Ho-Hum, Nunn Is Winner : Boxing: But fans aren’t happy with majority decision over Starling.

Middleweight champion Michael Nunn shook off the effects of a bitter, three-week feud with his manager Saturday night and fended off a dogged challenge by welterweight champion Marlon Starling at the Mirage Hotel.

Nunn, defending his International Boxing Federation championship for the fourth time and running his record to 35-0 against the World Boxing Council’s welterweight champion, got a 117-111 score from judge Art Lurie and a 118-110 advantage from Glen Hamada. The third judge, Gary Merritt, called it a 114-114 draw. Two Times cards had Nunn winning, 117-111 and 118-114.

It was a technical fight, only moderately interesting and largely unappreciated by the capacity crowd of 3,896 in a Mirage ballroom. The crowd booed what it perceived as a lack of intensity in the final rounds and booed even louder when Nunn’s cornermen raised him when the decision was announced.

This is becoming the pattern in Nunn’s recent fights--he displays athleticism and quickness but brings no one out of his seat. He fights with a passionless efficiency, risking little.

As he said afterward: “They don’t bother me. Winning is all that matters.”

There were no knockdowns Saturday. Neither fighter was ever seriously hurt, yet both often landed sharp blows. In the end, Nunn seemed slightly more in command, slightly stronger and seemed to have landed the harder blows.

As it turned out, the better story was in Nunn’s corner, where trainer Joe Goossen was a late entry. Goossen, younger brother of Nunn’s embattled manager, Dan Goossen, was asked by Nunn late Friday to take over.

The Goossens had guided Nunn in all of his previous 34 victories, but a long-simmering contract renewal dispute exploded into a complete break when Nunn angrily walked out of his camp on March 24.

He had been working with Los Angeles trainer Cassius Greene until Friday, when Nunn reached something of a reconciliation in a three-hour meeting with the Goossens.

“Basically, we talked and we agreed Joe would be in the corner (with Greene), and that we would talk about other things after the fight,” said Dan Goossen. “It was basically reopening a line of communication.”

Starling (45-6-1) was mounting only the 11th challenge since 1898 by a reigning welterweight champion to a middleweight champion’s crown. And it was the first such challenge since 1974, when Jose Napoles unsuccessfully challenged middleweight champion Carlos Monzon. The last time a welterweight champion won one of these was 1966, when Emile Griffith (150 1/2) upset Dick Tiger (160).

Starling, 31, was fighting at middleweight (158) for the first time in his 11-year career. His punches never carried sufficient impact to interrupt or to even disturb the rhythm of Nunn’s offense.

The fighters were nearly booed in the interview room, too.

Neither had much to say, both grudgingly paying tribute to the other. Neither bore a mark.

“I give Marlon a lot of credit--he came up a full weight class, but he never hurt me,” Nunn said. “It took me a couple of rounds to get going.”

Of his future with Ten Goose Boxing, he said only: “I want to take some time off, relax, and see what happens.”

Starling said he wasn’t active enough.

“Nunn was a little busier. He’s a good fighter,” he said. “I still believe I’m one of the best fighters in the world. He was looser than I was tonight.”

This one didn’t have a clear leader until the fifth round, when Nunn seemed to have found a rhythm that Starling couldn’t break. In the early rounds, the 5-foot-8 Starling seemed untroubled by the 6-2 Nunn’s longer reach. Throughout the fight, in fact, his lead left foot was often atop the southpaw Nunn’s right foot, which at times seemed to irritate Nunn.

In the fifth, Nunn seemed to have taken over, throwing more effective punches inside and out.

When Nunn seemed to win the sixth and seventh, too, it seemed that Starling’s only hope was that Nunn’s managerial troubles might have sapped his stamina.

No such luck. Nunn finished strong, and Starling seemed worn down by the struggle.

Nunn, who earned $1.1 million--his third $1-million payday--to Starling’s $675,000, next faces a mandatory IBF title defense from middleweight Donald Curry, this summer.

If the late-hour addition of Joe Goossen to Nunn’s corner meant a reconciliation will follow, the smiles it would generate would be tempered by a serious injury sustained Saturday by a highly regarded Goossen prospect, lightweight Gabe Ruelas.

Ruelas brought a 21-0 record into a 10-round fight with his toughest opponent yet, Jeff Franklin (21-4-3), and was winning the fight handily through five rounds. But Ruelas seemed to have injured his right arm midway through the sixth and could barely lift it.

In the seventh, he crumpled in Franklin’s corner, in agony. Ruelas was hospitalized, and the early indication was that he had suffered a fracture near the elbow.