It was only five months ago that the WBO lightweight champion of the world, Diego ‘Chico’ Corrales, met the WBC lightweight champion Jose Luis Castillo in what turned out to be one of the greatest fights of all time, if not the greatest. Knocked down twice and nearly out in the tenth round, somehow Corrales reached down for a last-gasp effort. Seconds later it was Castillo who was barely conscious, with his eyes rolling frighteningly in his head. Never stopped in his illustrious nine-year career, except on cuts in his early fights, the solid-chinned Mexican idol was out on his feet when the referee jumped in to prevent the miraculously rejuvenated Corrales from throwing that next right hand that could have been fatal.
Veteran boxing writers, including this one – by far the oldest of them all – were calling Corrales–Castillo I the most theatrically climactic of all time. And these eyes have seen Louis–Conn, Marciano–Walcott, Pryor–Arguello and Hagler–Hearns.
Corrales–Castillo I not only had a ‘Hollywood’ ending but produced enough controversy to set the stage for Corrales–Castillo II. After going down the first time, Diego had spit out his mouthpiece, and after the second knock-down spit it out again. A point was deducted from the WBO champion for this infraction, and Castillo accused him of using a deliberate ruse to steal more time for Corrales to recover, a charge Diego indignantly denied. He was a clean fighter who had always abided by the rules, he insisted; he loved boxing as a sport and had too much respect for it to bend or break its rules. He had removed the mouthpiece only to be able to breathe more easily, and it had slipped from his gloves to the canvas.
In their explosive first fight, the two best lightweights in the world had fought like human pit bulls. There was none of the usual feeling out, no fancy Dan boxing, just non-stop, take-no-prisoners, mano-a-mano warfare. Onlookers marvelled at the rivals’ stamina and ability to absorb punishment while refusing to take a backward step. It was almost frightening. In Corrales–Castillo I we were watching as classic a test of wills as we have ever seen, or maybe ever will.
For their first fight the arena in Las Vegas was only half-filled, and in Corrales’ dressing-room were only the fighter himself, his dedicated trainer, the articulate Joe Goossen, his assistants, and this writer and his son Benn, intimate friends of the champion. But nothing succeeds like success, and now Diego’s stunning victory had attracted a roomful of opportunistic celebrities – the living American baseball legend Cal Ripken, Jr; the movie mogul who cranks out those hundred-million-dollar action movie mega hits, Jerry Bruckheimer; the top honchos of CBS and Showtime; and the local politicians, movers and shakers. Also on hand were Jeff Lacey, the current super middleweight champ, and Sugar Shane Mosley, conqueror of Oscar De La Hoya, the classy former champion and now welterweight contender. This time the dressing-room was so crowded there was hardly enough space for Diego to do his necessary warm-up shadow boxing.
Beyond the sweet smell of success that’s always honey to the celebrity bees, interest in the impending match had been intensified by what we might call Weightgate. The contract called for both fighters weighing in at the lightweight division limit of 135 pounds the day before the fight. Corrales made sure he met it un punto. With a walking-around weight of 150, he had punished his outsized five foot eleven frame with dieting to extreme and sacrificed drinking water to meet the required title weight. But Castillo weighed in two pounds over the weight at one hundred and thirty-seven. Castillo’s physician, Dr Armando Barak, had tried to give his fighter a helping hand, or foot, by sneaking that foot under the scale to hold it to the weight agreed to, but alert Nevada State Boxing Commissioner Marc Ratner had caught him, suspending the Mexican medico and fining him $1,000. Castillo was given two hours to see if he could sweat off the offending pounds.
The old ‘foot under the scale’ trick used to be standard procedure back in the bad old days of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s when the Mafia’s notorious Frankie Carbo, ‘Mister Grey’, was boxing commissioner without portfolio. Now a replay of the ‘funny business’ days was taking place outdoors in the scorching Vegas sun near the old Caesars Palace Roman Plaza where Larry Holmes had inflicted that humiliating knockout of the sadly over-the-hill Muhammad Ali, and where Hitman Tommy Hearns fought his classic, if losing, battles with Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. This afternoon the battles were purely verbal but just as heated. Corrales’ promoter, Gary Shaw, was chewing out Castillo’s promoter, the veteran honcho Bob Arum, who was turning interesting shades of green. The weigh-in was out of control, with Corrales’ people and Castillo’s people engaged in a vocal free-for-all. There was wild talk of cancelling the fight. But with millions of dollars for the fighters, the sold-out arena and all those PPV sales at stake, Castillo was given the extra time to see if he could work off the troubling excess. To everyone’s surprise, he came back to the scale in less than an hour. This time he weighed 138–1/2! Instead of shedding the offending weight, he had actually gained a pound and a half.
Now the hard truth was dawning on the Corrales camp. They had been had. For it was obvious that Castillo had never intended to make the contract weight. More screaming followed. ‘They tried to cheat,’ Gary Shaw said. ‘They didn’t even try to make the weight. And that dirty business of the foot under the scale. They were going to cheat Diego out of his championship belts.’ Was Castillo involved in the scam? From his days as a Golden Glove champion, Diego Corrales has always brought an amateur’s pure love of the sport to his distinguished professional career. It was painful for him to admit that Castillo must have known all along he wasn’t going to make the weight. ‘This is really what gives boxing bad blows. I love my game. I love my sport. I love my job. As I said before, I don’t break the rules. I don’t bend the rules or manipulate the rules.’ ‘When a guy’s nearly six feet tall and he has to make one hundred and thirty-five, that’s debilitating,’ trainer Joe Goossen added. ‘I wish I knew he was coming in at 138–1/2. We’d’ve come in at 138–1/2 too.’
Weightgate carried over into Saturday, fight day, with Castillo ordered to make 146 for what was now a non-title fight, and having to pay Corrales $75,000 for every pound over that weight. Castillo had already been fined $120,000, with half going to Corrales and the other half to the Nevada Commission. Back in Corrales’ luxurious suite in a Caesars Palace penthouse, Corrales relaxed with his family, this writer and his son Benn, and two massive seven-foot bodyguards. ‘Chico’, as his friends call him, joked that he’d take that extra $60,000 of Castillo money and buy himself a motorcycle. ‘No, Chico,’ his personable and pregnant wife Michelle objected, ‘I’m taking it to buy jewellery.’
Since Corrales had fulfilled his weight obligation, he had the option of calling off the fight and still receiving his $2 million. But he wasn’t about to cancel the rematch with Castillo. ‘I’m not doing this for money,’ he told us in his suite 24 hours before fight time. ‘I’m doing it because I love my job and I owe it to my fans to deliver. The sport of boxing needs this fight. This is about pride and my legacy.’
By fight time Saturday night, both fighters were up around 149, but with a big advantage to Castillo, who had maintained the higher weight all along while the conscientious Diego had roller-coastered from 149 to 135 and back to 149 again. So much for Weightgate.
Now on to Corrales–Castillo II. This time the arena was packed to the rafters, 17,000 overheated fans, with a throng of vocal Mexicans waving their eagle-and-snake emblazoned national flags and chanting the name of their idol at the top of their lungs. If they needed any further incitement, it was the commanding ringside presence of the greatest Mexican fighter of all time, Julio Cesar Chavez, whose young son, Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr, was fighting the semi-windup. Castillo had served his apprentice years as a sparring partner for the legendary Chavez, and he had learned his brutal trade from a master. Chavez had prevailed over the years with his relentless combinations of short left hooks to the liver (the famous or infamous ‘Mexican liver punch’), nasty little uppercuts and straight crushing rights to the jaw.
That’s exactly the way Castillo fights too, and in the controversial rematch he lost no time demonstrating his bad intentions. This fight had been hyped as ‘Round Eleven’ – in other words, picking up where the last one had left off in that explosive tenth round five months earlier. The human pit bulls were at it again, ignoring boxing niceties, just toe-to-toe, hit-and-get-hit, with both fighters refusing to back off, going at each other with the same ferocious intensity once again. Only this time, by the end of round one Castillo’s dominance was painfully clear. Corrales was scoring with some two-fisted flurries, but it was Castillo who was doing the sharper punching. There were all the old classic Chavez combos, those short left hooks to the body Diego couldn’t seem to avoid and the straight right hands to the champion’s unprotected jaw. In the third round Castillo answered an effective Corrales attack with a straight right cross that had his rival in trouble at the bell.
Castillo had won all three rounds now, and he came out for the fourth with mounting confidence. He had been catching Corrales with his trademark left hook again and again, and that was his weapon now, a classic left hook to the jaw that put Corrales down as hard as he had in the first fight. No, even harder. Because now, for the first time in his life – his other two losses in his forty-two fights due to stoppages on cuts – he was unable to beat the count. After all the build-up and all those months of training, it was all over in less than a minute of round four.
Back in the dressing-room, Gary Shaw was fuming. It was Weightgate that did Diego in. He was blaming himself for not having called off the fight after Castillo’s shenanigans. To top off Shaw’s misery, he had lost a $100,000 side bet he had made with Castillo at the tempestuous weigh-in. This was no publicity hype. Your correspondent was there when they made the bet. In the aftermath, everyone was blaming the outcome on the cold-blooded cheating of the Castillo camp. Everyone, that is, except the always classy Corrales. At the post-fight press conference, which the Castillo camp had disrespectfully walked out on after having their say, under a cap jauntily pulled down to cover a blood clot on his right eye, Corrales said, ‘I’m not going to muck up his win by entertaining the thought that he had an advantage. He landed a good shot. Congratulations to Castillo. Good job. I made a silly mistake. I should have remembered from our first fight. I dropped my right hand and I paid for it.’
Does Corrales want a rematch? ‘Absolutely!’ He was even saying that in the ring right after the knockout, before he had fully recovered his senses. There’s a rematch clause in their contract, and after a hard-earned rest, he’s eager to go back into training for Corrales–Castillo III. Only this time, he, Gary Shaw and Joe Goossen insist on 135, so both championship belts will be in play. And so Castillo will not come in with the unfair advantage that tainted his victory.
So the stage is set for one of those classic three-fight rivalries. Think Graziano–Zale 50 years ago and still vivid in the memories of old fight fans. Stay tuned, my fellow aficionados. This is what fist fighting is all about. A battle of wills. Character in action. Get ready for the War to Settle the Score.
[2006]
P.S. Instead of the eagerly awaited Corrales–Castillo III, we had Weightgate II. All week long the working press was beating the drums for the last act of the trilogy. All the great trilogies of old were invoked in bated-breath anticipation for the showdown between lightweight champion Corrales and the hard-nosed Mexican challenger Castillo, who knocked out his rival in their second fight, but didn’t earn the belt because of his miserable failure to make the demanding lightweight limit.
As intimate friends of the straight-arrow Corrales (our journalistic objectivity in threads), my son and fellow boxing writer Benn and I had flown out to Vegas five days before the fight to be with ‘Chico’ as he faced the ordeal of getting down to that wicked 135. Hour after hour and day after day the tall, lean, lightweight champ punished himself in a rubber suit, plus several layers on top of that, skipping rope, shadow boxing, hitting the heavy and light bags in a gym with the heat turned up to 140 degrees. I think I lost five pounds just watching him.
As he stepped on the scale for the moment of truth, the official weigh-in the day before the fight, the press and a host of fans held their breath for the official announcement: ‘Diego Corrales . . . 135.’ The champion raised his arms in triumph. Then it was Castillo’s turn. On and off the scale he stepped, four times. In his last attempt, he stood up on his toes, as high as he could go, as if that would somehow reduce the offending weight. But he couldn’t cheat this time, as he had done so blatantly for their second fight eight months before. ‘Castillo . . . 139–1/2’ came the fateful call.
Pandemonium. Crisis. Castillo’s promoter Bob Arum turning green again. ‘I’m embarrassed, humiliated, disgusted. They lied to me. Week after week. Last night they said 137.’ A multimillion-dollar promotion was going up in smoke. Last time a weakened Corrales decided he didn’t want to let the public down, and went through with the fight and paid the price. This time he was there with his wife Michelle and his two-month-old daughter Daylia, and put them ahead of the fans. He had tortured himself to make the weight and all for nothing. He was in no mood to forgive Castillo. ‘If he had called me last week and let me know, we could have fought at catchweights. I could’ve come in at 140, 145. This way I made the sacrifice and he didn’t. It’s as simple as that.’
So after three months of intense training, three months of ballyhoo, three months of comparing Corrales–Castillo III to Zale–Graziano III, Ross–McLarnin III, Ali–Frazier III, Gatti–Ward III, the War to Settle the Score Ain’t Gonna Be No More.
Back in his Caesars Palace suite later that night, the righteous, self-deprived ‘Chico’ Corrales was knocking back a beer, dreaming of banana splits, frustrated that he was forgoing a purse of $1.2 million, but with his wife and baby by his side, sure he had made the right decision. ‘I love my wife and my new baby and all my kids and I want to see them grow up, get an education, get married, have a good life. If it was an equal playing field I’d love to fight him, but this way . . .’ He picked up and cuddled the baby, Daylia.
So Castillo goes home in disgrace, fined $250,000, with promoter Bob Arum and the WBC (which should have been minding the store) saying, ‘No más,’ and Corrales goes home without the million bucks he worked so hard for, but with his honour and his health intact. So where do we go from here, Chico? I smell money with Ricky Hatton, the banger from Manchester, who was there at ringside, comes to fight and won’t pull Weightgate like the schnorer from Sonora.