Controversy in boxing is sort of like the congealed glop that passes for melted cheese when you go to a movie and order those overpriced concession-stand nachos. Said glop is not good for your health (neither are the nachos) and you’re virtually certain to spill some on your shirt, but, hey, you already know that for health’s sake you should order the bottled spring water to wash down the smuggled apple you could have hidden in your jacket. But guilty pleasures wouldn’t be pleasurable without the guilt, would they? So a lot of us turn off our consciences and go for the glop, the XXXL-sized soda and enough candy to induce diabetic shock.
Good nutrition is usually as absent at your local Cineplex as angst-free fights are at an arena near you.
Most boxing fans do not necessarily clamor for controversy, but neither do they shy away from it. By now we all possess what might be described as a preconditioned reflex. You say you want some glop with that dubious decision? Here’s a heaping helping of it. You say you’re trying to lower your glop intake, that you’d prefer the results of all the fights you watch to be taint-free and totally above-board? Hey, buddy, what kind of parallel universe do you come from, anyway?
The sound and fury you are now experiencing are the byproducts of bouts past and future. Charges. Counter-charges. Conspiracy theories.
There is no stop to the glop.
“Many of the great fights in history have been shrouded in controversy,” Diego Corrales reasoned in assessing the Feb. 4 rubber match in his exciting but well-shrouded series with Jose Luis Castillo, which will be televised by Showtime from El Paso, Texas, where almost anything goes, or at least it does in the south-of-the-border town of Juarez, Mexico. “I mean, who gets the victory is all that really matter, not how you get it. Who cares about a little controversy, anyway?”
Uberpromoter Don King, who is to controversy what Niagara Falls is to leaky faucets, can relate to Corrales’ air of laissez faire. Having traveled to Germany, where what you see is frequently not what you get from judges and referees, King had no problem accepting the disputed majority decision loss for his guy, now-dethroned WBA heavyweight champion John Ruiz (41-6-1, 28 KOs), to massive lummox Nicolay Valuev (43-0, 31 KOs), as being as fair as Naomi Watts’ complexion.
“I’m not into second-guessing the judges,” King said even as it was revealed it had gained a 50 percent interest in Valuev’s next four fights in possible exchange for his 100 percent promotional rights to the increasingly unsaleable Ruiz, whose lack of allure to American television outlets already was well-established. “Nicolay Valuev is ready to unify. He’s thrown down the gauntlet.”
Norman Stone, Ruiz’s volatile manager-trainer who had gone to the Deutschland because it offered the best place for the “Quietman” to make a decent payday, was yelping like a scalded dog.
“Only in boxing can you be robbed without a gun,” Stone complained to the Boston Globe. “Back in America, you hear this sort of stuff – if you don’t knock out a guy in Germany, you get robbed.”
Stone’s tirade might be more justifiable were these United States the pillar of pugilistic integrity that they sometimes are held up to be. But too often state commission positions are doled out to unqualified hacks who make hefty contributions to the political party in power, and efforts to reform the sport wither and die on the vine because those with the clout to enact real change either don’t care or have more pressing matters with which to concern themselves.
Even when boxing gets it right, it almost seems wrong.
Take the burgeoning archrivalry between Corrales (40-3, 33 KOs) and Castillo (53-7-1, 47 KOs), which, depending upon one’s point of view, has been enhanced or corrupted by developments which many might consider to be orchestrated gamesmanship.
In their classic first meeting, on May 7 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Corrales stopped Castillo in the 10th round of their scheduled 12-rounder, rallying from two knockdowns in that round to score a victory that only moments before had seemed hopelessly beyond reach.
So what’s the problem? Well, Corrales, who had suffered severe lacerations to his lips and gums in previous fights because of ill-fitting mouthpieces, was using a sofer, more pliable mouthpiece which he said had corrected the situation and would not be an issue in the fight.
That mouthpiece became dislodged in the seventh round, giving a seemingly exhausted Corrales 15 seconds of recuperation time, and it popped out again in the decisive 10th round, after he’d been knocked down twice. Referee Tony Weeks deducted a penalty point from Corrales, but it was a small price to pay for the 28 seconds of rest he got while trainer Joe Goossen leisurely rinsed off the mouthpiece.
“Forget the Long Count,” huffed Castillo’s promoter, Bob Arum. “Twenty-eight seconds. Nearly a half-minute. If Jose Luis had spit out his mouthpiece (during Corrales’ final assault), maybe he would have gotten 28 seconds (to recuperate).”
Gary Shaw, who promotes Corrales, pooh-poohed Arum’s complaints.
“There’s nothing worse than taking away from a night like this, from a champion like this,” Show said. “This is the fight of the year, fight of next year, fight of the decade. I don’t believe you’ll ever see anything like this again. This fight cannot be sullied by controversy.”
We did, of course, see Corrales and Castillo go at it again, on Oct. 8 at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. Only this time, that old devil controversy had switched corners.
As Corrales drove himself to get down to the 135-pound lightweight championship limit, Castillo weighed in at a well-nourished 138½ pounds – and that was after a member of Castillo’s camp tried to cheat by sticking his foot under the scale.
Corrales’ WBC and WBO titles were supposed to be on the line, but he and Shaw allowed the fight to go on as scheduled, as a non-title affair, when Castillo continued to not make weight.
Result: a fourth-round knockout victory for Castillo, who decked Corrales with a crushing left hook from which he could not rise in time.
“I do not believe it was ever his intention to make weight,” Corrales says now. “I do feel that way. I feel it was premeditated.
“There is an advantage when you don’t have to deplete your body the same way that the other guy has to deplete his. You don’t wear down as quickly as you would. It does make a difference.”
As might be expected, the principals are now viewing each other with suspicion, distrust and smarmy remarks.
Shaw warned Castillo to “stay away from the buffet” while Arum, no longer incensed now that his fighter appears to hold the upper hand, was cracking ethnic jokes.
“We have taken all precautions to make sure that Jose Luis makes the weight,” said Arum, who is Jewish. “I’ve hired, on standby, a rabbi who performs circumcisions. If he comes in over the weight, the rabbi will make the appropriate snips.”
As mouthpieces and scales loom in the background of Castillo-Corrales III, King’s gift for manipulation hovers above the outcome of Valuev-Ruiz.
King, of course, is the guy who once stepped over the prone body of his fighter, Michael Dokes, to congratulate the victorious winner, Gerrie Coetzee, to whom he had wrangled contractual options as a hedge against just such an eventuality. It also is part of boxing lore that King arrived with then-heavyweight champion Joe Frazier and left with the new champ, George Foreman.
Fighters can win or lose, but King always seems to come out ahead. That doesn’t necessarily make him right or wrong, good or evil, but maybe just a smart businessman who, without question, is boxing’s foremost dispenser of glop.
We surely must like the stuff, or at least have become accustomed to it, because we keep coming back for more. Maybe that is not so much an indictment of boxing as it is of ourselves and our boundless capacity for culpability.
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