So now we know: Jose Luis Castillo’s secret role models are Roberto Duran, George Foreman and James Toney.
All right, so that’s a semi-cheap shot at Castillo after the Mexican failed to make weight for the second straight time in his now-infamous series with Diego Corrales. What had started out 13 months earlier, as a rivalry which could have and should have become legendary, now has become a punch line for fat jokes.
Corrales-Castillo III, which was to have been televised Saturday night by Showtime, was canceled when Castillo twice failed to come within hailing distance of the 135-pound lightweight limit. The final scale reading, as was the first, was 140 pounds. Castillo, who had assured the media in a conference call only days earlier that there would be no foulups on his part, now has been branded as a cheat and a liar.
“I’m mortified and embarrassed,” Castillo’s promoter, Bob Arum, told a disbelieving crowd which had come for Friday’s weigh-in at the Augustus Ballroom at Caesars Palace. “It’s inexcusable. There’s no explanation for what happened.”
No explanation? Actually, there are quite a few. Castillo could have held off on that extra enchilada for dinner. Or the larger portion of refried beans at lunch. Or … oh, never mind.
The absolute physical and mental discipline required of a non-heavyweight fighter to make weight separates boxing from almost every other sport except horse racing, where jockeys who can’t put down the fork and knife either find themselves out of work or developing serious health problems such as bulimia.
Perhaps the most extreme example of the self-denying fighter is former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins, who insists he has not eaten so much as a single doughnut in 20 years.
Think other sports are held to such a rigid standard? Ask disgruntled Pittsburgh Pirates fans about Dave Parker’s huge weight gain after he signed a multimillion-dollar, guaranteed contract and then showed up at spring training looking like the Michelin Man. Hey, Parker obviously reasoned, I’ve got mine. So send over the dessert cart, and let’s all forget about me ever making the Hall of Fame.
Basketball has had its Derrick Colemans and John “Hot Plate” Williamses, football its Nate Newtons and William “The Refrigerator” Perrys. But while coaches presumably can make overly hefty players run punishment laps, there is no requirement by the NBA or NFL that mandates that those leagues’ athletes must make a specific weight on a specific day. Tubbies might be frowned upon, but, in the NBA’s case at least, they can play and be paid until their contracts expire. They’ve got union reps, too.
Boxing, once described as the “red-light district of sports” by New York columnist Jimmy Cannon, is not nearly so strictly governed. There are times – usually from midnight to 11:59 p.m. – when the heads of the most widely recognized sanctioning organizations appear to be auditioning to replace Curly, Larry, Moe and Shemp in a Stooges revival. But that’s another story.
No matter how inept boxing’s overall administration, however, it still might be surmised that someone scheduled to earn $900,000 for a lightweight championship bout should weigh in at the lightweight limit of 135 pounds on the appointed day. That Castillo did not – again – casts more aspersions on him and, by extension, his sport.
Duran, in my estimation the greatest lightweight ever, had a propensity to pack on 40 or 50 pounds between fights. When it became increasingly difficult for him to come all the way down, he began stopping the elevator at increasingly higher floors, until he topped out as a super middleweight with jiggly jowls. That the erstwhile “Hands of Stone” could succeed as long as he did, and at as high a level, as the “Belly of Jelly” speaks to just how remarkably gifted he was. You have to wonder, though, how much more sensational the great Duran might have been had he been more capable of ignoring the growling noises that forever reverberated in his stomach.
The once-fearsome Foreman, after a 10-year retirement from the ring, reinvented himself as the jovial fat guy who prepared for bouts by going on the “seafood” diet, which meant — wink, wink — that he ate all the food he saw. Big George, however, had been a heavyweight before and he was a heavyweight upon his return, so the sight of him shoveling cheeseburgers down his gullet didn’t matter so long as he kept knocking opponents out.
The 5-9 Toney, never the most sculpted of middleweights, weighed as little as 155¾ pounds for a 1989 bout. A few million calories later, he was a slovenly and career-high 237 for his most recent ring appearance, a challenge of WBC heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman. “Lights Out’s” ample love handles hung over the waistband of his trunks like an awning, but he is now campaigning as a heavyweight, so some allowances reluctantly must be made to his apparently insatiable appetite.
Which brings us back to Castillo and the critical issue of intent. Did he knowingly retain added poundage rather than deplete his body, the better to have a competitive advantage should Corrales — who did make weight – again elect to fight him in a non-title contest? Or did the 5-8 Castillo, at 32, simply miscalculate when that body was capable of doing as it matured? He would not be the first fighter who found that he it was not only advisable, but necessary, to compete at a higher weight class rather than to torture himself to get down to a scale reading he no longer was capable of achieving sensibly.
Evidence points toward skullduggery by Castillo and his handlers. Remember, his personal physician stuck his foot under the scale for the weigh-in for the second bout, an irrefutable attempt at skirting the rules.
Corrales decided to proceed with that fight as a non-title affair, but after he was starched by a fourth-round left hook, he complained bitterly, and with justification, that Castillo had had a competitive advantage. He also vowed that he would pull the plug on the rubber match should the circumstances ever repeat themselves.
The matter of Castillo’s weight became so paramount, in fact, that clauses were written into the contract that provided for regular monitoring and “severe penalties” should he not come down in the prescribed matter.
It is a blot on the Mexico City-based WBC, which apparently employs the least effective monitors since Hans Blix and the United Nations sought to oversee North Korea’s nuclear program, that it so blatantly misled the public about the lack of progress made by Castillo. But, hey, the WBC always has appeared to subvert its rules to favor its home-nation fighters. (See Pernell Whitaker-Jose Luis Ramirez I and Whitaker-Julio Cesar Chavez.) Perhaps Jose Sulaiman’s inspectors were hoping that Castillo’s prayers offered up to the weight-loss genie, or maybe Jenny Craig, would result in a last-minute miracle.
What we do know is that Castillo, during a teleconference with the media the week before the fight, offered a whopper of a prevarication when directly asked if he was on weight.
“Both fights have been controversial,” Castillo said, a reference to his first battle royale with Corrales, who twice spit out his mouthpiece to catch his breath – one of which gained him a critical 28 seconds of recovery time in the 10th round, which Corrales won on a 10th-round TKO after having been down twice himself. “Things have happened. But no more things like that are going to happen in my fights. I’m going to make the weight. That other stuff is over with.”
If you argue that Castillo purposefully came in heavy for his second fight with Corrales, the better to gain a competitive edge, it also might be said that Corrales’ mouthpiece ejections similarly tainted their first bout. With this imbroglio, however, Castillo has forever relinquished the moral high ground to his opponent, who now must be viewed as the more aggrieved party.
So what’s next? Castillo, who clearly no longer can starve himself down to lightweight, remains a terrific fighter who might be best served by stepping up to junior welterweight and, say, a scrap with England’s Ricky Hatton. You have to wonder, though, if Castillo’s reputation has been damaged enough so that some restoration of that reputation will be required by the public before he ever is granted another opportunity to set things right.
But if he really does have a thing for Duran, Castillo surely knows that there was lots of boxing life for the Panamanian icon after No Mas. In sports’ red-light district, penance is liberally dispensed to those who pack a hard enough wallop.