<i> Mas, Mas--</i> Duran Trains for Comeback

His finances reportedly exhausted after high living in retirement, former boxing champion Roberto Duran is training hard in his comeback attempt.

It won’t be much at first--a Jan. 31 match against Colombian junior-middleweight champion Manuel Esteban Zambrano in the capital’s Nuevo Panama Coliseum.

But Alberto Aleman Jr., chairman of the World Boxing Assn. championship committee, said that if Duran wins, promoter Bob Arum would give him the chance to fight the winner of a bout between John Collins and Robbie Sims on March 9 at Las Vegas.

Collins is ranked No. 5 among middleweights by the WBA and Sims is No. 7.

Duran, 34, says he is down to 175 pounds from the 200 pounds he weighed a couple of months ago, but he has another 15 pounds to lose.

Friends and family members say Duran’s huge fortune, amassed when he became lightweight, then welterweight and finally junior-middleweight champion of the world, is almost exhausted by unbridled spending after his retirement following a 1984 knockout loss to Thomas Hearns.

Duran hung up his gloves and lived the life of a playboy. He bought an ultra-light plane, rode motorcycles and drove fast cars, became a singer and traveled often with an orchestra his brother owned. And he spent money.

However, Duran says he is going back to the ring not because he is broke but because he is bored.