Easy Wears The Crowns

Juan Domingo Roldan was 10 when he was paid two Argentine pesos to fight a boy 30 pounds heavier than he. Six years later, he earned $100 for surviving 12 minutes against a wrestling bear. And last Friday night at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, he got $100,000 to try and take away Marvelous Marvin Hagler's undisputed world middleweight championship. Roldan should have stuck to bears.

Against Hagler, the end came 39 seconds into the 10th round, with Roldan badly battered and brushing resin from the seat of his trunks while informing referee Tony Perez in Spanish, "No more. I've had enough." Roldan had been practicing that speech since midway through the third round, after a hard right hand from Hagler had gouged Roldan's right eye and converted him into a very awkward cyclops. Until then, Roldan, the WBA's No. 1 contender and a 6-to-1 underdog, had just been very awkward. At the end of the third round, he'd told the people in his corner, "I can't fight anymore. I can't see him."

Tito Lectore, his manager, told him, "You've still got your left eye. You must have courage. You're beating him and you can take him out with one punch. You must forget the pain. You can be the world champion."

Roldan had won the first two rounds, mostly because Hagler was fighting in reverse while trying to decode Roldan's wild but fiercely aggressive style. The retreat was only the first element of Hagler's strategy. "It will take me a couple of rounds to figure him out," Hagler had said the day before. "After that, this is where he gets off the bus. He's been following me around for 18 months. [Roldan had fought on the undercard of four Hagler defenses.] This is the last stop for him. Now I turn on the red light."

However, it was certainly no part of Hagler's plan to wind up on the floor in the opening seconds of the fight. "It was a damn slip," the embarrassed champ, who hadn't been on the deck in 52 amateur and 62 previous pro fights, later protested. Perez ruled it a knockdown and, after shoving the seemingly puzzled Roldan toward a neutral corner, tolled the mandatory eight against an angry Hagler. "You can call it whatever you want," Perez said. "I called it a knockdown."

No matter. For $1.2 million, Hagler could afford to give Roldan his glimmer of hope. It wouldn't last long—only until Hagler, having solved the riddle of Roldan's rushes, opened up in the third round with the guns that had carried him to a 58-2-2 record. He hadn't lost since March of 1976, when Willie Monroe decisioned him.

The 5'7", 159¼-pound Roldan, a resident of Freyre, Argentina, 400 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, throws all of his punches with singular purpose: to destroy. If he feints, it's by mistake. Usually, the punches flow in wide, angry arcs starting from the hip, but against Hagler, who also weighed 159¼, he scored well early with a right uppercut. Roldan is ungainly, but he uses that fact to his advantage, and many of his most effective punches are thrown while he's off balance.

"He's so aggressive, you've got to drive him back," Hagler said before the bout. "He doesn't like it when people hit him back. This may surprise a lot of people, but I intend to hurt him. People think that just because I didn't knock out Roberto Duran [last November when Hagler won a close, but unanimous, decision] that I'm ready to be taken. I'm going to show them that the monster is back. I went to school on Duran. From him I got my master's degree. Starting now, I'm going after my Ph.D."

Hagler began serious work on his doctorate in the third round. After the second, he was told by trainer Goody Pe-tronelli, "Slide back on this guy and catch him coming in. He's wide open after every punch." Earlier, Hagler had tried ducking inside some of Roldan's punches and had been tagged by an uppercut. Now, as Roldan punched, Hagler heeded Petronelli's advice to take a step back and, as Roldan's shots fell harmlessly short, counter with hard punches to the body.

Midway through the round, Hagler fired a straight right to the head. He caught Roldan at the end of the punch, just as his hand was turning over, and the knuckle of the tucked-in thumb caught Roldan in the corner of his right eye. "God, the pain was terrible," Roldan said afterward. "It spread all the way across to my ear. I couldn't see anything."