Half a Fight Is Not Enough for Duran : Boxing: He starts strong, but his 43 years catch up at mid-fight and Pazienza wins a unanimous decision.

Still punching with hands of stone but burdened with legs of granite in the final seven rounds, Roberto Duran left the ring Saturday night an exhausted, disgusted unanimous-decision loser to Vinny Pazienza.

At 43 and the underdog, Duran was good for half a fight before 10,149 at the MGM Grand, snapping off more hard left jabs and brutal overhand rights to the head in the first six rounds than almost anybody thought he could.

So, the Duran legend will stay intact after this bout--but has Duran’s career finally wound down?

An hour after the bout, a calmer Duran said he didn’t know. His manager, Luis DeCubas, however, raged about a Pazienza second-round slip that was not ruled a knockdown and demanded a rematch.

“I showed the whole world that I’m not that old,” Duran said through an interpreter. “That guy didn’t do nothing. I outpunched him. If this kid is so tough, look at his face, and look at mine. What did he do? He slapped the whole night. I didn’t lose the fight.”

At his highest tide, in the sixth round, Duran sent a sizzling right hand to Pazienza’s cheek that dropped him face down, the only knockdown of the bout.

“To be honest with you, when he knocked me down, I loved it because I wanted to see what I would do,” Pazienza, 31, said. “I came back like a real champ.”

Despite the roars from the pro-Duran audience, Duran lost energy and precision beginning with the seventh round, and Pazienza kept buzzing the slower, older man with quick combinations that Duran could not defend.

Duran seemed to find the heart to give it one last surge in the 12th and final round, and the two men, both bleeding heavily, stood in the middle of the ring and fired shots.

Judge Chuck Giampa scored the 165-pound super-middleweight bout for Pazienza, 117-113, and Dave Moretti and Jerry Roth both had it 117-112 for Pazienza, who took home the little-regarded Intercontinental Boxing Council championship.

Pazienza (35-5) won the last five rounds on all of the judges’ scorecards and dropped Duran’s record to 93-10.

“He fought a good fight,” Pazienza said. “I thought only George Foreman and Larry Holmes could pull off the over-40 thing.”

After a slow start, Duran appeared to bully and brawl with Pazienza, gaining the upper hand with the sheer force of his blows and the ease with which he recovered from Pazienza’s flurries.

Late in the second round, Pazienza flew sideways to the canvas, but referee Joe Cortez ruled it was caused by a slip, not Duran’s left-right combination.

Pazienza rallied in the fourth, bouncing away from Duran punches and scoring with left hooks to the body and one hard overhand right.

In the sixth, with Duran ducking Pazienza and landing punches, he knocked Pazienza backward to the canvas with an overhand right with 1:28 gone in the round. Pazienza looked stunned, but was up quickly.

By the end of the sixth round, both Pazienza and Duran were bleeding heavily because of an accidental butt that cut both, Pazienza on his right eyebrow and Duran in the corner of his left eye.

In the eighth, it was clear that Duran was on his last legs. His jabs came fewer and fewer and Pazienza kept up the pace, angling in for quick hooks to the body and uppercuts to the chin.

In an earlier bout, Tony Lopez (45-4-1, 32 knockouts) survived an ugly cut over his left eye caused by an accidental butt and blasted the ever-charging Greg Haugen for most of 10 rounds before referee Richard Steele stopped the junior-welterweight fight at 1:43 of the 10th round.

From the sixth round on, when Lopez knocked Haugen down with a huge right to the jaw, and despite receiving the butt in the eighth, Lopez ducked harder punches and dominated Haugen (34-6-1) with heavy shots.

In a controversial opening heavyweight bout, a listless Mike Evans (30-10-1) was knocked out in the second round by Jorge Luis Gonzalez (19-0, 18 KOs). After receiving a right to the chin area, Evans went down but appeared steady enough to beat the count.

Evans, who threw only two punches in the first round, hadn’t been stopped in more than 11 years, including three fights against future or former world champions.

Minutes after the bout, the Nevada State Athletic Commission announced that it would withhold Evans’ $20,000 purse, pending a hearing to investigate the circumstances of the knockout.