Starling Keeps Title in Draw With Breland

The Mark Breland Story, the one that began several years before the Olympic Games and continued until last summer, seemed to have been brought to the final chapter Saturday night.

In a hotly disputed decision, Breland, in the eyes of most of the 6,248 present, got a gift draw with World Boxing Assn. champion Marlon Starling.

Starling, most ringsiders thought, seemed to have decisively beaten Breland.

At the end, Breland, the 1984 Olympic welterweight champion, was behind on some ringside score cards by as many as 10 points. Nevada judge Jerry Roth had Starling a 116-113 winner, Nevada judge Dave Moretti had Breland by 115-114, and judge Elias Quintana of New Mexico called it a 114-114 draw.

The Times had Starling the winner, 115-113.

In the first main event, J.C. Superstar himself, Mexico’s Julio Cesar Chavez, ran his out-of-this-world record to 57-0 with a sixth-round TKO of unexpectedly tough Rodolfo Aguilar of Panama.

Breland, who was ahead on the judges’ cards when Starling knocked him out in the 11th round last August in Columbia, S.C., seemed by many to have regressed in the rematch. For eight rounds, Breland seemed to be a punchless, standing target for the shorter, charging Starling.

Starling counterpunched with his own right over Breland’s once-vaunted right hand repeatedly through the first eight rounds. In the ninth, Breland finally began to move laterally and picked up the pace a bit over the tiring Starling. But he never hurt his tormentor, who all week long challenged Breland’s pride with comments such as:

--”Mark Breland quit, like a dog.”

--”To me, he’s just the Olympic boy. Notice I said ‘boy.’ ”

--”I’ve been hit harder by guys you never heard of.”

And by the time the battle was unfolding, Starling’s mouth seemed to have been right on target, after all. Well, OK, the “dog” line may have been a little cruel.

But the fact is Breland, the part-time actor who was once supposed to be the new Sugar Ray Robinson, wasn’t even the new Marlon Starling Saturday night. Where does he go from here? Ready when you are, C.B.

For Starling, a longtime contender who toiled in boxing’s bush leagues for years, the draw won’t prevent him from nailing down at least one more big payday, probably against England’s Lloyd Honeyghan. Starling earned $450,000 Saturday, Breland $175,000.

Watching the ineffective, stumbling, often awkward Breland caused some to wonder if this was another case of a highly promoted young athlete who’d been packaged and sold by television on not much substance.

And whatever became of the atomic right hand, the one that knocked amateurs and a few pros unconscious? Or the hammer-like left jab.?

Gone. Both of them. They simply weren’t there. Well, the right was there, but almost every time Breland unloaded it, Starling was waiting for it. He countered repeatedly with a right of his own.

Over the first six rounds, Breland had been tagged so many times by Starling’s counterpunches that for long periods, he stopped throwing the right.

Breland pulled out a draw by changing tactics in the ninth round, when he began moving laterally. The result was that the volume of Starling’s counterpunches was reduced. Also, Starling seemed to tire in the late rounds, and he became much less busy after the ninth.

All three judges gave Breland four of the last five rounds.

Breland’s co-trainer, Lou Duva, was livid afterward--at Breland.

“You know how he started moving in the ninth?” he said. “He was supposed to do that the whole fight. I don’t know what was wrong with him. It looked like a Golden Gloves fight. Mark looked bad tonight, and the only reason he got away with it is because the other guy looked so bad.”

Starling, whose left eye began to puff up after the eighth round, seemed to want to cry robbery afterward, but his heart didn’t seem in it.

“I felt Mark won maybe three rounds, if that,” he said.

“I had an easier time with him than I did the first time. He’s got those long arms, and every time I put a couple of punches together, he’d grab me. Every time I touched him, his legs did a dance.”

Breland, who supposedly trained harder for this fight than any other, said: “I felt weak and stale in the early rounds. But I thought I won the fight in the late rounds. Both my hands hurt after the second round.”

Chavez, the other champion who retained his title Saturday night, was asked what he thought of the Starling-Breland decision.

“I thought Starling won, but it wasn’t a great fight,” he said.

Chavez, the textbook boxer/puncher from Culiacan, wore down Aguilar with both body and head blows. The barrage increased steadily after the fourth round.

Going in, Aguilar seemed to many observers to be simply fodder for showcasing Chavez. The World Boxing Assn. had Aguilar ranked first, while the World Boxing Council didn’t have him in its top 30.

But Aguilar showed both skill and courage. The lightweight champion rocked him early in the first when three punches in a four-punch combination landed in an exchange at center-ring. However, late in the round, Chavez had a small cut over his left eye, one that his corner patched up after the round.

Chavez put Aguilar on the deck in the Panamanian’s corner late in the second round with two rapid-fire right hands to the head. Aguilar, only stunned, jumped up quickly. Earlier in the round, Chavez had landed a half-dozen left uppercuts on Aguilar’s chin.

Surprisingly, the long-armed Aguilar worked well inside on Chavez.

But beginning in the fourth, the stronger Chavez backed Aguilar up the rest of the way. At times, Aguilar backed up effectively, managing to muffle Chavez’s inside work.

Early in the fifth, Chavez seemed finally to be on the verge of his 47th knockout victory. He caught Aguilar on the ropes, rocked him repeatedly with hard right hands, and the Chavez section in the bleachers waved the Mexican flag and began a “Cha-vez!” chant.

But with Aguilar’s sweat flying into the first rows with each blow and just as ringside photographers were rising to their feet to catch the knockout blow, Aguilar came off the ropes and punched his way out of the fog.

Early in the sixth, Chavez connected with a left-right combination to Aguilar’s head, and the Panamanian slumped, almost in slow motion, to the floor. He arose, but when referee Richard Steele saw him helpless against the ropes, he stopped it.

On an undercard heavyweight fight, James (Buster) Douglas won a TKO over Wimpy Halstead at 1:16 of the ninth round. Halstead tried to intimidate Douglas by spitting at him at the end of several rounds, but it didn’t work. Douglas knocked him down three times.

WBA light-middleweight champion Julian Jackson of the Virgin Islands, in a non-title fight, knocked out Reggie Barnes of Memphis, Tenn., in one round.