TO THE CHAMPION, IT’S A HATE-HATE RELATIONSHIP : HAGLER IS STEAMING

Watch Marvelous Marvin Hagler, sitting on his stool between rounds Monday night. See the steam rising from his shiny dome in the cool night air. It will be evidence of his heated resentment. The man is, even physically, boiling over.

The man is almost always boiling over, thanks to life’s unfairness. It fuels his apparently ceaseless fury.

But Sugar Ray Leonard, in particular, turns up his dial. And, as it happens, it will be Leonard sitting in the opposite corner Monday night. Leonard--pretty boy, Mr. HBO, Mr. Middle Class, looking obnoxiously aristocratic even outside a tuxedo. Hagler will be sitting on his stool looking like a whistling tea kettle.

Why so steamed, Marvin? Leonard has been so effusive in his praise of the middleweight champion as to defuse nearly any possible hatred. If the sugar man had accorded his elder any more sweetness in the prefight buildup, the bout would have been called on account of diabetes.

Moreover, it is Leonard’s decision to come back, after a layoff of five years, that is giving Hagler a record payday of at least $12 million and, with a percentage of the gross, as much as $30 million. Not to mention that it may be Hagler’s long-deferred entree to ring greatness, his invitation to the pantheon of middleweight gods. “The man should call me up and thank me,” Leonard says, baffled by Hagler’s insistent ill will.

Instead, Hagler wallows in prefight bitterness of heavyweight proportions. “It’s Ray this and Ray that,” he groused the other day, at a rare press conference. “I’ve been a legitimate middleweight since 1973, nevertheless Sugar Ray Leonard is a household name and I’m still the bald-headed guy.”

He couldn’t be deterred: “Just because he won a gold medal and because he’s America’s sweetheart doesn’t mean I’m a bum. I’ve had more KOs than he’s had fights.”

And so on.

At once the best and unhappiest man in boxing. The best, perhaps, because he’s the unhappiest.

Hagler’s intimidating visage is hard-earned. Sixty-six fights, many on dim undercards where the violence lacks the prime-time elegance to which we are accustomed.

The matchmaking has been excessively brutal. Those famous Philadelphia middleweights, to which the young Hagler was tossed like raw meat, have exacted a huge and unsightly toll. His brows are stitched like a grotesque needlepoint. The Hagler scowl, a mask of scar tissue, is now commonplace, and accepted.

Similarly, he comes by his smoldering resentment honestly enough. Says longtime Hagler promoter Bob Arum: “It’s a bitter pill, I would think, for Hagler to fight on an undercard in his 36th fight and make $1,500. And Leonard, in his third pro fight, is making $50,000 in the main event.”

Hagler, 32, though more accomplished and earlier franchised as a promising pro, has strangely followed in the 30-year-old Leonard’s wake for more than 13 years. It is amazing to look back to 1973, when both fought in the National AAU tournament. Hagler was named the tournament’s most valuable boxer. Leonard lost to Randy Shields. Hagler might have thought a plot line had been established.

Instead, Leonard chose the Olympics and became a 1976 hero-TV star. The lingering fame set him up for a $40,000 payday when he turned pro.

For Hagler, something had gone drastically wrong. In his first fight, Hagler, by then a father more desperate for paydays than Olympic gold or TV exposure, earned $50, $10 of that going for a registration fee.

“Life is not fair,” Leonard admits. “What can I say.”

The inequities compounded, though, and Hagler was nothing if not a careful scorekeeper:

--Leonard was Sugar Ray by popular decree; Hagler was only Marvelous by a legal document, a name change in a court of law.

--Leonard was an early candidate for a title opportunity by popular demand; Hagler a reluctant choice for a title shot, in his 50th fight, and only at the intervention of a hometown legislator.

Leonard was the main event, earning $1 million for the challenge. Hagler, even in his challenge of Vito Antuofermo’s title, was a prelim fighter. On the undercard, he made $40,000.

Maybe nobody forgets something like that. But hardly anybody remembers it with Hagler’s white-hot intensity. It’s seared into his brain.

“He’s got the poster from that fight,” Arum says. “Benitez-Leonard. And in small type it says, ‘Added attraction . . . ‘ “

Arum, who has promoted Hagler since 1979, says the fighter has had an unusual interest in Leonard’s purses.

“He was always aware, not because he was interested in the money but because of what it meant,” Arum says. “One of the important things in putting this fight together was, which guy gets the biggest purse. Hagler originally agreed to $10 million, plus a percentage, which would have worked out about the same. Leonard wanted a flat $11 million. That’s why Hagler’s getting $12 million.”

Of course, Leonard is still getting more attention. Not that Hagler has failed to notice. “Ray this, Ray that,” he mumbles.

Hagler finds his motivation where he can. His and Leonard’s long, intertwining histories might have been sufficient for Hagler, who requires a nearly pathological hatred to perform his ring brutality. But he has gotten more, imagined insult piled upon imagined insult.

There was Leonard’s retirement party in 1982, seemingly on the eve of a much anticipated Leonard-Hagler bout, the logical mega-fight after Leonard beat Thomas Hearns. Hagler, who was advised to be on hand in the Baltimore Civic Center, expected Leonard to announce the event. He was embarrassed by Leonard’s switcheroo.

“That fight will never happen,” Leonard said, pointing to a surprised Hagler.

Then, after Leonard came back a year later, with the express intention of granting Hagler the match, the master was once more left holding the bag. Leonard performed disappointingly against Kevin Howard and abruptly announced another retirement.

There was no trusting the man.

Then last year, Leonard, still retired at the time, asked Hagler down to his new restaurant in Baltimore to make an appearance at the opening. Hagler, wary as always, agreed, on the condition that Leonard return the favor for the opening of his sporting goods store in Brockton, Mass.

It was to be a kind of old-timers’ affair. In fact, Hagler began musing that his own retirement was at hand. Hagler, finally at peace with his chief tormentor, was relaxed and resigned about the end of his career.

Some time later, Leonard having sized up a reluctant champion, announced a comeback.

“Hagler feels he was suckered by Leonard,” Arum says. “He felt Leonard had knifed him. He might have respected him more if Leonard was forthright. He regarded this as being sneaky.”

Hagler, sitting on his stool, will recall the betrayal with gusto. It’s gotten him through his Spartan training camp, “jail” he calls it, the place he spends away from his beloved family, sparring in hot tents instead of touring the countryside in his motor home. It has lured him along the desert paths as he did his Palm Springs roadwork.

He has used this hatred, contrived or not, to move him up a rock mountain behind the Palm Springs hotel. Try to picture Hagler, the day he was to break camp and move to Las Vegas, scrambling up the promontory, reaching some rocky precipice and commemorating it with paint. “Marvelous Marvin Hagler, 3-26-87, 53 KO.” As of the moment, he has just the 52. His monumental anger, now focused like a laser beam on his opponent, announces the promise.

Anger and the consequent ring punishment are about all that Hagler shares with anybody.

“He likes adulation, but from afar,” Arum says. “Otherwise he resents all intrusion on his life. In the eight years I’ve known him, and I think he genuinely likes me, I’ve never been to his home. I’ve had dinner with him even less than a handful of times. The only guy close to him is (manager) Pat Petronelli. Even (Pat’s brother) Goody is not close with him.”

This reflects little discrimination, since Hagler is largely a loner anyway.

Even in Leonard’s retirement, the former champion traveled with an entourage. Mort Sharnik of CBS notes that Leonard always traveled with one or more colleagues when he went from one broadcasting assignment to the next.

“I doubt he’s ever made a plane reservation for himself,” Sharnik says.

Hagler, on the other hand, travels by himself. Arum has used him on some of his own broadcasting assignments. “Marvin gets off the plane alone,” he reports.

It’s the life of an undercard fighter, which Hagler remains in spirit, if not in fact. Although he is beginning to enjoy the spoils of his success--commercials for Diet Coke and Pizza Hut, appearances on a Bob Hope special and “Saturday Night Live”--he still lives the life of the challenger, bucking the system, if no longer the odds.

Even as he prepares for his 13th title defense--two short of Carlos Monzon’s record--he remains essentially the challenger, he who would destroy Leonard’s mystique.

It’s a role he’s comfortable with:

--Hearns had too big a punch? KO 3.

--Roberto Duran had too much guile? Decision in 15.

--The undefeated John (the Beast) Mugabi had too much primitive force? KO 11.

And now Leonard has too much history, too much personality, too much hair, even too much money.

It’s enough to make a man mad, which of course is how Hagler likes it, perhaps even needs it.

Do you remember Hearns, who got on Hagler’s bad side simply by taking over a bigger limousine than the champion during a publicity tour? Hearns paid a terrible price, his pettiness inciting an anger of incredible depth.

When this is over, Hagler may retire.

Perhaps, if it is an easy fight, he will go for Monzon’s record.

In any event, he has made nearly as much history as he can. Already, Arum, notes, Hagler is devoting more and more time to his sporting goods store.

“What consumes him most is that store these days,” he says. “I need him to be somewhere, but if there’s trouble with a $5,000 order of T-shirts, he’s gone.

“The thing about Marvin is, while other athletes want to become businessmen, he’s willing to learn. He’s participating in a low-risk enterprise that can’t make him much or lose him much. But he’s using it to learn the business. He’s extremely calculated that way. Things that seem purposeless with Marvin are actually very purposeful.”

So he’s even an undercard businessman, in a way, acquiring his skills there in a prelim fashion, away from the main-event glare. Presumably he’s nurturing a healthy hatred for all those entrepreneurs with head starts.

Like that Baltimore restaurateur, Leonard.