‘No Mas’ Talking--It’s Time to Fight : If Looks Mean Anything, Then Duran Is a Shoo-In

The trouble with Sugar Ray Leonard as a pug is, he doesn’t look like one. He looks like he just walked off a can of baby food. If you saw him in the park, you’d want to take him down to the precinct and buy him a lollipop till his parents showed up.

He’s got this wide-eyed, innocent, baby-faced stare. He’s not really very big, certainly not big enough to be the middleweight champion of the world. The forehead is smooth and unwrinkled, not a mark on it. There’s no scar tissue over the eyes or ears. He has all his teeth. He smiles a lot. His nose isn’t mashed against his cheeks.

You look at his record and you picture Hulk Hogan. You look at the fighter and it’s “Leave It to Beaver.”

It’s not fair. Killers should look the part. It has always been the contention here that the reason Scotland Yard never caught Jack the Ripper was because he didn’t look the way Jack the Ripper was supposed to look. Nature plays tricks. He probably looked more like a wimp than a monster. Wolves look cuddly. Hitler looked comical.

Sugar Ray Leonard doesn’t look like a wimp but if he’d tried to pick a fight in a bar before he got famous, the tough guys would have laughed and recommended he get back on his tricycle and go home to mother.

The first time Ray fights anybody, he seems to inspire that kind of overconfident reaction. There is very little doubt that when Roberto Duran looked across the ring in Montreal that night in 1980 and first saw Ray, he couldn’t believe his good luck. They got altar boys tougher than that where Roberto comes from.

You have to think Thomas Hearns also figured he was in with teacher’s pet the first time he fought him. We know Marvin Hagler did.

He doesn’t even sound like a fighter. His voice doesn’t rumble like a freight going through a tunnel. He doesn’t have the laryngitic whisper of someone who’s taken too many hooks to the Adam’s apple. He doesn’t talk like somebody being strangled.

He uses words like perspective and minimize distractions, gratification-- spelling bee words. He doesn’t exactly quote Schopenhauer or Nietsche but he does say things like, “Underestimating an opponent is not my forte.” Pugs are supposed to stick to, “I’ll moider da bum.”

But, by the second fight, Ray has blown his cover. They see right through that look of the little boy getting his first look at Santa Claus and treat him for what he is, Baby Face Nelson, Public Enemy No. 1 in boxing trunks, a terrorist with gloves on.

What’s his secret? Speed. The great equalizer. Boxing is a speed sport. It’s a simple matter of physics. The car that hits you going 5 m.p.h. leaves you unhurt. The same car hits you going 125 m.p.h., they pick you up in a basket.

Ditto with punches. Velocity plus mass equals unconsciousness when it lands on the chin. The original Sugar Ray taught that to a generation of tough guys from Jake LaMotta to Rocky Graziano. The new Sugar Ray taught it to the Marvin Hagler--and Roberto Duran--generation.

The question becomes: What happens when the speed decelerates? When the reflexes slow? When that happens, does the match come down to brute strength?

This is the proposition that saves tonight’s matchup at The Mirage Hotel from being a foregone conclusion. Joe Louis once said he never lost his punch, just the ability to get it there on time.

If that happens Thursday night--and it almost happened when he fought the Hearns rematch--does Sugar Ray live up to his looks? Nature apparently intended him to be a piano player or a ballet dancer. When the speed’s gone, does he turn into Little Boy Blue at last?

Roberto Duran couldn’t be anything else but what he is. Central Casting wouldn’t list him as anything but pure pug. Sugar Ray might get the parts where he wears a velvet suit with buckle shoes.

If Sugar Ray hasn’t lost any speed, Duran is going to think it’s raining punches. If Sugar Ray has lost his speed, he’s going to feel as if a wildcat’s got into the kitchen.

A fighter’s supposed to look like something hanging off a French cathedral, not like a cheerleader. Any self-respecting director would send Sugar Ray back to makeup with orders not to return till they painted him up to look like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Of course, if he’s lost some speed, Roberto Duran may do the makeup for him. Sugar Ray may go from Little Lord Fauntleroy to Jake LaMotta in five rounds. If he’s lost his edge, by the time Duran is through with him, he’s going to be able to haunt operas.