Payne Quits to Fight Another Day : Boxing: He gives up after seventh round of heavyweight bout, claiming elbow from Van Nuys’ Butler had affected his vision.

Eighteen months ago, one-time amateur boxing star Craig Payne parked the big truck he had used for six years in his construction business, locked the two doors and tucked the keys away in his house. He would give boxing one more try.

Friday night, after the first round of combat against Lionel Butler of Van Nuys, Payne’s trainer, Paul Soucy, heaped advice on his panting fighter. Use the jab. Use the uppercut. Move to your left. Keep your hands up.

The best advice would have been this: Don’t sell the truck.

Payne, 30, who beat Mike Tyson and three-time Cuban Olympic gold medalist Teofilo Stevenson 10 years ago, quit after the seventh round of the heavyweight bout at the Reseda Country Club, claiming a Butler elbow had injured his right eye and blurred his vision and that he would be unable to continue. Ringside doctor Barry Schwartz examined Payne, found no obvious sign of injury but went along with Payne’s wish and halted the bout.

“If it had been a title fight or a big money fight, I would have stayed in there,” Payne said. “But for a fight like this, for this money, it wasn’t worth it. He was hurting me, and I figured it was his hometown and I’d have to knock him out and I didn’t feel like I was going to be able to do that, so I’ll come back and fight another day.”

Payne, of Livonia, Mich., barely missed a berth on the 1984 Olympic team, losing a close decision in the final match of the trials to Tyrell Biggs. He then fought only once as a pro--he won--and retired, saying he couldn’t deal with the politics of the sport. He returned to a gym in 1991 weighing a stunning 380 pounds. He has lost nearly 100 pounds--he weighed 291 Friday--but also has lost nearly all of the skills that made him a formidable fighter. The loss was his second in a row and dropped his record to 7-3-1.

Against Butler (16-10), he was little more than a large punching bag. A slow jab was followed by a slow overhand right, and that was pretty much the entire arsenal. Butler, 232, ranked 14th by the World Boxing Council, simply waded through the weak punches and banged Payne to the body and head nearly at will.

By the second round, Payne was gasping for breath. In the fourth Payne was staggered by a hard right to the jaw and made it to the end of the round by clinging alternately to Butler and the ropes.

Despite having an exhausted Payne in front of him, barely moving, during the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds, Butler was unable to put Payne away. He threw few punches in the final two rounds, easily bulling past Payne’s jab but landing very few clean punches once he got inside.

“He was cagey,” said Butler, who got credit for a knockout--his ninth in a row--despite the unusual ending. “He was blocking a lot of my punches. He has a lot more experience than I do.”

But not much else.

The best bout of the night featured 1992 Olympic silver medalist Wayne McCullough of Belfast, Northern Ireland, who ran his record to 3-0 with a savage, nonstop attack and unanimous decision over tough Oscar Zamora (0-1) of Pacoima in a four-round bantamweight bout.

McCullough, 123, threw punches relentlessly for the four rounds, battering Zamora, 125, with hundreds of solid punches to the head. There were no knockdowns.

In a 10-round bout, Miguel Martinez of Tijuana, the North American Boxing Federation flyweight champion, scored a split decision over Eduardo Ramirez of Mexico City in a non-title fight. Martinez is 23-5-1 and Ramirez is 24-11-1.