Not So Wonderful Marvelous

By Tom Callahan

The winner loses some aura, the loser wins some respect

In his gentlemanly fight last week with Roberto Duran, undisputed Middleweight Champion of the World Marvin Hagler was both an evident winner and an obvious loser, perversely confirming the curious viewpoint of the Las Vegas judge who scored six of the 15 rounds for nobody. The fight was not as close as the scores indicated (on two of three cards, Duran could have taken the decision in the last round), but it was close enough to reprieve Duran as a personification of shame and to reduce Hagler as a figure of terror.

Before the battle, per that charming custom, past champions trooped through the ring, showing their beautifully squashed old faces. Beau Jack, Kid Gavilan, Jake LaMotta, Gene Fullmer, Carmen Basilic, Carlos Monzon. The last four are former middleweights, who must wonder about the state of the 160-lb. division.

Now Duran, of course, was a lightweight in his prime, and as champion for nearly seven years he batted out 135-lb. contenders with a feral joy. But by 1979 the little Panamanian monster had eaten his way up to the welterweights (147), none of whom fell apart when he hit them, least of all Sugar Ray Leonard. Pulling something unknowable out of himself, Duran defeated Leonard in 1980, but leaving it there five months later, he quit against Leonard in disgrace. "No mas" became the most notorious phrase in any language. Roberto lost two subsequent fights, but then knocked out former Welterweight Champion Pipino Cuevas to get a chance at Davey Moore's junior middleweight title. When he stopped Moore in June, Duran had come back virtually to Leonard, actually to Hagler.

Leonard's retirement last year was prompted by a detached retina he suffered in training, but dread of Hagler was thought to be at least a secondary consideration. A Hagler sampler: "Don't play with them, bust them up." No one could blame Hagler for the shortage of competition leading up to and during his three championship years, but the fact remained that Duran, such as he was, represented Hagler's first eminent opponent and premium payday (possibly $10 million apiece). For a change, people feared for Duran's safety. Recalling "No mas," even Hagler supposed, "He could be wanting to stand up and take a beating now," a theory that faded a few days before the fight when Duran eyed Hagler and pronounced, "Two days, no more champion." Smiling uncomfortably, Hagler said, "I thought the man couldn't speak English."

The first round was more a prologue to a fight than a fight. Giving away three years (32 to 29), 1 lb. (156 1/2 to 157 1/2), 2 in. in height (5 ft. 7 1/2 in. to 5 ft. 9 1/2 in.) and 8 in. in reach, Duran clearly meant to box Hagler, who began timidly. "I was a little tight," the champion said. "I tried not to give him too much respect. But he was very clever." Dipping and dodging, Duran forced him to miss, and counterpunched through the second and third rounds. But the fourth was better for Hagler, and come the fifth he began bringing Duran to his toes with uppercuts inside. Other than lightly noting Duran's familiar low blows, Greek Referee Stanley Christodoulou stayed out of it.

In the the sixth, switching leads left and right, sucker-punching at every crossover, Hagler celebrated the biggest round of the fight. Duran did not answer at all until the ninth, and not too loudly then, but the eleventh, twelfth and 13th were Duran's as Hagler's trickling left eye bubbled over and nearly closed. The Panamanians who had cursed Duran in 1980 were waving small flags and cheering, not in one voice but in pockets of song scattered about the 15,200-seat stadium outside Caesars Palace. The closed-circuit and cable audience was estimated to be 2.5 million.

Some time in the middle rounds, Duran's right hand began to ache, and anyway, Duran did well to keep his manos de piedras up to defend himself in the last two rounds. "Hagler had just this much better conditioning," he told his manager, Luis Spada, honestly. "Next time," Roberto pledged. The fighter was in good shape, but he will try for better. There should be no outcry for another one of these, but Duran will fight again, and again, because he is Duran.

Hagler is less secure in what he does, strangely so. "Come on, you've got to give it to me," he implored. The champion who had petitioned a court so that he might be called Marvelous asked for acceptance and almost for forgiveness. "Duran laid back, counterpunching," he said. "He's a three-time champion, a very gutsy warrior. I couldn't go in there and get foolish."

Marvelous Marvin Hagler possesses many of the virtues of the old fighters and even comes from an old fighter's town, Brockton, Mass., Rocky Marciano's town. He works out like an old fighter, hard and lonely, on the sand dunes at Provincetown. But when Hagler referred to his sore eye at the last, saying, "I didn't expect to come out pretty anyway," it was the first time he seemed at all like the old champions who had preceded him into the ring. --By Tom Callahan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.