by David P. Greisman (photo by Javiel Centeno/FightWireImages.com)
Take a handful of 135-pound fighters and place them in a bowl. Add a pinch of pugilists who formerly weighed in at 130 pounds, all of whom are now looking to mix it up five pounds north. Stir.
The lightweight division has the right recipe for a meaty, juicy stew, for delicious, fulfilling fights. Take in too much, however, and the weight will get to you. Throw in the wrong ingredients and alphabet soup will ruin the meal.
One cook who has left the kitchen is Nate Campbell, who, quite literally, has grown too big for the division.
Campbell was to defend his three lightweight titles – one each belonging to the International Boxing Federation, World Boxing Association and World Boxing Organization. But he lost his belts at the scales, weighing in at 137.5 pounds.
That was one pound less than what Joan Guzman weighed this past September, one night before he was supposed to have stepped into the ring against Campbell. Guzman never stepped back on the scales. Instead, he was taken to the hospital and treated for dehydration. Campbell and Guzman agreed to fight in an over-the-limit bout, but Guzman pulled out hours before, leaving Campbell without an opponent and without a payday.
“I’m disappointed. There’s a lot of disappointment,” a subdued Campbell said that night. “I really trained hard for this fight. I’m ready to fight right now. I accepted the fight with him over the weight. It didn’t matter to me what he weighed. I just wanted to fight.
“I’d have fought him at 30 pounds overweight. It didn’t matter,” he said. “I just wanted to fight. I fulfilled my end of the bargain. I showed up. I made weight. I was prepared to fight. He pulled out at 6:30, 7 o’clock. I was on my way to fight. I’m for the fighter, but I’m also for fighters doing what they’re supposed to do. As a professional prizefighter in Guzman, 28 pro fights, over 300 amateur fights, he knows better. So for me, I don’t have to say anything. The public sees who did what and that he didn’t want to fight.”
That was not just one wasted night for Campbell, but, rather, several weeks. The countless hours of training, the days spent away from his family, the rounds of sparring and miles of roadwork, the dieting and exercise to make weight and then not get a chance to perform.
“I’m still world champion,” Campbell had said. “I still have all my titles intact.”
Not anymore.
One recalled two lightweights in a similar situation. Jose Luis Castillo had failed to make 135 pounds for his second and third bouts with Diego Corrales. In interviews after their canceled rubber match, Corrales spoke much in the same way Campbell would two years later. Then Corrales would go on to face Joel Casamayor but weigh in five pounds over. The fight went on. Casamayor won.
Campbell and Funeka still fought, with Campbell pulling off a majority-decision victory, earning crucial points late with an 11th-round knockdown. The win was hollow, however. Campbell, like Corrales, took pride in the idea of professionalism.
“I’m hurt,” Campbell said in a post-fight interview. “I worked my whole life to become world champion, and my body said ‘No more.’ All my life, I wanted to be the best at what I did. And I finally was, and I lost it at the scales.”
Last March, Campbell, at 36, had outworked a workhorse 12 years his junior, taking Juan Diaz to the proverbial woodshed, taking his three title belts in the process and taking his place as the consensus top fighter in the division.
If only that recognition were truly that easy.
When Diego Corrales came back to stop Jose Luis Castillo in their first meeting, Corrales won the championship doled out by “The Ring” magazine. Corrales kept “The Ring” belt even though Castillo knocked him out in their rematch, for Castillo had never made the lightweight limit.
Though Corrales never made that same limit for his next bout, Casamayor had made 135. By winning, the lineage passed on to him.
And then Casamayor beat Jose Armando Santa Cruz in a split decision nearly universally seen as a blatant robbery. And then Casamayor got knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez. And then Santa Cruz got knocked out by Antonio Pitalua.
And now?
Now, even without Campbell in the mix, the meal is just as scrumptious – as long as alphabet soup doesn’t get in the way.
A bout between a Campbell with three world titles and a Marquez with “The Ring” belt would have cleared up any debate about who was the best at 135. But Campbell is promoted by Don King; Marquez is part of Golden Boy Promotions. Golden Boy has too many lightweights in its stable to allow someone else’s horse into the race.
Marquez will face Juan Diaz on Feb. 28. The company will put on a four-fight show April 4, with most of the eight lightweights coming from within the Golden Boy ranks. Edwin Valero, formerly a beltholder at 130, will take on Pitalua; Casamayor will face Julio Diaz; Michael Katsidis will meet Jesus Chavez; and Jorge Barrios will throw down with Carlos Hernandez.
Campbell making weight and keeping his belts would have left a call for him and Marquez to meet, a need that probably would have never been fulfilled. Funeka beating Campbell and taking his throne still would have left Funeka on the outside, an 11th wheel.
With Campbell’s titles now vacated, the meaty meal of the 135-pound weight class could get clouded over due to murky alphabet soup as lesser fighters lay claim to what are now lesser titles.
Nevertheless, the lightweight division remains delicious. With so much depth, each fight is a bite worth sinking one’s teeth into.
The 10 Count
1. I’d chronicle how cursed the Feb. 14 promotion featuring Campbell-Funeka ended up being, but my colleague Jake Donovan already did a stellar job recounting the card’s encounters with Murphy’s Law, “[f]rom revolving opponents, to fighters missing weight, to Florida officials struggling to prove that they’re up on the boxing rules.”
Instead, a few quick thoughts from the broadcast itself before I get into the results from the undercard:
HBO had once differentiated its “Tale of the Tape” from that of other networks by giving “arm length,” the distance from armpit to the end of the fist, instead of “reach,” which is the same as wingspan. This year, though, it is giving figures that are clearly “reach” but still placing them under the heading of “arm length.”
Max Kellerman, if 154-pound fighter Alex Bunema was shopworn by the time he lost to Sergio Martinez last year, how do you explain his otherwise stellar 2008? Bunema not only knocked out Walter Matthysse, but he also scored a major upset by stopping Roman Karmazin.
The two features on the numerous future stars in the sport were a good idea, especially considering how many of the names with whom HBO once made major money are now close to leaving the sport or are already gone. One nitpick: Next time, instead of extremely quick clips aired while Kellerman speaks, largely in the foreground, how about one minute of highlights, with voiceover, for each, so fans can be shown why they should care instead of being told to do so.
2. Alfredo Angulo showed patience and power in dispatching late replacement Cosme Rivera. But he needs to work on a porous defense, and he should be kept far, far away from boxers.
Just 15 fights into his career, he is somehow already ranked in the number-one spot of not one, but two sanctioning bodies.
Looking at the World Boxing Council’s top 15 junior middleweights, here are a few good matches to get Angulo in before throwing “Perro” in with the dogs: John Duddy, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and James Kirkland. Of course, all of those are fighters other promoters are looking to cash in on. Something tells me this thin 154-pound division means Angulo will get a title shot sooner rather than later.
3. Sergio Martinez, you were indeed robbed of victory against Kermit Cintron on Saturday night. I had the bout scored 117-109 in Martinez’s favor, and I have no idea how judges Ged O’Connor and Peter Trematerra found six rounds to give to Cintron in finding the fight a draw.
That said, Sergio, you and only you are to blame for squandering any momentum you had coming off how great you looked beating up Alex Bunema last fall. Five rounds into the Cintron fight, Martinez had landed only 42 of 198 shots. My notes for the first three rounds: “Boos,” “Zzz,” and “Zzz.” Cintron stunk it out, too, early on, but Martinez looked surprisingly ineffective against an opponent who has never been difficult to hit.
4. Boxers Behaving Badly, part one: Johnny Tapia has relapsed, sadly, and is once again using cocaine. The former three-division titlist was arrested last week for violating probation and put into a psychiatric ward of a New Mexico detention center, according to television station KRQE, with plenty of additional reporting from BoxingScene’s own T.K. Stewart.
Before this most recent arrest, Tapia, 42, was not only fortunate to be free – he was also quite lucky to be alive. In 2007 he overdosed on cocaine, ending up in a hospital for several days. He pleaded guilty in May of that year to a felony drug possession charge and was sentenced to no prison time and 18 months of probation, a ruling contingent upon his completion of a substance abuse program.
Tapia was given a conditional release from a drug rehabilitation center in August 2007, provided he wear an ankle monitor and be tested for drugs. He had to return to rehab, however, after testing positive for cocaine at that treatment center.
That relapse earned him 14-and-a-half months of supervised probation. One wonders – and worries – just when and how this will all end.
5. Boxers Behaving Badly, part two: Anthony Richard Neil Barron, a former heavyweight from Tasmania, will spend five years in prison after being found guilty last week of “causing grievous bodily harm,” beating up a friend who was trying to keep him from driving drunk, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and various other reports from Down Under.
A friend of the 42-year-old had taken Barron’s car key, prompting Barron to beat up said friend for some 40 minutes, breaking several of the man’s bones, dislocating the man’s shoulder and gouging his eyes.
The man spent five months in the hospital recovering from his injuries.
Barron only fought twice as a professional, yet he somehow earned the description “former professional boxer” within the first paragraph of a story about his criminal trial. Those fights took place between a six-month period in 2002 and 2003. Barron lost his first bout and won his second.
6. Boxers Behaving Badly, part three: Fijian fighter Nereo Cakautini must have taken his “Terminator” nickname too seriously – he was sentenced last week to 18 months behind bars for taking a cane knife and chopping someone in the shoulder with it, according to the Fiji Times.
Cakatuni’s entire pro boxing career took place on the island nation. The 34-year-old fought 21 times between 1998 and 2005, winning nine times (including six times by knockout), losing eleven times and coming out even once.
The incident occurred in May 2007.
7. Boxers Behaving Badly update: Female featherweight Erin McGowan was found not guilty last week on charges of assaulting a woman outside of an eatery in a suburban area near the Western Australia city of Perth, according to online newspaper WAtoday.
The incident took place in the wee hours of March 6, 2005, when McGowan and the woman got in an argument. McGowan had been accused of punching the woman in the face several times, leaving her with cuts and abrasions.
But McGowan said she had been hit first, that her hair and clothing had been pulled, and that before the fight the woman had touched her “inappropriately.”
McGowan, 28, is still awaiting trial on assault charges stemming from a separate case.
McGowan entered the professional ranks some two years after the incident occurred. She has won all eight of her fights, seven of which have ended by knockout, including her last appearance, a second-round stoppage in October of some dudette named Saisamon Sor Saitong.
8. Boxing Journalist Behaving Badly: David Mayo of Michigan’s Grand Rapids Press newspaper was arrested last week and charged with manufacturing marijuana and maintaining a drug house, according to, well, his employer.
Police said they found “71 marijuana plants and 32 ounces of packaged marijuana” in his house, according to the report. His lawyer told the newspaper that about 17 of the plants were big enough to be “harvestable,” while the rest were seedlings of about one or two inches in height.
The manufacturing charge is a felony carrying a penalty of up to seven years in prison. The drug house charge is a misdemeanor punishable by up to two years behind bars.
Mayo’s lawyer said his client was not selling marijuana, but that the plants were for “personal use.”
Mayo, 48, is out on bail. He has been suspended without pay from the newspaper.
9. Mayo must be a big fan of the press room dinner spread…
10. No word yet whether there are any photographs of Michael Phelps, formerly a student at the University of Michigan, visiting Mayo’s house…
David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His weekly column, “Fighting Words,” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. He may be reached for questions and comments at fightingwords1@gmail.com
