Roberto Duran

- STILL BOXING at age 49, Roberto Duran covets a return to the bright lights of Madison Square Garden. But for now, he'll settle for a limousine drive from Yakima to Toppenish and a fight tomorrow fight.

YAKIMA - For just a moment, as Roberto Duran talks about the first time he clenched a fist and threw a punch designed to re-design somebody's face, he looks again like the mischievous miscreant who terrorized his profession in the 1970s and '80s.

Sitting on the couch in a non-descript hotel room a million miles from his glamorous past, Duran becomes animated. He speaks quickly and laughs easily.

He is 49 going on 14.

It seems he was walking along the nasty streets of Panama City's El Chorrillo district in the early 1960s when he saw a gang of teenagers teasing a girl. Duran says he asked them - all five of them - to stop. When they didn't, the fight was on: Duran vs. the gang.

"I knocked out all five of them and then I ran fast, away from them, with the girl," Duran says through his interpreter and longtime friend, Tony Gonzalez. "But the police came and saw me running and chased after me. They put handcuffs on me and took me and the girl and the five boys to the hospital.

"They took me into the room where the five boys were recovering and asked the five guys if they knew me, if I was the one who punched them out.

"They took one look at me and all said, `No.' The police let me and the girl leave. She wanted to walk home, but I grabbed her and we ran for a cab and jumped in, just in case those guys came out and wanted to fight again."

Maybe the story is apocryphal, but the animation with which it is told makes it feel real. The storyteller is enjoying this moment, weaving a little more magic into his legend.

Duran, who fought his first professional fight as a lightweight on March 8, 1967, in the Caribbean city of Colon, still is fighting.

At a time when all of his great adversaries like Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler have retired into the good life - Leonard is playing golf and training other fighters, Hagler is playing villains in Italian movies - Duran is back in the gym, back in shape, still in the ring.

Tomorrow night, in the nearby dusty town of Toppenish, at a place, Legends Casino, that is trying to become a player in the boxing world, Duran will fight a guy named P.J. Goosen. It will be Duran's 119th professional bout.

As he sits in this room, he anticipates every question the way he anticipates a jab. What is there left to prove? Isn't he worried about his health? Doesn't he hear the snickers? Does he really need the money?

"Boxing is my life. This is what I do," says Duran, who will earn between $70,000 and $80,000 for this fight. "Many years have passed, but the rage still burns. Besides, my name can still draw fans."

Behind a house on Yakima's South Side, inside an enlarged garage that serves as the home for the Ringside Boxing Club, 11 boys and one girl wait on the stairs for Duran to arrive for his late-afternoon workout. Outside, it is 97 degrees. Inside, with no windows open and no fan to circulate the stale air, it must be 115.

A pair of heavy bags hang from wooden beams at one end of the building. A small, 14 1/2-by-14 1/2-foot ring with worn ropes sits in the center. This is about as unglamorous as this game gets.

The white limousine that brings Duran to this afternoon appointment kicks up dust in the driveway and looks as out of place as a Lexus in a demolition derby.

I have to admit, I came here expecting to laugh at Duran. I expected the legendary "Hands of Stone" to look more like the pudgy "Midsection of Mashed Potatoes." I expected Duran to be a pathetic sight.

After all, the Nevada Boxing Commission suspended him after a dreadful performance in a third-round knockout loss to William Joppy almost two years ago. The commission only revoked its suspension yesterday. And since the Joppy loss, Duran has only fought twice, losing a 10-round decision to Omar Gonzalez, almost 17 months ago, then beating Pat Lawlor in Panama this past June.

But Duran is in shape. His face is unmarked. His stomach is flat. His speech isn't slurred. His brown eyes are steely and focused again. He works hard and relentlessly in the stifling heat inside this garage, boxing 12 four-minute rounds on the heavy bag and shadowboxing alone in the small ring.

A steady stream of neighbors and fans crowds into the room, making it even hotter. Occasionally they applaud after Nestor Quinones, Duran's trainer and longtime friend from El Chorrillo, announces the end of a round.

If this is what Duran wants; if, as he and the promoters promise, he has passed all of the neurological tests; if he still can create a stir and draw a crowd, and if he still wants to fight, why shouldn't he be given the chance? The danger tomorrow night, it seems, belongs to Goosen, not Duran.

"I was born to box," Duran says. "I still believe I can compete, and that's why I still do it. This is what I love, and I take care of things I love. I have a title right now. Whoever wants to step up to the plate to fight me for it can step up to the plate."

(Actually, Duran's title - the National Association of Boxing super-middleweight crown - is not a title from a recognized international body.)

"I ignore all the people who say I shouldn't do this. I don't care what they say," Duran says. "The commissioners in Las Vegas should worry about their own boxers. I've seen 10-times worse boxers down there, and they're still able to box when they shouldn't have a license. That's what really makes me mad. I've taken every test; and, besides, I know what my body's able to do. I listen to my body, and I will know when my body tells me it's time to quit. The decision will be made by me. Nobody else.

"I can tell you, no, I won't be fighting when I'm 60. I will fight for maybe another year or year-and-a-half. But right now, this is still my business. When I step into the ring I'm just doing my business."

Still, it is hard to believe anything is left for Duran. He has fought practically every great fighter in the middle-weight classes of his generation. Leonard and Hagler, Esteban DeJesus and Edwin Viruet, Thomas Hearns and Saoul Mamby, Carlos Palomino and Davey Moore, Vinny Pazienza and Hector Camacho, Robbie Sims and Iran Barkley.

Now Duran fights because he can. And because there still is someone willing to pay him almost $80,000. And because, maybe, just maybe, there is one, last big payday.

"I've fought pretty much everyone in my past that I've wanted to fight. There's really not one guy out there I really want to fight," Duran says. "If I were 15 years younger, I'd like to fight Roy Jones, but not now. I'm smart. I know where I can go and where I can't.

"What I would really like, more than anything, is to fight one more time in Madison Square Garden. That's where I won my first title (June 26, 1972, against Ken Buchanan). I remember how happy I was that night, being able to take a title back home to the people of Panama. I would like one more night like that."

In the heat inside the Ringside Boxing Club, no music plays. No television cameras record his movements. Duran wears a sleeveless fleece jacket over a T-shirt as he throws those once-deadly right-left combinations.

In this room, he still looks as if he's wrapped as tightly as the gauze that protects his hands. Here, as he grunts and slugs at the heavy bag, he looks evil and intimidating again, as he did in 1975 when he almost killed Ray Lampkin on national TV and gloated about it later.

Tomorrow night, he will be as far away from the glare of national television as a fighter can get. Like Jack Nicklaus playing at the local pitch-and-putt, or Gaylord Perry throwing spitters in a semipro league, Roberto Duran will be a somebody in the middle of nowhere.

"The sport is like this," Duran says. "Sometimes you come to places like this. It's not always glitz and glamour. But a ring is a ring, and you can see (tomorrow) if my hands still are made of stone."