By Ron Borges

Apparently weight limits in Pop Warner Football are taken more seriously than they are in the most dangerous sport on earth, professional prize fighting.

When a kid is overweight in Pop Warner they tell him to take a seat until he loses a few pounds. In prize fighting they tell him to take a lunch break and if he can't slim down we'll see you at ringside. What other conclusion can one arrive at after the debacle the second Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo fight degenerated into recently in Las Vegas, a town where boxing is supposedly administered by the strictest commission in the sport? If that's the case, no wonder the game is riddled with self-inflicted wounds.

      

Diego Corrales was supposed to be defending the lightweight title against former champion Jose Luis Castillo in hopes of a replay of their first stirring confrontation, which was one of the best fights of the year and a glorious moment for boxing. Only problem was this time Castillo came in as a welterweight. And an overweight welterweight at that.

What made matters worse was his doctor tried to fix the scale at the weigh-in, getting caught with his foot under it while trying to make it appear Castillo had made the 135-pound limit, as Corrales had with great personal sacrifice moments earlier. If the doctor had been successful it would have been a criminal act with dangerous intent because it would have allowed Castillo to not only circumvent the rules but given him the kind of physical advantage that could have resulted in Corrales being severely hurt.

As it was, Castillo inflicted serious damage any way, punching holes in the man who had stopped him in the 10th round of their first fight, from the opening bell. He accomplished that in part because he knew all along in such a big money fight nobody was going to pull the plug over a difference of a few pounds, even though that difference put Corrales at a noticeable competitive disadvantage.

The same thing happened a few years ago in New York when Arturo Gatti looked like a weight lifter compared to a former world champion named Joey Gamache, who was outweighed by nearly 20 pounds when that fight began. Predictably, Gamache was destroyed in a matter of minutes.

The same thing nearly happened to then welterweight champion Jose Rivera but he refused to fight Ricardo Mayorga last year on a don King promoted card in New York because Mayorga was no where near the 147-pound limit. What happened? Rivera was taken off the card and paid only half his purse although entitled to all of it under New York Athletic Commission rules while Mayorga was allowed to fight TWO weight classes over his contracted weight and paid his full purse. Now that's a well run operation.

Making weight takes a toll on a fighter. That is particularly true for guys like Castillo and Corrales, who have been trying to maintain 135 pounds for too many years when their bodies are naturally craving additional pounds as they age. At nearly six feet tall, Corrales often looks like a scarecrow when he enters the ring after having starved himself to reach the lightweight limit. To face an overweight fighter as skilled as Castillo who has not shared in that struggle put him at both a competitive disadvantage and in a situation where he could have been seriously injured and anyone with any understanding of boxing knew it, yet nothing was done.

"Diego is almost six feet tall,'' said his trainer, Joe Goossen.

"It's very hard for him to make 135. He had to take meager sustenance for the last couple of days to do it. If it's an even playing field it's one thing but when it isn't it effects your performance because the other guy didn't have to sacrifice like that. There's a reason we wanted Castillo to make 135. So he could be as weak as we were.''

But because of the actions of Corrales, Shaw and most of all the Nevada commission, Jose Luis Castillo was no where near as weak as Corrales. Even with his doctor's foot under the scale the closest he got to 135 was two pounds over. Given two hours to work that weight off, he returned at 138 1/2, which calls into question how much effort, if any, he put into losing that weight in the first place.

Todd duBoef, president of Bob Arum's promotional company who handles Castillo, claimed he saw their fighter in the spa at Caesars Palace shadow boxing but Goossen claimed one of the attendants at the hotel's sauna said Castillo left within 20 minutes after making only a cursory attempt to sweat off the extra pounds. Corrales' wife also claimed to see Castillo leave within 20 minutes after his arrival.

"I've had to cut two, three pounds off and I never did it in 20 minutes,'' Corrales said. "'Maybe he tried but he knew he couldn't make it so he said, 'Screw it. I can't take it.'''

"If the roles were reversed and I had two hours to lose 3 1/2 pounds, I'd take an hour and 59 minutes not 20 minutes,'' Goossen added. "Let's face it. At best, the kid gave up on trying to make it. At 138 1/2 he was barely able to get on the scale. If he'd had to make 135 he's a dead man. That's the bottom line. I'm just trying to be truthful here.''

Whatever the truth of those charges, the fact is Castillo was finally allowed to weigh-in the following afternoon after being fined $120,000 (a tenth of his purse) but only had to make 147 pounds. If he was heavier he would have had to pay Corrales $75,000 for every pound or fraction of a pound over that. Not surprisingly, he made it easily 24 hours after Corrales had starved himself to come in 12 pounds lighter.

Corrales was weighed unofficially by the commission several hours before the fight and came in at 149, which somehow was supposed to prove this was still a fair fight. No one, of course, re-weighed Corrales, who was probably well into the 150s by then. So more than likely Castillo was allowed to fight upwards of 20 pounds above the lightweight limit without ever having made weight. Why? Because he understood boxing is a sport run by money not the people paid to police it.

"They baited me hook, line and sinker and I went for it,'' Corrales conceded after he'd been knocked cold in the fourth round in a fight in which he was red-faced and bleeding in less than two rounds and flattened before the end of the fourth. "They had no intention of ever making weight.

I could have said I wasn't going to fight but a lot of fans paid money to come out to Las Vegas. They can't get that money back. I had obligations to fulfill in my contract, too. I did that at a cost to myself. I'm a brave warrior. I love this game. They knew that. They knew I wouldn't let this game be battered and bruised.''

Instead, Corrales took the battering himself in exchange for a $2 million payday. But, as he and his promoter admitted later, it wasn't simply for the money that they chose to ignore the disadvantage the commission allowed them to be put at by refusing to take action themselves and order Castillo to make 135 or be replaced.

"We were put on notice by (casino owner and fight sponsor Steve) Wynn and Showtime (which was televising the fight on pay-per-view) they would sue us for breech of contract,'' said Shaw. "I tried for 145 to mitigate as much damage as I could but Arum kept yelling if it was '45 forget the fight. Chico thought a cancellation would be one of the biggest black eyes to boxing ever. So he fought.''

Yet how would Corrales have breached his contract for insisting his opponent show up at the weight they had contracted to fight at? Certainly Castillo and the people around him breached their's but there again is the fractured logic of boxing. The guy who did everything right was being threatened if he insisted his opponent do the same while the guy who cheated (there can be no other word for it) was allowed to fight with a huge (literally and figuratively) advantage and suffered no real consequence except for the 10 per cent fine he was assessed. That's a small price to pay compared to the vision of Corrales hugging the floor, his mind on hold and his eyes glassy.

"I believe there was criminal intent, especially with the (effort to fix the) scale,'' Shaw said. "The guy supposedly lost weight and came in at 138 1/2. He was probably 142 when they had their foot under the scale. There was criminal intent there. Everyone in boxing knew it wasn't a fair fight from the beginning.''

So why didn't Shaw protect his fighter from himself? For fear of being sued and fear of future consequences for both him and Corrales from TV networks and casino operators in a business where a fighter has only a few years to make the bulk of his career earnings. That being the reality of the situation, why didn't the Nevada Athletic Commisison take the decision out of the hands of a fighter helpless to stand up to the larger forces in boxing and do it's job, which last time I looked is to protect the fighters and the public not the casinos and the TV networks? This is especially pertinent in light of the fact less than three weeks earlier that same commission had presided over the death of Levander Johnson in one of its rings?

Why? Pretty much the same sad reasons that Shaw and Corrales had.

Fear of reprisals from forces larger than the administrators who run the sport. No one was willing to simply say, "Fight's off'' for fear of the wrath of casino and TV executives, as well as that of the Governor's office once it began receiving angry phone calls from powerful business figures in Las Vegas. That was just too much for either the commission or Corrales' promoter to stand up to, so instead Diego Corrales fell down. Hard.

"I'll never again do what I did,'' Shaw claimed from inside the ring after the damage had been done to his fighter. "If I have a contract for 135 we fight at the contract weight.''

 

Sure. Until the next time there's a few million on the line and an opponent carrying too much weight says "Go ahead and make me.'' Who will force that guy do what no one made Jose Luis Castillo do?

In a town and a sport as morally bankrupt as Las Vegas and boxing are, no one. Unless, of course, the guys who run Pop Warner football in that town take over the boxing commission too.

Ron Borges is an award-winning sports writer for the Boston Globe and a contributor to BoxingScene.com.