Resurrection Man

FRANKIE DUARTE was not yet 21 years old when he sparked a riot at the Olympic Auditorium. A raucous split decision over Famosito Gomez in April 1975 sent the afición into a liquor-fuelled frenzy. They obliterated seats, set bonfires, hurled bottles into the ring (one of them struck Duarte in the head), sprayed water hoses every which way, and charged through the ropes, where Referee Larry Rozadilla promptly kayoed one of them with a dead-aim right cross. That was how much heat the Southern California scene could produce in the 1970s. And that conflagration acted as a metaphor, of sorts, for the tumultuous life and career of Duarte, who nearly self-immolated with alcohol and drugs.

Duarte should have been the next Bobby Chacon, the freewheeling featherweight whose charisma and concussive left hook made him a wealthy man before he petered out in his mid-twenties. The irony was that, in some ways, Duarte did become the next Bobby Chacon. Duarte had in common with Chacon more than just boyish good looks, a Chicano background, and a thrills, chills, and spills ring-style. Duarte also loved partying and he also shared a self-destructive worldview that limited his success in the ring. Like Chacon, Duarte wasted his best years, but he never came close to achieving what “The Schoolboy” did. At his peak, in the mid-1970s, Chacon won a world title and set a record for a featherweight purse during an era when the little big men ruled the West Coast, including