19.05.05 – By Matthew Hurley: Diego Corrales (photo: Tom Casino/Showtime) sat back in his chair, his body still aching from the assault it had suffered a week before and shook his head. “This is the first time I’ve watched it with no pain meds,” he said quietly as the video of his epic bout with Jose Luis Castillo began playing on the big screen television. “With pain meds, you don’t really remember it all.” After a bout like the one he was involved in how could he possibly remember anything at all – medication running through his system or not. It was that brutal a fight. But Corrales wants to remember it and he wants to relive it because he’s a fighter who prides himself on his warrior’s mentality. It’s what makes him a special fighter and it’s what led him, almost inexplicably, to victory against a fighter who was his equal in every way.
Corrales and Castillo reminded jaded boxing fans why this sport can be so exhaustingly compelling. Despite battering each other with fist and will for 10 unbelievable rounds the clash between these two proud warriors flew low under the radar screen. It’s a fight many people now wish they saw after reading all the hosannas from sports writers around the world. It was that good. In fact it was so good it was great and ten years from now people who never set foot in Las Vegas will swear they were there on May 7, 2005..
As Corrales watches the bout unfold he shakes his head and smiles. “I know he made a fan out me,” he says of his gallant opponent. “I think I made a fan out of him. You could feel the shifts in momentum. After six rounds, it was still a dogfight.”
The fight finally seemed to break Corrales’ way in the seventh round when Diego landed some wicked shots that seemed to have Castillo waving in the wind. “I thought to myself, I finally got him,” he recalled. But Castillo was having none of it. The proud champion would not go easily. In fact it was at this moment that he dragged his opponent into hell and wouldn’t let go until one of them was knocked senseless. “There’s a reason he’s been wearing everyone out,” Corrales said, again shaking his head. “He’s a strong man. That’s a warrior.”
The tenth round, and what would turn out to be the bout’s final stanza, exploded into such a fury that it will unquestionably go down as one of the great fistic time frames in boxing history. When the bell rings there seems to be nothing left but exhaustion in both combatants and then it happens. “Never saw that left hand,” Corrales says. He watches himself spill to the canvas. “Was I clear headed? No way.”
He would fall a second time and somehow find the wherewithal in his clouded mind to pull out his mouthpiece. Or was it just instinct? “I was trying to get a deep breath,” he says about what has become a bit of a controversy. “I wanted to let some air in. I didn’t intend to drop it. It’s hard to hold something with a boxing glove.” That move, intentional or not (and it doesn’t really matter because Diego is the fighter and he did what he had to do) bought Corrales precious seconds to recover. He lost a point, properly deducted by referee Tony Weeks and then proceeded to cement his legacy. Somehow he caught a perhaps unaware Castillo of guard. “Two right hands,” he says smiling. “Then two lefts. Then it was over.”
Bang, just like that. A classic battle ended in unbelievable fashion – and that is the prerequisite for tagging a boxing match a “classic”. Something dramatic has to occur. Something anticipated and yet somehow unexpected has to happen. Whether it’s Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns trading blows that would knock down buildings the moment they could get at each other or Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera testing each others wills round after round or Arturo Gatti somehow surviving that ninth round against Micky Ward in their first bout, round ten of Castillo – Corrales, and the nine that preceded it, will go down in history as one for the ages.
“Should we do it again?” Diego asks, rewinding the tape to watch his greatest achievement over again. “Yeah. Why not?”
Then he hesitates, smiles and rubs his bruised face. “Not right away though. We both need a rest.”