[Above, promotional decor for the first Corrales-Castillo fight outside the restaurant Aureole at Mandalay Bay.]
CORRALES-CASTILLO
8 May 2005
They're already calling it a classic, one for the ages, the fight of the year -- a year which isn't even half over and which has also seen the recent epic combat between Morales and Pacquiao.
If you're a member of the Fancy you know I'm talking about the awesome battle between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas last night. If you're not, take a look at a rebroadcast or tape of the fight sometime and try to believe your eyes. I was there, and I still don't believe mine.
There were some goofy undercard fights which did not prepare one for what was to come -- but looking at the faces of Corrales and Castillo on the big video screens as they made their ways to the ring one could see that the mood of the night was about to shift. These guys had the air of men facing something terrible but inevitable.
Castillo is a fighter who doesn't move exceptionally well on his feet or punch exceptionally hard, but he's a skillful enough boxer. He likes to go forward and pound away at an opponent and grind him down. Corrales is taller and rangier, with more speed and a harder punch but not known for his sturdiness. Like many rangy fighters he can't always absorb punishment well and has been knocked down, though not out, a lot. Both men have awesome wills, though, and never give up, so the fight did not figure to go the distance.
My sense of it was this -- either Corrales would knock Castillo out sometime in the first four rounds, or Castillo, if he survived the early going, would knock Corrales out sometime in the last four rounds. Beyond that, prediction would be foolish.
In the end it went much (though not quite) as I had foreseen, but on a level no one could have imagined.
Corrales did indeed dominate the early rounds, but just barely. He hit Castillo repeatedly with combinations that would have felled a lesser man -- and almost felled Castillo. But Castillo gave almost as good as he got and the rounds were very close.
When the fourth ended, I thought -- now Castillo's time has come . . . now he will win.
But the balance never tipped too far in either direction and as the battle wore on I was gripped by a strong feeling of sadness at the thought that someone was going to lose this fight. It had become a battle of wills, a contest on a moral and spiritual plane. By the 8th round I had a feeling that Corrales had the edge. He seemed to be landing the harder blows and he seemed, surprisingly, fresher. But that just made Castillo's refusal to surrender all the more admirable. Still, moral determination can take you only so far -- in the end the body has its limits. But anyone who watched this fight now knows that those limits are sometimes wider than the mind can easily conceive.
In the 8th Castillo made a startling comeback, fighting it seemed on willpower alone. He opened a cut under one of Corrales's eyes and nearly closed both of them. By this point both men seemed to have abandoned defense altogether, willing to take any amount of punishment to find the opening that would end things decisively.
And then, in the 10th, it happened -- exactly as I had predicted. Castillo landed a combination that put Corrales down. He got up to continue but he looked dazed and unsteady on his feet. The crowd, which heavily favored Castillo -- Las Vegas boxing fans are overwhelmingly pro-Mexican, and Corrales was a mere American -- had been roaring incoherently throughout the fight. The roar turned mournful in the middle rounds, with an undertone of shock and anger. Now it soared into the realms of delirium.
A guy behind me screamed, "It's over!" -- and I agreed with him. Corrales's destruction was now just a matter of time, and not much time at that. Castillo struck with more combinations and Corrales went down again. Somehow he got up on all fours and then up on his feet to beat the count, but he looked like he was somewhere else, far from Las Vegas and this ugly beating he was getting.
Both times he went down Corrales lost his mouthpiece -- by crafty design or simply from punch drunkenness. Fighters who are ready to give up often spit out their mouthpieces in unconscious anticipation of surrender. In any case, retrieving the mouthpiece and getting it put back in by his cornermen gave Corrales a few extra seconds to get his head together and his legs coordinated.
Referee Tony Weeks, a seasoned veteran, seemed to take his time transferring the mouthpiece to Corrales's seconds -- I had a feeling he was giving them a chance to stop the fight, because Corrales looked on the verge of absorbing some vicious and possibly debilitating further punishment. But Joe Goosen, Corrales's trainer, obviously had no intention of throwing in the towel. Indeed, after the second knockdown he gave his fighter a stern and admonitory look -- as though trying to convey to him the gravity of the situation. Goosen appeared serious but oddly calm -- which may have had some influence on what happened next.
The fight resumed. Corrales didn't yet seem to be all there, but his dislocation from reality took an astonishing form. He stood up straight, with no attempt at defense, and attacked Castillo fearlessly. There was no time to tie up and regroup -- he'd lost three points in the 10th, two from the knockdowns and one from Weeks, who had penalized him, quite correctly, for spitting out his mouthpiece the second time.
At times in the middle rounds I'd had a sense watching Castillo of seeing a ghost in action. Physically beaten, he was operating by pure will, transcending the physical. Now Corrales seemed to have entered the same disembodied territory. His body was beaten -- something else was fighting in the ring in its place.
[AP Photo]
He hit Castillo with a punch that stunned him, sent him back into the ropes. He hit him again four times as he leaned against the ropes, his hands down, his eyes rolling upwards, out on his feet. Weeks called an end to the fight to prevent certain permanent damage to Castillo and possibly his death.
Corrales had come back from the dead and was now champion. Castillo, who'd had the fight won in merely mortal terms, had lost. I discovered, when my mind settled a bit, that my mouth was wide open and that I was holding my head in my hands -- a perfect cartoon-figure expression of shock.
The cry from the crowd was indescribable -- filled with sorrow and astonishment and an almost inhuman excitement. The place seemed suddenly crowded to the rafters, bursting its seams -- a case of emotional standing-room only.
At the end of the night, Steve Albert and Jim Gray, the Showtime announcers, made their way past me out of the arena. Someone shouted something to Gray, who turned back and said, "You'll never see a better fight than that."
I'm sure I never will. Joe Goosen, when asked about the possibility of a rematch, on everyone's mind after such a contest, said, "These two should never fight each other again -- it's too much." They will, of course, boxing economics being what they are -- but it's hard to imagine any other outcome than one of them killing the other in the bout.
I went over to RM Seafood, an ultra-moderne restaurant at the Mandalay Bay, for some soothing crabcakes and beer. I couldn't think about the fight -- there didn't seem much to think about. All its meaning had been fully explicated and exhausted in the ring. What remained for me was a kind of wonder, an expanded sense of the horizons of the human will.