By Thomas Gerbasi
If there is an afterlife, wouldn’t it be something to know what Diego Corrales is thinking about Saturday’s fight between Manny Pacquiao and Shane Mosley? Knowing Diego, he’d be rooting for his buddy Shane, but at the same time would still be able to appreciate the talent of Pacquiao, boxing’s current pound-for-pound king.
Deep inside though, he would probably wonder whether they would be able to live up to what he and Jose Luis Castillo did six years earlier on May 7, 2005, the night he made his legend in a bout dubbed the greatest fight ever by nearly everyone who saw it.
And that’s what it was – a fight. Despite the high-level skills owned by both lightweights, what they specialized in was proving that they could punch their opponents harder than they could get punched back. And when you’ve got that kind of attitude, there comes a time when the people you punch draw a line in the sand and say ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
What results is Corrales-Castillo I, a fight that can’t possibly be done justice with words, but one that showed just what intangibles like courage, will, and heart look like when dressed up with boxing trunks and gloves. The end result that night in Las Vegas reads Corrales TKO 10, but his journey to get there was nothing short of spectacular.
We called it a battle, a war, and any other noun that encompasses risking your life in pursuit of a goal. But this fight went beyond that, and six years have not dulled its impact. Even now, you can get chills thinking of Corrales and Castillo just hitting each other over and over again. As excited as you were about seeing it, you had to feel some guilt knowing that they were leaving something of themselves in that ring that they would never get back.
And frankly, it seemed like that’s what Corrales signed up for. As affable, funny, and accommodating as he was outside the ring, inside the ropes he appeared to be offering himself up for sacrifice, willing to walk further, get hit harder, and suffer longer than his opponent in a quest for victory.
In the Castillo fight, he did all of those things, but then he got knocked down twice in the tenth round and it seemed like it was all in vain. But as he rose to his feet, his left eye nearly closed, a cut under his right eye, and his lungs empty of air, there was no sign of quit in him. He smartly (albeit illegally) dropped his mouthpiece, losing a point on the scorecards when he had already lost two due to the knockdowns. This wasn’t a point fight anymore though. Either Corrales or Castillo were going to get knocked out, and as Corrales got the word from his trainer Joe Goossen, “you gotta f**kin’ get inside on him now,” he waded into his destiny.
He ducked the first hook from Castillo and put his gloves up high to buy himself precious seconds to make sure his head was clear for a final assault. A 1-2 ripped his head back, but he remained upright. A wide right missed Castillo’s head, but the second landed, and suddenly he had new life. A clinch delayed the inevitable, but a left hook reminded Castillo that he wasn’t okay anymore. The follow-up barrage was a blur, and when referee Tony Weeks intervened at 2:06 of the round, the greatest comeback, fight, and story were in the books.
For weeks, the boxing world celebrated “Chico”, forgetting any of the legal troubles he had and simply reveling in his redemption. I spoke to him a little over a month after the bout, and one of my first questions, though I knew the answer, was whether he pondered quitting at any time during the punishing bout with Castillo.
He didn’t hesitate to respond.
“No.”
Did you ever think about it?
“No.”
Ever?
“No.”
Not even for a brief second?
“It’s not even a thing that pops into my head.”
He laughed, knowing that he wasn’t giving the usual machismo-laden answer, but that he truly meant it. He didn’t even take credit for such a mindset.
“That’s my dad’s doing,” he said. “My dad believed that you push hard, and when you’re done pushing harder, keep trying to push. So that’s where it comes from. No matter what you do, it’s just an extraordinary drive. It’s my dad. I can never give up. I can’t do that. That’s something I was taught never to do. No matter what you do, you put everything in it; you leave it all on the table. And if you have anything left, then I didn’t do that.”
Unfortunately, Corrales lived the same way as he fought, and he would never win another prize fight. A heavier Castillo knocked him out in just four rounds in their rematch five months later, and subsequent bouts with Joel Casamayor and Joshua Clottey were sad displays of a former world champion with simply nothing left to give because, in his words, he left everything on the table.
A month after his 10 round loss to Clottey on April 7, 2007, Corrales, with a wife and family depending on him, but few viable options in the fight game anymore, was killed in a motorcycle crash in Las Vegas.
He was 29.
His date of death, May 7, 2007, two years to the day of his greatest triumph in the ring. And it’s not any comfort to those left behind, but isn’t it fitting that Corrales died on the same day in which he was at his most alive? The Diego Corrales who defeated Jose Luis Castillo that night would have been a handful for anyone who ever laced up the gloves simply because he refused to lose. That’s a cliché in and of itself, but he lived it. And while there were, are, and will be better fighters, there are none truer, and he wore that distinction with a badge of honor, despite what it cost him.
When I asked him what the aftermath of the greatest fight of all-time felt like, he laughed like only he could.
“It took about two weeks until my body started feeling normal again and my insides stopped hurting,” he admitted, but when it came to his wife Michelle’s reaction, he turned serious.
“Nobody wants to see their wife cry, and especially when I’m doing my job,” he said quietly. “Nobody wants to see that. That was kinda difficult, but this is the way I make my living.”
So when the topic of a rematch came up, there wasn’t much debate.
“Do you really want to do this again?” Michelle Corrales asked her husband. “What can I expect?”
“The same thing you saw last time,” Diego answered.
If he ever had fear, he never showed it. If he ever questioned his choice of business, he didn’t let the media in on it. If he ever wondered why he fought the way he did, it never manifested itself in any kind of tentative performance. He was the fighter we all imagined ourselves to be when we were kids shadowboxing in the bedroom. Why dream of being the knockout artist who never gets challenged or the slick boxer who never gets hit? When you dream of being a fighter you dream of fights that will live on forever. If you get one of those, then your legacy is complete.
Diego Corrales’ legacy was complete at 2:06 of the tenth round on May 7, 2005. Six years later, will we be able to say the same thing about Manny Pacquiao or Shane Mosley?
You get the feeling Corrales will be cheering for them as they try to find out.
