Feb. 12, 1965 - Rubin (Hurricane) Carter leaned against the lockers in his dressing room, stretch out his legs, and drank from an ice bag.
“Man,” he said, “that’s the best thing I’ve done all night.”
It might have been the most satisfying thing Carter had done tonight at Madison Square Garden. Of course, there was that moment in the seventh round when he knocked Luis Rodriguez through the ropes with a right-left-right combination. Rodriguez too an eight count, flurried out of trouble, and bounced his way to a unanimous 10-round decision.
“He won the fight,” Carter admitted. “Can’t take that away from him. But there ought to be a law against little men like him having arms that long. He’d stand across the ring and bing, bing, hit me right in the face with that jab. Surely, that jab confused me. But almost anything Rodriguez does confuses me. I didn’t know he was so awkward. He always makes the wrong moves — wrong for me.”
Luis, a 2-1 favorite at ringside, was 3¼ pounds lighter than Carter at 151 but, especially in the early rounds, he moved from Carter as if he was fighting a heavyweight. Luis ran and jabbed, while Carter, with his extraordinary muscles bulging, chased him. In those early rounds, the fight resembled a replay of the Clay-Liston fight in miniature.
The punches that knocked Rodriguez down?
“It wasn’t too much,” Carter said. “It might have been better if it had happened out in the middle of the ring. I could see he wasn’t hurt. You don’t need no referee counting to tell you a man’s hurt. He wasn’t.”
In the victor’s dressing room, Rodriguez said: “Hey, that man’s a good fighter. I didn’t want to get in so close to him; he’s a hard puncher.”
Rodriguez agreed with Carter that the punch that put him down was good, “but not too good.”
“I think Jesse Smith and Virgil Akins and Florentino Fernandez punch harder,” said Luis. “I work with Fernandez in the gym in Miami Beach, and he hurts even with the big gloves.”
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