He stood five feet, ten inches tall, which was enormous for a featherweight. Compare him to, say, Sandy Saddler, who was considered freakish at five feet eight, and you understand the size of Diego Corrales. Even as a lightweight, he was taller than most. This, possibly, was why opponents came at him so hard. He once said to me, “I can box a lot of different ways, but I always end up in a brawl.” He was a physical anomaly. At full height in the center of the ring, he looked like a King Cobra rising to strike.
Yet he was hardly snakelike. The fact is that Corrales, who will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame next June, was more like a junkyard dog, willing to fight with his ears and tail torn off. Alas, it wasn’t until the later days of his career that we truly appreciated Corrales’ fighting spirit. He’d always been a fighter we wanted to see, but near the end, he was a fighter we had to see.
He was always smiling. Smiling at how he had lived his boyhood dream to become a professional fighter; smiling at how he became a titleholder at 23; and absolutely beaming after any of the 40 wins on his record. He reacted to each of his victories like a kid who had been surprised by an unexpected birthday gift.
That’s why it was always hard to reconcile this likable, oversized boy with the fact that he had a history of violence against women and once served 14 months in a state prison for felony spouse abuse. What went on in his mind? We’ll never know.
He was 29 when it all ended. He’d lost three fights in a row, which is hard to come back from. He was on his third marriage, and it, too, was falling apart. He had problems with the IRS and was running out of money. Friends said he was optimistic about his career and his troubled marriage, but Corrales seemed like a man with an uncertain future. Just weeks after his most recent loss, he was riding his Suzuki motorcycle northbound on Fort Apache Road in the Las Vegas Valley. He was drunk. Along with hitting women, he had a history of drunk driving arrests. On this night he rammed into the back of a car. The impact left the Suzuki looking like a crushed Coke can, and sent Corrales hurtling 100 feet. When Corrales landed, he was struck by another car. He died hard.
He had become a legend of sorts by then, all because of one fight – and it is largely because of that one fight that he has been selected for enshrinement in Canastota – a stunning, 10th round come-from-behind knockout of Jose Luis Castillo in 2005. It was contested in a half-empty Mandalay Bay Center for alphabet belts that no one remembers, but a generation of boxing fans considered it the best fight in history. Who could argue? Corrales and Castillo had battered each other. Their faces and torsos were beaten into colors we’d never seen on human flesh. The bruises weren’t black and blue; they were grey, or muddy brown. It was as if the contusions were in pain, screaming for mercy.
Castillo was about to win, having sent Corrales to the canvas twice in the 10th, but somehow Corrales landed a right on Castillo’s cast-iron jaw. Jose Luis sagged into the ropes unable to defend himself. Corrales threw a few more punches until referee Tony Weeks stepped in. It was instantly an all-time classic.
“We were going to box,” Corrales said later, “but I kind of shredded that game plan once the fight started. I was just in the mood to fight.”
That gritty side had existed in Corrales all along. There was a bout with Joel Casamayor where Corrales was bleeding so badly from a cut in his mouth that the ringside doctor called for the fight to be stopped. Corrales argued, wanting to continue even as gore spurted from his lips.
The same was true of his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. Corrales had been dropped five times and was so far behind on points that his step-father/trainer stopped the fight. Again, Corrales was outraged. There were still two rounds left. When a man can punch like Corrales, he always believes his fortunes can change.
His time at the top was brief. He met Castillo for a rematch five months later and was stopped in four. Two more losses followed. The first war with Castillo made Corrales the toast of boxing, but it also ruined him. He was never the same.
It is possible that Corrales could’ve achieved more in boxing. He always had that urge to show the world what he could do. After his second bout with Casamayor, in which he had boxed with finesse and won by split decision, Corrales turned to the cameras and smiled. He said, “See? I told you I could fight like that.” As much as he loved a good rumble, he wanted us to know he was more than a brawler.
Corrales wasn’t a great fighter, but he was a good one. He was gutsy and he could punch. There was his bout with Acelino Freitas, a strange one that saw Freitas simply stop fighting in the middle of a round and walk to his corner. It was a mystery as to why Freitas surrendered, though his manager later told me the reason. “He said Corrales hit him so hard that he was seeing triple; there were three Corraleses in front of him and he didn’t know what to do.” Such was Corrales’ power.
There were stories of Corrales’ gentler side. He was a gourmet cook who loved TV soap operas and designer clothing. When reporters made fun of him early in his career for having too many piercings, he felt embarrassed and removed them all. He seemed eager to please. He could charm you. I recall his mild voice, excitable but friendly, like a teen. Our few conversations had been nice. He was personable, happy to talk about his career and upcoming fights. But as LA writer Bill Dwyer said of Corrales many years ago, he was “a con artist with a twinkle in his eye.”
Corrales was pleasant to me, but was I just another person taken in by the Corrales con?
“Face to face, he was a wonderful kid,” said publicist Bill Caplan at the time of Corrales’ death.
But when no one was looking, Corrales became something less than wonderful.
Corrales put his second wife in the hospital with a broken collarbone, bruised ribs, and other injuries. She was pregnant at the time. On another occasion she was seen with Corrales’ handprints on her neck. Choke marks. The powerful hands that had made him a champion were used to strangle a woman who was nearly a foot shorter than him, and weighed less than 100 pounds. You don’t put your hands on a woman’s throat unless you mean to kill her. How close did he come to snuffing her out? He’d beaten up his first wife, too, so you can’t say it was just bad chemistry between Corrales and wife number two. The man was a serial abuser.
Corrales hadn’t been a shoe-in for the IBHOF. It took 16 years for him to be inducted. The IBHOF didn’t return calls for this story, but one can imagine the response would be typical of his defenders, something about his personal life not having an effect on his being selected. But one wonders if 16 years were needed because it took that much time for people to forget the worst things about Corrales, and to just remember the fights.
Corrales has always had supporters. Contemporaries who knew him from California gyms will smile and say, “My man, Chico!” Loved ones will cry at his memory. Journalists will try to put a romantic spin on him, saying that he lived recklessly and died recklessly, that he was a thrill seeker. They’ve always done that for Corrales, idealizing him as a “Raging Bull” type of character, a man of extreme emotions, a man with a dark side. They will say his misdeeds are unfortunate because they taint his legacy. I think they’re unfortunate because a couple of women are probably still having nightmares about him.
There’s a history of fighters being given a pass for abusing women. There seems to be an unspoken deal, in that the fighter entertains us, so we forgive his wrongdoings. In that way, boxing fans aren’t much different than the folks in Ozone Park who revered John Gotti, a Mob killer, because on Independence Day he supplied them with fireworks and sausages.
Corrales will be honored this spring. Hardcore fans who make the yearly trek to upstate New York for the inductions will cheer his name. Why not? His fight with Castillo made us all love boxing again, and that may be reason enough to place him among the great ones. And he’s certainly not the only wife beater in the hall. He’s just the latest.
Inducting Corrales gives people a chance to recall his best moments in the ring, but it will also give us a chance to think about the way we continue to glorify these men who hurt women. To say Corrales served his time is far too simplistic, as is the tendency to glamorize him as a man tortured by demons. The tough guy who thrives in a violent profession but beats his wife is an archetype that has been around too long, and one we no longer need.
- Don Stradley
