HE’S ALL BUSINESS

Marvelous Marvin Hagler may not have the charisma of a Sugar Ray Leonard, but his time has finally come, not only for respect, but for money and acceptance

You can hardly fail to remark on Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s head, since it assuredly represents the most distinctive coiffure this side of Don King. It is shaved clean. It has always been shaved clean, as if to suggest terrible sacrifice, as if to say: “I have done this awful thing to my own beloved head, because of you. And, what, out of fairness, should I do to yours?”

In fact, it no longer inspires dread, no more than his “Destruct and Destroy” slogan of several years ago. Instead, like the slogan, it evokes, among other things, an almost comic familiarity. We have had Hagler for 12 years now, have seen him fight many times. And although his presence in a boxing ring may inspire a certain anxiety, it is neither the slogans nor the glowing dome that quicken the flow of an opponent’s adrenaline.

By now that once fear-inspiring dome calls for a kind of respect as much as anything. This is a man who has been around, who has suffered through 64 professional fights, many of them for food money, hardly any of them for respect.

Now, middleweight champion of the world, he commands an admiring attention with that dome. Does he really shave his head? Or has it simply been burnished to its dull glow by the polishing rag of Everlast leather?

Hagler is certainly the most sacrificing of modern ring warriors, and the wear and tear on hair is the least of what he puts himself through.

Imagine his roadwork, 8-12 miles before the sun shines on the sand dunes of Provincetown, Mass., the last mile run backward.

Imagine 10 rounds a day, with carefully selected barbarians, fighters who’d just as soon take him out as suffer his unorthodox, ambidextrous percussions. But that is nothing.

Imagine nearly 10 years as one of the best fighters in the world, fighting for purses of $200. Imagine receiving $40,000 for a title bout, in his 50th fight. Sugar Ray Leonard made the same purse in his pro debut.

Keep that in mind as you watch the middleweight champion fight the heavy-fisted Thomas Hearns over 12 scheduled rounds tonight, on the celebrated asphalt behind Caesars Palace. Is $5.6 million, his minimum tonight, a lot of money? Too much money? There is no one who has ever seen that well worn head who will call him overpaid, not anymore.

Hagler’s time has finally come--for respect, for money and acceptance. He has earned this opportunity for the big money.

Consider his harrowing apprenticeship, taking his skills from his home in Brockton, Mass., to Philadelphia in the mid-70s. There he was required to fight one awesome middleweight after another, under conditions you would not wish on anyone.

“They didn’t bring me there to win,” reflects the bald one. Fighting the likes of Willie Monroe, three times, and Bennie Briscoe in their hometown, he rose, finally, to become the top-ranked middleweight.

Then, despite what all the rules of boxing dictate, he was made to fight three more times before getting his title shot.

No, nobody begrudges him any of it, money or respect. But think about it. His new popularity may be due to more than his preserverance.

Hadn’t he already shown preserverance before this, his 11th title defense? Why is he just now, at 30, electrifying the boxing world, selling out the 15,088-seat arena three weeks before fight time, causing the promoter to scramble to find even more closed-circuit sites just days before the fight?

Could it simply be a matter of timing? Could it be something about us, not Hagler, that has changed?

What is Hagler, anyway, but a blue-collar boxer, a small-business operator who has built his enterprise from scratch, with the conservatism that would make any Republican proud.

It may be an accident of our political and cultural climate, as much as anything, that has finally brought Hagler into fashion, in step with a nation’s new-found respect for work and its rewards. He’s the conservative, in and out of the ring, and maybe people are in a mood for that.

Never mind, for the moment, what Hagler has achieved, or how hard he has worked to achieve it. Consider that Hagler, possibly the highest paid athlete in the world--last year’s fight with the once-fearsome Roberto Duran brought him a purse similar to the one he’ll earn tonight--lives with his family on a $500-a-week allowance.

He has five children and the older ones get $15 a week for spending money. Hagler has an explanation for what he considers so extravagant an amount. He doesn’t want them chiseling for money to buy a record.

Furthermore, in a story on his finances, Boston Magazine, decided he was paying too much in taxes because of a conservative approach to investing. How about this: Hagler’s idea of adding to his business empire, which so far includes a sporting goods store, is to someday buy a laundromat.

“People think money changes you,” Hagler said. “It doesn’t have to. I don’t have to wear a $3,000 suit, because I can wear a $200 suit and make it look good. I know how to look for bargains.”

He may be the man who best reflects the values of our time. Promoter Bob Arum doesn’t want to pin Hagler’s new popularity on any swing in politics. Not exactly.

“Well, maybe, I hadn’t thought about it quite like that,” he said. “But this is a climate now for more conservative-type athletes. The flamboyant ones are not in the same demand. . . . Five years ago, everybody was doing the Ali shuffle and spouting off. You don’t see that anymore. Maybe they don’t remember Ali anymore, but what about Sugar Ray Leonard. His flamboyance is not that far removed. The country has changed.”

Arum is not prepared to drive the thesis into the ground, but he does say this fight, worth $11 million to the two boxers, probably would not have been possible in 1982, when it was first scheduled and then postponed because of an injury to Hearns, then was canceled by promoters. At that time, the public was enthralled with Sugar Ray Leonard, even in his retirement. Flash was valued beyond substance.

Even as recently as last year, Arum was unsure of what he had on his hands. Although many wanted a Hagler-Hearns fight, Arum doubted that enough people wanted it to guarantee a $10-million purse, which is what the fighters were then demanding.

But then Hagler entered his last defense in Madison Square Garden, Oct. 19, with Mustafa Hamsho, a fighter he had already sliced up once before. Big deal. Except that 16,000 crowded into Madison Square Garden, even though HBO was telecasting the fight live. What to make of that?

“That proved to me Hagler was a true personality,” said Arum, who rushed Hearns, the World Boxing Council’s super-welterweight champion, into the ring after the fight, as much to dare him to move up to middleweight and sign right on the spot.

“I felt before the Hagler-Hamsho fight that a Hagler-Hearns fight would not be as strong as the Hagler-Roberto Duran fight. I figured that was good business because of the Latin crowd. I thought they delivered the fight. But then with the Hamsho fight, I saw Hagler could gather a following.”

That’s when Arum realized how to sell Hagler, although it was clear the public was already doing some window shopping for a new kind of hero.

Arum said: “He doesn’t have the charisma of a Leonard, who has the unbelievable magic of lighting up a room, and he doesn’t have the persona of a Duran, who epitomizes everything people think a pug is, a brute, all savagery. The way to market Hagler was a terrible frightening personality on the one hand, with that fierce looking head, and a conservative, real New England guy on the other hand.

“He lives cautiously out of the ring, a decent family guy. Wife and kids, a no-drug kind of guy. And he even fights as safely as possible in it. He may have been held back all this time because nobody knew how to market him, diligent and conservative, a Pete Rose kind of hustler.”

Obviously, Hagler (60-2) alone does not make this fight, which Arum predicts will gross as much as $24 million, eclipsing the record of $22 million for the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney fight.

The fact that Hearns (40-1) carries the moniker of Hit Man, with a wonderful penchant for dispatching his opponents with a solid right hand--he has 34 knockouts--makes it a more than interesting match and makes up for the lack of individual charisma on each fighter’s part. The scientific Hagler on the one hand, the vicious Hearns on the other.

The matchup in personalities, as much as in style, is what makes this compelling. At least to Hagler, who has taken to viewing this fight as a kind of morality play. From his point of view, Hearns stands for everything that is wrong in society, a “shuckin’, jivin’ freak” who has not had to work for what he has. Hagler resents Hearns’ fame and popularity, and the resentment was intensified while the two endured one another’s company during a 22-city, 10-day publicity tour.

“I don’t like him,” said Hagler, in the best tradition of pre-fight hype. “That’s why I’m thinking KO, cause he’s got a vey big mouth and is very arrogant. I think his head is gone now. I think he’s lost all sense of reality. To tell the truth, I think boxing kinda bothers him. He’s strutting’ around with all kind of bodyguards. Believe me, I had two weeks of that nonsense.”

To some extent, that is imagined. To think that Hearns does not work at his craft is a most dangerous assumption, one you can be sure Hagler does not really make. He says it, though, to nurture his own sense of outrage, a general life-is-not-fair attitude that drives him to work, to sacrifice and deny himself. It is true that Hagler forces himself into a regimen that is Spartan by any standards, but it is as much to reinforce his own sense of sacrifice as to get into shape.

Almost against his wishes, he did most of his training in Palm Springs, instead of in the wintry Provincetown. His home grounds were too risky; he couldn’t chance a cold.

But even in Palm Springs he cloistered himself in his room, writing letters to his family and just generally being miserable, angry at Hearns for forcing him to do this. Each time he was hauled down to the fern-filled bar to chat with visiting press he said: “I have just come from jail.”

During his training, he enjoyed imagining Hearns, who was doing his fight preparation in Miami, frisking about on the sand, attended by his bodyguards. It made his own last mile easier.

Then here in Las Vegas, Hagler abandoned the tradition of ballroom workouts, refusing to perform in front of the casino stragglers. “He said it was too much like a circus,” lamented Arum, who thus missed out on a concessions opportunity.

Whereas Hearns worked out in the Coliseum Room of Caesars Palace, before patrons who paid $2 a head to see him skip rope, Hagler was working out in Johnny Tocco’s downtown gym, a well maintained gym, by gym standards, but hardly ballroom quality. Nobody, at any price, was allowed to watch.

Most certainly, Hagler did not invite six women into the ring for an aerobics workout as a cheerful Hearns did on his final day of public workouts. Hagler had work to do, even when others could afford play.

No, life is not fair.

“This is my fifth year being champion and I have the feeling I have to kill somebody to get noticed,” Hagler said.

He was asked about his appearance on “The Tonight Show” last week, on which he said that just sitting there was a life-long dream. Didn’t he feel he was finally getting his due?

Hagler scoffed. “Only reason I was on was because I had to hire people to get me on. I had to hire an agent.”

See, he has to work overhard just to get that.

Hearns, on the other hand, has had a staff publicist his entire career. He was on the Carson show years ago.

“Nobody comes to Marvin Hagler,” Hagler continued. “I have to go to them. I just can’t understand it. Same thing with endorsements. They got John McEnroe doing those shaving commercials just because he’s some big brat and he’s got all that hair.” Hagler rubbed his shaved head at the unfairness of it all. “I use more Bics than he does.”

He is slighted and disparaged a hundred ways. The comparisons infuriate him.

Asked about the Duran fights, in which an overly tentative Hagler labored for a 15-round decision and in which Hearns took just two rounds to finish the one-time legend, Hagler bristled. “No comment on that,” he saids.

The age difference? Another sore subject. “I’m a young 30,” he insisted.

Hearns, 26, has been trumpeting otherwise. “You listen to him and I’m old and crippled,” complained Hagler.

Well, this is the cost of doing business the Hagler way, suffering all manner of indignities, public and private. But this kind of business is evidently good business. It all seems to pay off.

He was criticized, for instance, for staying with the Petronellis, brothers Goody and Pat, when his career wasn’t moving. Hagler could have gone elsewhere and his instincts as a Newark ghetto kid, blasted out of the neighborhood by the 1967 race riots, might have suggested he go with other management.

But loyalty now appears rewarded. He is rich because of the Petronellis. Loyalty in boxing is as old-fashioned as, well, Hagler is.

But this is his ethic and this may be what is making him rich and famous after a decade as the most overlooked fighter in boxing.

“You write I’m no big drawing card, but look what’s happening to this fight,” he said. “Nobody’s going on charisma, or looks. I’m no showboat, not a fancy Dan. People like me because I work hard and right. When I open my fan mail, it almost always starts, ‘I hope you can fight forever. We’ll never see a fighter like you again, or have a role model like you.’ ”

Hearns may knock him down and out--who knows?--but this much is true: If Hagler falls, it will not be from some great height. “My feet are on the earth,” he says. And if Hagler falls, he will be easy to pick up. “I can go home, win or lose,” he says. “I’m still going to be Daddy, win or lose. I’ll still be a husband.”

At that, the apparent hero of the ‘80s rubs his smooth head, perhaps thinking of a day when the record-breaking 14 title defenses have been made, when his family is financially secure, when he no longer has to do road work or go to jail. Perhaps thinking of a day when the hair will grow, when the work is over.