NO MAS! NO MAS!

Twenty-six years ago tonight, unbeknownst to little Large and even littler I-Berg, our humble sports brand found it’s name, when Roberto Duran unexpectedly threw up his hands in the middle of the eighth round of his fight with Ray Leonard and either did or did not utter the words, “No mas.”

It was at the Superdome in New Orleans. Five months before in Montreal, Duran had shocked Sugar Ray and the world, luring the Olympic golden boy into an ill-advised brawl with his taunts and then doing what he did best – brawling like a motherfucker. It was a hard, close fight, but Duran won a well-earned unanimous decision.

In the rematch, Sugar Ray used his feet and his brain against the Panamian, and that was that. Like Barrera against Juarez a few months ago, Leonard simply outclassed a thuggish fighter he had been stupid to stand toe-to-toe with in the first place.

In the seventh round, pretty much throwing a shutout to that point, Sugar Ray started to clown and taunt Duran. By the middle of the eighth Old Hands of Stone had seen enough. He suddenly backed away from an exchange, waved a glove in the air as Leonard shoe-shined his ribcage, and reputedly said “No mas.” Then, according to referee Octavio Meyran, he said it three more times on the way back to his corner. Duran claimed afterwards that he never said the infamous words in the ring, and that he quit because of severe stomach cramps, not because of Leonard’s humiliating antics.

Either way, he quit, and for a macho Latino boxer like Duran, that was a lot to live down, especially to the Panamanians who had revered him like a god on earth (imagine if Manny Pacquiao pulled something like that in a rematch with Barrera – the Philippines might actually sink into the Pacific). His image was somewhat restored when he outbrawled Davey Moore at the Garden for a junior middleweight belt in 1983, but still, the legend of “No Mas” lives on - in the minds of boxing fans everywhere, and of course, on the tags of those stupid fly shirts you pimps be wearing every day.

Check the shit out below - it shows the seventh and eighth rounds in full and then a post-fight Cosell interview with Duran's trainer Ray Arcel, who seems genuinely flabbergasted and heartbroken.