By: Sean Crose
It wasn’t supposed to happen. Marlon Starling was supposed to be bested by Olympic star and WBA world welterweight titlist Mark Breland when they met in South Carolina back in the summer of 1987. The fight, which was broadcast live on ABC, was supposed to showcase Breland’s skills against a challenging, but not overly serious opponent. Suffice to say, things didn’t go as planned. Hartford’s Starling kept pushing the action, and while the tall, lanky Breland was largely able to hold the challenger off with an effective jab, it all came crashing down in the 14th round. Starling caught his man, then unloaded, sending Breland to the mat and the sport of boxing into shock. The grizzled “opponent” had won the WBA welterweight title, and with it came vindication for years spent plying his trade.
Less than 2 years later, Starling would find himself in a similar situation. Although well respected the man didn’t seem the type to beat a ferocious warrior like Lloyd Honeyghan. For it was Honeyghan after all who had pretty much walked through Donald Curry a few years earlier…the same Donald Curry who had bested Starling in two close matches. Once more Starling found himself the underdog in a welterweight title fight. Suffice to say, Starling laid a beating on Honeyghan that evening. The difference in skill sets between the two men couldn’t have been more clear. Starling, a scientific hard-hitting practitioner of the sweet science basically gave the colorful Honeyghan the beating of a lifetime, walking out of the ring with his title.
Just a year or so after that, Startling again was an underdog, this time against middleweight titleist and all around boxing standout Michael Nunn. It proved to be a bridge too far for Starling. Still the jump up to middleweight was impressive in and of itself. Yet with such a resume, it’s a true curiosity that Sterling has yet to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot. This was without doubt, the best welterweight from the late ’80s through the early ’90s, after all.
It’s all rather puzzling. There are names on the Hall of Fame ballot this year that weren’t equal to Starling’s. Yet, here Starling is, unheralded still-forever stuck, it seems in the role of underdog.