An Observer classic

There may be something in the theory that Roberto Duran had the wrong cornermen in New Orleans last week. Perhaps, he should have had Freud, Jung and Adler carrying the buckets and providing the gee-up between rounds.

Admittedly, those three have been known to give conflicting advice while offering the water bottle. They might merely have added to the psychological turmoil that is the most common and the most convincing explanation of how Duran came to yield his world welterweight championship to Sugar Ray Leonard as meekly as a 10p poker player throwing in a bad hand, to declare himself retired and then start shouting within a couple of days for a third go at Leonard.

His abrupt withdrawal from the hostilities towards the end of the eighth round at the Superdome was as bizarre as anything the most experienced watchers at the ringside had ever seen in boxing.

The complaints of severe stomach cramps may have had some genuine basis. Certainly, the Panamanian's haphazard eating habits are enough to give a boa constrictor indigestion, and the Baptist Hospital in New Orleans did accept, after examinations in the early hours of Wednesday morning, that there had been acute abdominal pains.

But during the 20-odd minutes of action against Leonard there was no sign of agony and nothing less could have been expected to undermine the will of the Roberto Duran who had stormed with relentlessly violent purpose through the 73 professional fights he had fought before Tuesday. He had won 72 of those and the winner of the other, Esteban DeJesus, had been battered aside in two subsequent matches.

The fierce brilliance and macho disdain with which he subdued first the lightweight and then the welterweight division persuaded practically all who saw him that he was a fighting man to his toenails and one of the most intimidating examples of the breed that the modern ring has known. And the closer the view of his performances the greater was the impression of an unquenchable pride.

'Roberto Duran quitting was the last thing that ever entered my mind,' said Ray Arcel, who has been in the Duran corner for almost a decade and had earlier in his long life worked with 17 world champions. 'If anybody had come and said Roberto was a quitter I would have spit in his face. I believed this was a fighter who could leave the ring in only two ways - as a winner or as a guy that was absolutely knocked dead!'

Arcel is over 80 but his mental sharpness and his emotional identification with those he sends out to war are still strong. 'This is a terrible experience,' he said quietly on Wednesday. 'I've handled thousands of fighters and I never had anybody quit like this. I can only assume that somewhere along the line this guy's mind must have cracked. It's like a guy who has been completely reliable, admired by everybody who then goes and commits a horrible crime.

'The whole thing is a real mystery for me.

Who the hell knows what goes through a man's head? You can fool yourself. I think it's not Roberto's body the doctors should be examining - it's his mind.'

Carlos Eleta, the multi-millionaire Panamanian businessman whose almost parental commitment to Duran would have guaranteed the former champion financial security even if he had not been paid nearly $7m in New Orleans, agreed that a sudden 'psychological collapse' was the most comprehensible cause of the debacle. 'When he raised his gloves in a gesture that he was finished. I thought he was clowning,' said Eleta. 'The referee also was confused. Then when he tried to bring the boxers together and Roberto showed that he would not fight on. I could not believe it. This was something I could never have associated with him.'

That claim was not dramatically contradicted by what happened in the final minute of the eight round, because what Duran did then seemed unrelated to physical fear. After holding up his hands to give his first astonishing indication that he wasn't interested in going on, he turned sideways to head for his corner and was instantly assailed by Leonard who hit him with two solid punches to the body.

A man who had retired because of an alarmed desire to protect himself would probably have cringed from that assault, perhaps dropping to one knee for safety. Duran treated the blows as no more than an irritating interruption of his efforts to let everybody know that he had decided to go home.

The origins of that decision may never be fully understood but it is likely that even Duran was doubting the importance of any stomach cramps long before he completed the journey through a snarling crowd to his dressing room. Yet the allegations of cowardice are oversimplified, at least they must be if founded on the belief that his spirit was broken by the fear of physical pain that Leonard could inflict on him.

It is far more feasible that Duran's willingness to fight on was drained out of him by the realisation that for the first time in his life he was going to be deprived of control over his own destiny in the ring. By the seventh round his attempts to close destructively were being exposed as humiliatingly futile.

As his frustration grew, the baring of teeth that had suggested the familiar sneer between Duran's moustache and beard at the first bell began to convey a sickly embarrassment. When Leonard, in the seventh, indulged in taunting as elaborately contemptuous as anything in the repertoire of Muhammad Ali (sticking his chin far out to invite punches, while his hands hung by his sides, turning his back-side towards his victim, once winding up his right hand ludicrously before jumping his left under Duran's chin) many of us were convinced we would see a climax too savage to stay within the rules of the game.

Faced with such indignities the Duran we knew was liable to take drastic retribution. Butting and kicking would have been infinitely less surprising than what he did. But it must be he concluded that somewhere in the complicated reaches of his mentality he had decided that his most effective gesture was to declare the contest void as far as he was concerned. Brown, the second of his old trainers, says that with Duran boxing has always been too serious to be considered a sport. 'It's not like football,' says Brown. 'Because he never gives you the ball.' Realising that Leonard was taking the ball away from him for keeps, Duran resolved to put a knife in it.

The illusion that he had invalidated the night's doings by turning his back on them was maintained when Duran told a press conference that he still considered himself 'a thousand times the man Leonard is' and insisted that he had been done down by the accident that could have overtaken anyone: the cramps. But next morning, in the corridors of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, he had a disturbed and chastened air.

'Maybe reaching another peak in his career by beating Leonard against the odds in Montreal, and taking a second world title removed some of the desire,' said Carlos Eleta. 'It is true, also, that he is rich now, and does not have to fight to escape poverty as he once did. Perhaps when doubts enter a rich fighter's mind he lets them stay when a poor fighter would chase them out.'

While Louisiana State Athletics Commission was fining him $7,500 for 'unsatisfactory conduct, and muttering about what it might do to any part of his purse that was still in the US, there was serious speculation about whether the golden age partnership of Brown and Arcel had been too passive to combat the uncertainty in Duran's head. It was argued that the urgent, acid tongue of an Angelo Dundee could have awakened the fighting resistance in him.

While the controversy eddied through his hotel, Duran's main activity appeared to be eating. On Wednesday he was into three full meals by 2pm. Sugar Ray Leonard took nourishment from press conferences, where he was notably generous, but not bountiful enough to promise a match to Maurice Hope.

Leonard had the solemnity appropriate to one who had just diminished a legend. However, his delicacy was poor consolation to many. 'A record of 72 wins and two losses and they'll remember him as a quitter,' said the bitter voice of Ed Schuyler, an Associated Press writer, who knows boxing and feels for it deeply and for whom Duran's defeat was a trauma. 'All those thousands of rounds in training and for real, all the lonely hours of work, all the great performances, and it ends with a lot of shitheads booing him out of the business. Booing Roberto Duran, that's something I can't take.'

Two days later, in Panama, Duran announced that he couldn't take it either, that he wanted to fight Leonard a third time, and redeem himself. But even if he is serious, he may find that he has more appetite for the collision than any American promoter.

· Roberto Duran remains in boxing despite losing on points to Hector Camacho in July at the age of 50. Sugar Ray Leonard, 45, runs his own boxing promotion company and lives with wife Bernadette and four children in California. He made a failed comeback in 1997, also losing to Camacho, in five rounds.