by David P. Greisman
Last Friday’s weigh-in fiasco involving Diego Corrales – paralleling the poundage problems Jose Luis Castillo had preceding his second and third fights with Corrales – was not the lone incidence of déjà vu in Las Vegas.
From Corrales’ weight drain to Joel Casamayor’s waiting game, the rubber match in their trilogy followed the early blueprint of Corrales’ loss to Floyd Mayweather.
Prior to their 2001 bout, Corrales failed to make the junior lightweight limit on his first attempt and was forced to sweat the extra body mass off of his already-lean six-foot frame.
Not only was Corrales drained and distracted by legal problems, but in Mayweather he was facing a faster master boxer capable of dissecting and destroying him. The result could have been preordained, as Mayweather floored Corrales five times before Corrales’ corner surrendered for their fighter.
Half a decade later, Corrales was again faced with a crafty boxer fully able to exploit his tendency to take punishment – and he was once more feeling his body rebelling as a consequence of years of massive, rapid weight loss.
“I’ve been trying so hard to drop the weight, I was almost at the point of passing out this morning,” Corrales said after ending up at 139 pounds at Friday’s weigh-in. “When I was at the 147 area a few weeks ago, I knew it might be tough to get down. I got down a bit and thought I might get there, but I just couldn’t crack 142 pounds.
“Every day, I trained, ate salad and still weighed 142 pounds…. I just got done working out for two hours and only lost half a pound. That pretty much sums it up. I pretty much killed myself to be here at this fight,” he said.
But unlike the third Corrales-Castillo fight, Corrales-Casamayor III went on, though only after Corrales’ camp went forward with remorseful and financial gestures.
“I grabbed Casamayor’s hand after the weigh-in and apologized,” Corrales said. “It’s not something I tried to do.”
The hand that Corrales grabbed was made much richer by a cut of the large fine issued by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, as well as an extra, undisclosed settlement between the two camps.
One day later, a Casamayor hand grabbed in apology became one of two in artillery. Much like Mayweather in 2001, Casamayor interspersed movement with regular jabs and crosses to Corrales’ chest early on, seeking to drain Corrales of whatever minute amount of energy had been replenished into his formerly dehydrated body.
By the third round, Casamayor had figured out that Corrales had taken up his former fallback of following his opponent around, looking for that one bout-ending shot. As such, the southpaw Casamayor peppered Corrales with accurate left crosses, the same appendage appropriated by the orthodox “Pretty Boy Floyd” in hook form. It seemed inevitable that Casamayor would take over and take Corrales out.
Corrales, however, dug deep, breaking the Mayweather blueprint by providing enough resistance to make the bout closer. The occasional Corrales counter or single shot kept Casamayor honest but couldn’t swing a majority of the judges in Chico’s favor.
After Jimmy Lennon Jr. announced the scores – Nobuaki Uratani and Adalaide Byrd tallied it 115-112 and 116-111, respectively, for Casamayor, with Jerry Roth’s 114-113 the lone dissenting vote for Corrales – the deposed lightweight champ weighed his career after the fight in the same manner he had arrived before – heavily.
“You’ve seen the end of me at 135, and as of right now it’s time for me to go home and decide if you’ve seen the end of me period,” Corrales told interviewer Jim Gray after the fight.
After his drubbing at the hands of Mayweather, Corrales had taken a two-year layoff that was part incarceration, part introspection. After this defeat, Corrales will need to go home and think about whether he will break the Mayweather blueprint or if he will remain broken and blue.
The 10 Count
1. I’d criticize the World Boxing Council over the Corrales weight fiasco, but I’m not sure it’s wholly appropriate this time around. If Corrales had truly been 142 pounds in the week prior to the fight, then he would have fallen within the seven-day limit set by WBC rules. Yet without consistency from the WBC in regularly disclosing the results of their poorly administered pre-fight weight policy checks, these types of problems will keep coming up without all of the responsible parties being held properly accountable.
2. Nikolai Valuev ran his record to 45-0 by defeating Monte Barrett on Saturday via eleventh-round knockout. For all of the legitimate criticism over Barrett somehow earning a shot at Valuev’s WBA heavyweight title – even HBO play-by-play man Jim Lampley told reporter Michael Woods that he’d “be very surprised if Monte Barrett could beat Valuev” – Barrett put in effort exponentially beyond that in his snoozer loss to Hasim Rahman.
Valuev, meanwhile, has now had two straight defenses against questionable voluntary opponents – Barrett and Owen Beck, who earned his shot by losing to Barrett and Ray Austin and then outpointing a cruiserweight. His next opponent should be the winner of the upcoming John Ruiz-Ruslan Chagaev bout, and for the sake of boxing and boxing fans alike, one hopes for Chagaev to become the mandatory challenger.
3. By the way, the Illinois Boxing Commission should have a conversation with John O’Brien, the referee who worked Valuev-Barrett. In the eleventh round, Barrett was clearly on shaky legs, barely showing much offensively or defensively, and had already hit the canvas twice. Yet O’Brien allowed the fight to go on, forcing Barrett’s trainer James Bashir to step into the ring and cause the stoppage.
Even the best referees are known to have off nights, but this isn’t the first time that O’Brien has endangered a fighter he has been charged with protecting. In July, O’Brien was the third man in the ring for the bout between Ronald Hearns and Hector Hernandez. In the fifth round, Hearns put Hernandez down three times and Hernandez clearly was in no shape to continue, but O’Brien let the massacre go into the sixth, when another Hearns onslaught finally caused an immediate stoppage.
O’Brien’s job safety is far less important than the physical safety of boxers competing in Illinois. O’Brien has to learn; otherwise he must leave.
4. In a light heavyweight division that has stagnated, the saving grace has been the wars between Tomasz Adamek and Paul Briggs. Although their first barnburner went untelevised on the undercard of last year’s Lamon Brewster-Andrew Golota quickie, HBO rightly bought the rights to this weekend’s sequel for the undercard of Valuev-Barrett, receiving another entertaining brawl and another majority decision victory for WBC titlist Adamek.
Despite Adamek’s 2-0 advantage over Briggs, theirs are the kind of fights that scream trilogy, but unfortunately Briggs’ disappointment at the judges’ decision may prevent a third go-around, according to an article in The Australian. Yet the headline “Stunned Briggs rules out rematch” is the only mention of Briggs’ not wanting to face Adamek again, perhaps leaving open the possibility of a wise promoter paying for Adamek-Briggs III to headline the kind of show Boxing After Dark used to be.
5. Kevin McBride’s sole claim to fame had been beating Mike Tyson by remaining standing up, but on the non-televised undercard of Valuev-Barrett he had difficulty remaining on his feet. McBride’s delusions of contention were pierced by Mike Mollo, a suspect heavyweight prospect who knocked “The Clones Colossus” down once in the first and twice in the second, forcing the stoppage. Mollo, by the way, is the same prospect signed earlier this year by Don King and then immediately fed into a fourth-round stoppage loss to DaVarryl Williamson.
6. Also on the undercard of Valuev-Barrett, Nate Campbell defeated Matt Zegan via unanimous decision to become the mandatory challenger for the winner of the Jesus Chavez-Julio Diaz bout. One quick question: why did Campbell, who lost to Isaac Hlatshwayo in an eliminator for the IBF’s number two spot, qualify to fight six months later for the top position?
7. Less than seven months after participating in a bout likely to win Fight of the Year honors, Somsak Sithchatchawal lost his first defense of the WBA junior featherweight title when Celestino Caballero stopped him in the third round. Caballero, a lanky Panamanian who gave current WBO 122-lb. titlist Daniel Ponce De Leon his first loss in 2005, knocked Sithchatchawal down thrice in the third, forcing the referee to call a halt.
Incidentally, Caballero was another example of a long-term interim titlist, having won the WBA’s temporary distinction in October 2005, five months after earning the right to fight for the IBF’s belt. Yet Caballero was inconceivably forced to wait for the result of March’s great fight between Sithchatchawal and then-titlist Mahyar Monshipour, giving the WBA an opportunity to take sanctioning fees from both Monshipour-Sithchatchawal and Caballero’s February interim title defense against Roberto Bonilla.
8. Poll question of the day: which will be found first, the phantom punch in Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston II or the phantom head-butt that caused flyweight titlist Vic Darchinyan’s victory over Glenn Donaire to be a technical decision instead of a technical knockout?
9. Boxers Behaving Badly: Roger Mayweather, a former junior lightweight and junior welterweight titlist who earned renown for training his nephew Floyd, was sentenced in September to six months in jail, according to a recent article in The Grand Rapids Press. Mayweather entered a Las Vegas jail on Sept. 19 after a jury found him guilty of a felony battery charge relating to a July 2005 incident in which he punched the grandmother of his infant son.
10. The Contender Update: Tournament of Contenders, the organization that promotes fighters associated with The Contender reality show, signed season two champion Grady Brewer, along with fellow contestants Steve Forbes, Cornelius Bundrage, Norberto Bravo, Freddy Curiel, Walter Wright and Nick Acevedo, according to a press release.
The signings may seem positive for fighters who have either not received much in the way of paydays or are seeking one last push to conclude their careers. But these seven season two fighters are joining a stable with three contestants from season one – Sergio Mora, Peter Manfredo and Alfonso Gomez – and non-Contender super middleweight Jerson Ravelo. For the lower-tier non-stars, they have little to look forward to beyond sharing similar fates with Jonathan Reid and Miguel Espino, who filled out undercards with no hope of improving their statures.
Since the beginning of the year, Tournament of Contenders has only been involved in four shows – February’s Manfredo-Scott Pemberton card, May’s Mora-Archak Ter-Meliksetian fight, August’s Mora-Eric Regan bout and this Saturday’s Manfredo-Joey Spina fight. With the promoter doing nothing but occasional shows on ESPN – nothing regional or on other networks – it may be little time before some of the most recent batch of contestants are maneuvering for free agency.
