His Aim Is to Avoid Getting Hit

No one ever had to ask Jake LaMotta what he did for a living. Carmen Basilio and Tony Canzoneri wouldn’t fool too many people. Even Jack Dempsey had to have a nose job.

Not even if the members had blindfolds on could LaMotta stump a panel. The minute he began to talk they would ask him how many fights he had. The few punches that missed his nose went right to his Adam’s apple.

How would you like to be known as a fighter who could take it?

That’s Marlon Starling’s worst nightmare. Which is curious because he’s the welterweight champion of the world--World Boxing Assn. version--at the moment. He holds the same title Roberto Duran, Tony De Marco, Basilio and some of the all-time gargoyles of boxing history held.

He’d never get the part in a movie. First of all, there are the glasses. Horn-rimmed and owlish, they look as if they belong on an accountant. His ears don’t look as if they are growing. He doesn’t have scar tissue for eyebrows, his hands don’t look like mittens and he can breathe through his nose and talk through the front of his mouth.

Yet, he’s had 157 fights, 47 as a pro. When he talks, he doesn’t sound like Ronald Colman but neither does he sound like Fritzie Zivic.

Marlon made it the hard way. He didn’t come out of reform school, He didn’t, strictly speaking, come out of the ghetto. He came out of the hard-rock section of Hartford, Conn., known as the Brickyard, but he graduated from high school, he grew up in a two-parent home, he never ran with gangs and his roots and outlook were, if anything, bourgeois.

Hartford is a conservative town with strong traditions of Yankee commerce but it has always had a strong attraction to pugilism. Its fights were staged in armories, car barns and amusement parks.

It became the citadel of the featherweight championship when three titleholders in a little more than a decade came from there. First, there was the relentless Louis (Kid) Kaplan, the buzz-saw who came out of the shtetls of Russia to the Connecticut Valley, where he was to become the most furious swarmer the division had ever seen. Then came Christopher (Bat) Battalion, a warrior whose profession was all too visible on his face. Then came Willie Pep, the nearest thing to mercury in boxing togs the ring had ever seen. Pep fought 242 fights, the last when he was 46 years old--he lost a split decision.

Willie was as hard to hit as four of a kind--for everyone but Sandy Saddler--and Marlon Starling modeled his fight plans after the Wisp.

“I hate the sport,” Starling admits. “I particularly hate to look like a loser even if I’m a winner. I don’t want to sit there with an ice pack on a split lip and two swollen eyes and bleeding God knows where and have somebody congratulating me.”

His ring style reflected his philosophy. “If I get hit 5 times in 15 rounds, I’m upset with myself.”

It’s great for the eyes, the teeth and the ears, but not so good for television. Marlon wasn’t into putting on any Rocky IV blood baths, he was into survival.

He also didn’t have any Olympic gold medals to hang around his neck as he climbed in the ring. Television likes those even better than a suicide complex. Marlon lost his chance for the 1976 Olympics when he broke a wrist in training.

When he reeled off 24 straight wins, with 16 knockouts, Hartford thought it had its best since Willie and would descend on New York by the trainload when he fought. But when he lost to Donald Curry twice in Atlantic City, the fight mob wrote him off. To the extent that they considered him a nice safe opponent for Mark Breland, one of the Los Angeles Olympic heroes. They set up a title match that was to be a triumphant parade for Breland in his hometown of Columbia, S.C.

Starling rained on the parade. He knocked Breland and his gold medal kicking in the 11th round.

Breland, who was thought to be so promising some were surprised they didn’t rename him Sugar Mark, got his rematch with Starling and, this time, he stayed conscious. But when he got a draw, even the TV commentators were outraged.

Wrote Newsday’s Wallace Matthews: “Starling was robbed of the satisfaction of another win over Breland when his apparently easy 12-round victory was scored a majority draw by the three judges.”

Starling kept the title and the prestige. He still doesn’t look like something you’d call the Raging Bull, or the Mauler, or the Meriden Buzz-Saw. But that’s all right with Starling. So long as they call him what he is. The champ.