reflected on what it was about Pierce’s character, The Wire’s Bunk Moreland, that enchanted me enough, 12 years later, to read Pierce’s delightful memoir. Then on Saturday afternoon YouTube recommended clips of a Chuck D interview by djvlad. And a pattern emerged. What a Juilliard-trained actor and the leader of Public Enemy had in common was radiance.
There are men who glow. One needn’t dig very deep in anyone’s account of meeting Muhammad Ali before encountering an allusion of some sort to this glow. Skin tone and face shape no doubt help some performers glow more than their inner lives might predict, but these are oftentimes illusions more than real gold. Ali had real gold. He had an ugly side, too, doubt not, but expressing that ugly side so vigorously so often sweated much of it out of him, and what remained inside kept itself insulated by canceling his mobility, his expressiveness, and finally his very voice.
I was unprepared for Chuck D’s glow. That unpreparedness, what it says about glow’s audience, the role of others’ perceptions and vistas, is something to treat during this, another eventless week in our pandemic slog.
Chuck D has glowed for who knows how long without my perceiving it. He has been a speechmaker for decades and a worldclass performer for decades longer than that. As a very angry teen I saw Public Enemy at Boston’s Orpheum Theater in 1991. The group was touring with metalband Anthrax, with whom they’d redone “Bring the Noise”, shortly after Apocalypse 91 got released with its remarkable “Can’t Truss It” – a song still fresh and audacious and militant 30 years later.
As a less-angry college freshman I saw Public Enemy in 1992 at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz., when they opened for U2 and performed only one song, “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, a protest anthem. A stadium concert can be heard for blocks, and I recall more fondly than the show the reaction of two African-American dormmates, Uumoiya and Jimmy, when they recounted their pride at Chuck D’s shutting the show down after only one song and saying his band would play no more in Arizona till the state recognized Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.
“We knew PE wouldn’t sell out,” said Uumoiya.
By 1993 I’d lost interest in hiphop; if “Welcome to the Terrordome” is your anthem, “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” holds few delights. In 2012 I wrote Chuck D a letter, addressed to Carlton Ridenhour, thanking him for the example he’d set. During that time I wrote regularly for The Ring magazine and wondered if there were a way I might make “Burn Hollywood Burn” enough about boxing, in some finagled way, to interview Chuck D and Big Daddy Kane – never getting more than a minute in the thought before realizing it was boyhood fantasy masquerading as literary pursuit. Honestly, I didn’t want to interview either man – for fear of making them touchable.
It was with that same sense of Chuck D’s untouchableness I spent Saturday watching his recent interview, admiring his greatness from afar and marveling at his glow. It began an inventory of prizefighters I’ve met who exude something similar (fail as I might, I do try to make this column about boxing). The inventory had me looking at my favorite fighters, naturally, and finding few of them glow, as they remain too close to combat’s requisite edge.
Among current practitioners, probably Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez is the closest I’ve seen to glowing, and that may be an artifact of this persistent optical illusion: To me, Chocolatito’s countenance often resembles young Cassius Clay’s. Chocolatito, too, has one of the apparent requirements for the glow, which is a set of deeply held spiritual beliefs for which he makes sacrifices.
Maybe this is a commentary on spirituality, and maybe it isn’t. Having more responsibilities than needs, that universal pathway to contentment, is a thing religions gift their flocks, an outward gaze that quiets minds’ ceaseless chatter.
Then it came to me, in that mix of exuberance and relief that marks every week’s discovery of some topic, any topic, about which I can fashion 1,000 words – there was a prizefighter who glowed like no other I’ve interviewed: Roberto “Manos de Piedra” Duran.
Recently, to commemorate Duran’s release from his coronavirus-related hospitalization, colleague and friend Norm Frauenheim tweeted about Duran, recollecting Duran as Norm’s favorite interview in more than 40 years of such things. I was there, that day in 2006, beside Norm, in the conference room of a Phoenix hotel, as Duran regaled us with wondrous absurdities for 40 minutes; Norm was the interviewer, I the interpreter, and Duran the raconteur nonpareil.
He weighed at least 100 pounds more than his lightweight prime. He was rounded and glowing. There were no sharp edges to him; he bore no resemblance whatever to the bearded madman who took Sugar Ray Leonard’s ‘0’ at welterweight. He was gregarious, generous, warm, beautiful. He had the quality of a man accustomed to being observed, admired, and unwilted by others’ unbroken attention.
If he’d not been through a spiritual transformation – and perhaps he had – he’d been through the sort of existential crisis that gives birth to one. Five months after he outfought Leonard in 1980 began Duran’s bout with bottomless ignominy during the eighth round of their rematch. Exasperated, Duran waved the fight off, turned his back on the battle, and sauntered to his corner. “No mas” became a hashtag half a lifetime before Twitter. Contempt’s contemptuous revenge; Duran’s disgust with what he misperceived as Leonard’s cowardice birthed a phrase that got misperceived round the world as an ultimate act of cowardice.
Twoscore years and 45 prizefights and four weightclasses and a car accident and a battle with COVID-19 later, though, Duran glows.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry