I devised all-action tactics for one of boxing’s most dramatic wars of all time after watching Floyd Mayweather fight
Jose Luis Castillo had perhaps given Floyd Mayweather his two toughest fights when in May 2005 he was matched with Diego Corrales.
There remain those who believe his educated pressure should have earned him victory in the first of their two fights in 2002. His fellow Mexican, the great Julio Cesar Chavez, thought so highly of him that he regularly hired him as his leading sparring partner; for years he was therefore a significant figure in the training camps of one of the finest fighters of all time.
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The late Corrales, of America, had just recorded two of his greatest victories. In 2004 he avenged his previous defeat by Joel Casamayor of Cuba to win the WBO super-featherweight title, and he then moved up to stop Brazil’s Acelino Freitas to win the same sanctioning body’s title at lightweight.
A meeting between him and the then 31-year-old Castillo, the WBC champion, at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay naturally had considerable appeal. What couldn’t have been predicted was that they combined to produce one of the most revered fights of all time.
“You’ve got one of the great, great inside, pressure fighters,” Joe Goossen, the Hall of Fame trainer of Corrales, said of Castillo to marvelbet369.com. “He had some crazy fricking number of knockouts [Castillo retired in 2014 with 57 knockouts from his 66 victories] – he was so hard hitting. His mentor was Julio Cesar Chavez. He basically brought up Jose Luis, and was ringside for the fight.
“‘How should Diego Corrales fight Castillo?’ Most would say, ‘You've got the height and the reach on Castillo – why don’t you box this guy?’ In my mind I’m going, ‘Did you just see the Mayweather fight with Castillo? Was Mayweather able to outbox Castillo? He struggled; he got trapped on the ropes. A lot of people gave Castillo the edge’.
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“When people were telling me, ‘He should box; use his height; use his reach’, I’m going, ‘Okay, did you not just see the guy with the greatest legs in the business get pinned by this guy and couldn’t get away from him?’ How is a guy who never took a step backwards – Corrales – all of a sudden gonna be this fleet of foot, fancy Dan boxing and jabbing and moving? You’ve got the wrong guy.
"I didn’t disagree with anybody. I just didn’t tell anybody what we were working on – and it wasn’t that.
“You make a guy regret coming at you. But you have to have inside skills to beat an inside fighter. Castillo was a pre-eminent inside fighter. That’s where he was most comfortable – nose to nose with you. Great body puncher; great left uppercut; short chopping right. Just like Chavez. He did all the things Chavez did. We decided to go right at him and submarine him.”
Corrales’ father, Ray Woods, had instructed him not to take the fight through a fear that Castillo was too big for him. Woods had been sacked as Corrales’ trainer four years earlier after he stopped the fight with Mayweather as a consequence of Mayweather knocking him down five times.
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“I doubt, very seriously, [Castillo] got five, ten guys to come into his camp and stay in the pit with him,” Goossen continued. “I think he thought, because the general consensus was what should be done is to box him – use your height and reach – ‘Oh, you mean this guy’s not going to do that, so all the sparring was the wrong sparring? We didn’t get five, ten guys to come at us and submarine us and then throw triple, quadruple left hands and finish off with a couple more punches in combinations’. That’s what we did.
“By the time the fourth, fifth round rolled about, we were just kinda figuring out what the hell was happening, because I think we caught him off-guard, by submarining him, and going right at him. I don’t think they were ready for it. Luckily, because we needed to soften him up – I told Diego we needed to soften him up early because this guy is really good down the stretch.”
For nine gruelling, intense rounds, Corrales and Castillo were close to the equal of each other, and often trading with intent.
Off the back of a strong ninth Corrales – then 27 – was perhaps over-confident, and was punished by twice being knocked down. The first time, after a concussive left hook, his gumshield was knocked out. After another left hand he spat his gumshield out – for which he was deducted a point – and looked to his wife Michelle Corrales-Lewis to indicate to her that he was okay.
Goossen, wisely, stalled when cleaning his fighter’s gumshield and returning it. As he did so he also told him, 'You gotta f***ing get inside on him now,” – a moment and quotation that has become immortal.
“If we had boxed and moved and not done early damage to him, maybe we don’t get that knockout in the tenth,” Goossen recalled. Corrales, remarkably – while at risk of the stoppage – traded with Castillo and hurt him with a left hand.
As they continued to trade another left hand left Castillo struggling to defend himself, and further unanswered punches rightfully led to the intervention of Tony Weeks, the referee.
“Castillo, after those two knockdowns, I’m sure when he saw Diego get up the second time he went, ‘What the hell?’,” said Goossen. “That’s discouraging for a fighter, when you use all of your energy; you’ve already been through a tough, ten-round fight – a tug of war with two knockout punchers that were hitting themselves incessantly, and nobody’s really budging.
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“We were able to, luckily, absorb the knockdowns, and were able – because of his conditioning and he was in tremendous shape; I knew what was coming for this fight – get up and summon, through his willpower, some incredible strength he found deep inside of him, and was firing back really hard.
“When he decided to start firing back he was whipping him – once he started tagging Castillo he had used up all of his bag of tricks, and Diego was able to take over at the end of that round and stop him in one of the great comebacks of all time.”
For two months afterwards Corrales remained in such discomfort that he required his wife’s help because he struggled to bend over to tie his laces. Post-fight his urine was said to have been thick and red with blood.
Five months later, in their rematch at Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center, Castillo caught Corrales with a left hook to secure revenge in the fourth round. A trilogy fight between them in 2006 was cancelled when Castillo failed to make weight.
Two years to the day of their celebrated first fight together, Corrales was driving his motorbike when he hit the back of a car ahead of him. His body was thrown 100 feet, and tragically he died at the scene.
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