He fought a bit like Shawn Porter, relentless in pursuit, surging forward, arms pumping, an unstoppable force that never let up, not even when buzzed. The night he won the welterweight championship from Barney Ross in front of a howling mob of more than 26,000 fans at Madison Square Garden Bowl, Henry Armstrong weighed 133.5 pounds to Ross' 142.
Although it wasn't a contractually mandated catchweight bout, it sure was a catchweight on the scales. But the 8.5-pound discrepancy meant nothing for the only man to simultaneously hold world titles in three weight classes. Armstrong made 19 successful defenses of the 147-pound title and never scaled that high.
The bigger man doesn't always win. The best man wins.
Porter is not Armstrong -- nobody is -- and that's not the only difference. Porter had never weighed less than 146.5 in a welterweight title fight, but was contractually required to make 144 for his non-title fight with Adrian Broner last Saturday. And there's nothing the matter with that.
In this instance, folks who got riled up about the catchweight clause need to dial down the indignation. By the time Porter and Broner entered the ring they were both middleweights! The perception that Broner, the so-called A-side going in, gained advantage by insisting that Porter weigh three-pounds less than the welter division limit turned out to be irrelevant in Porter's unanimous-decision win.
That is not to say that insisting on a catchweight can't be an advantageous, but there are no absolutes. Each case has to be judged individually.
Just as every fighter wants to gain an edge inside the ring, the guys in the suits who control their careers do what they can to give it to them. A catchweight is just one of dozens of gambits employed to this end. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Historically, it's pretty much a wash.
"All his glories in the ring notwithstanding, [Joe Gans] was virtually broke by 1906," wrote biographer William Gildea. The legendary lightweight champion was so desperate he agreed to fight the formidable Battling Nelson at 133 pounds -- wearing his trunks, shoes and gloves!
"I suppose Mr. Noland [Nelson's manager] will want me to wear an Oregon boot next," quipped Gans in reference to a type of prison shackle used at the time.
The "Old Master" sucked it up, made weight an incredible three different times on the day of the fight, and then beat Nelson by disqualification in the 42nd-round, when the "Durable Dane" fouled out with a flagrant low blow rather than suffer a stoppage defeat. Even one of the most Draconian catchweight stipulations in history couldn't save him.
More than 80 decades later, Sugar Ray Leonard came up with a bizarre deal to fight for both the WBC super middle and light heavyweight belts in what HBO analyst Larry Merchant called "a gimmick fight." Leonard specified that light heavyweight titleholder Donny Lalonde (who had weighed 173.4 when he won the title) could not weigh more than 168-pounds, the limit for the newly created super middleweight division.
What backfired on Nelson worked flawlessly for Leonard, and he gave Lalonde a savage beating before the fight was stopped in the ninth round. The only thing that fighting at the light heavyweight limit would have done for Lalonde is prolong his agony.
In both the Gans-Nelson and Leonard-Lalonde cases, the better fighter won. Weight was inconsequential.
One of the most egregious catchweight bouts in recent memory was Floyd Mayweather's 2009 fight with Juan Manuel Marquez. Mayweather didn't even try to make the contracted weight of 144 pounds. Instead he bought his way out of it by giving Marquez $600,000 and weighing 146. Why did Floyd sacrifice more than a half-million dollars for two stinking pounds? My guess is because he could. There's little doubt he would have won just as convincingly at 144.
But don't get the impression that all catchweight bouts are dastardly plots designed to give one of the combatants an unfair advantage -- quite the opposite. The original intention was twofold: to level the playing field and make matches between boxers from different weight classes more competitive, and allow champions to stay busy between title fights.
Kid Gavilan had 28 fights between winning the welterweight title in May 1951 and losing it in October 1954, but the title was only on the line in six of them. Except for a failed shot at the middleweight title, the rest were over-the-weight bouts, fought at an agreed upon catchweight. Nobody thought any the less of him. All the champs, except the heavyweights, did the same thing. Purses were nowhere near what they are today and even the very best had to fight on a regular basis to maximize their earnings.
The practice was still going strong in the 1970s, when Roberto Duran sprinkled his record with catchweight bouts throughout his lengthy lightweight reign. One of them cost him his unbeaten record, when Esteban De Jesus won a 10-round decision in November 1972. The loss didn't hurt his career or reputation one iota. It created a lucrative rivalry between "Manos de Piedra" and his Puerto Rican rival, setting up two subsequent title fights, both won by Duran.
Motives behind catchweight bouts vary from incident to incident, but there's no denying that the current epidemic of them under the PBC promotional banner has spooked a lot of fans and media members.
There was something smarmy about junior welterweight titlist Danny Garcia's catchweight bouts with Lamont Peterson and Ron Salka, but the jaded wins diminished Garcia's status more than a little. Now he's scheduled to face six-time loser Paul Malignaggi, last seen on the receiving end of a supposedly career-ending concussion, compliments of Porter. As far as I can figure, Malignaggi got the opportunity by badmouthing Manny Pacquiao, an easy thing to do when you're not sharing the ring with him.
However, you can't blame PBC for the Miguel Cotto-Daniel Geale catchweight massacre. Roc Nation slapped that one together, and suffered the sling and arrows of outraged critics leading up to Cotto's dominating fourth-round TKO victory. Afterward, most of the same people were gushing over how good Cotto looked, which was precisely why he was fed Geale in the first place.
Even though catchweight bouts are not intrinsically bad, there's plenty of wiggle room for abuse. Still, it's a relatively minor matter compared to the day-before-the-fight weigh-in, an appalling transgression that has made a mockery of weight divisions and placed fighters at a greater risk than the traditional day-of-the-fight weigh-in.
Porter easily made the compulsory 144 the day before fighting Broner, but entered the ring a whopping 161 pounds, while Broner ballooned from 143.5 to 157. The official weigh-in has become a publicity vehicle and has about as much to do with what happens in the fight as the color of the boxers' trunks.
People uptight about catchweight bouts are focused on the wrong problem. Moaning and groaning about a couple of pounds when more often than not they have little or no bearing on what transpires in the ring is akin to fretting about the cut of your jib as the ship sinks.
It's come to a point where boxers who fight at their natural weight are at a disadvantage against opponents who rehydrate to the point where they jump one or more divisions between the weigh-in and fight time. There's nothing fair about that.
Nonetheless, natural catchweight bouts such as Armstrong-Ross can produce amazing results, often disproving the much-bandied bunkum about how a good big man always beats a good little man.
My go-to example involved two International Boxing Hall of Fame inductees, Emile Griffith and Dick Tiger. Welterweight champion Griffith took the middleweight title away from Tiger while weighing 150.5 to Tiger's 160. In his very next bout, Tiger beat light heavyweight champion Jose Torres, weighing 167 pounds to Torres' 175.
Yes, these are legendary fighters who accomplished exceptional things, but isn't that what we want to see? Armstrong, Griffith and Tiger (Ross, too) will never be forgotten, in part because they didn't worry about how big the other guy was, they were only concentrated on winning.
But for the mere mortals that toil between the ropes, fighting an adversary who is actually around the same size is crucial, as opposed to fighting someone who weighed approximately the same as them the day before.
Rules that say a fighter can gain no more than a certain percentage of his or her body weight during the interim between weigh-in and fight are merely cosmetic measures intended to camouflage the root problem. Periodic weight checks leading up to a fight are also a smokescreen.
Why confuse the issue? Make weight the day of the fight, the only time when it really counts, and be done with it.
In the meantime spare me the sob stories about B-side fighters being coerced into accepting catchweight deals. Instead, let them do what Porter did -- beat the bully out of the other guy and become the A-side. To the victor go the spoils, including the ability to dictate terms. That's the way it is in life, as well as in boxing.