We all have our sources of exhilaration as well as our secret fears. When I was in the Marines, during a snowy winter in Aircrew Flight Equipmentman (parachute rigger) School at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst, N.J., I jumped out of an airplane. Greatest rush I ever had. Rubbing shoulders with danger can be like that sometimes. Nothing makes some individuals feel more alive than to voluntarily place themselves in peril, to peer into the potential face of death and not blink.
But no one is utterly fearless. Somewhere deep in each of our psyches is a dark compartment which stores that which we most dread. It is the other side of the same coin, the reverse being the scratching of our itch for thrills. We go through life straddling the thin line that separates shadow from substance, our peaks from our valleys.
Monday night’s death of two-division former world champion Diego “Chico” Corrales, in a high-speed motorcycle crash in Las Vegas, sent chills down my spine because it reminded me not only of our fragility as human beings, but of one of those dark compartments within myself.
I don’t know what can possess a reasonably sane man to jump out of airplanes, to take punches in and out of the ring (yeah, in my youth I had more than my share of street fights), to taste his own blood and not flinch, but yet be scared witless by motorcycles.
My worst fear is not a horrible death by fire, but surviving the very real pain and scars resulting from the flames of hell on earth. Riding shotgun to that No. 1 apprehension is the imagined terror of my being on a high-powered motorcycle, hurtling down a dark highway in exactly the same manner in which Corrales, 29, met his grisly end.
Only once have I been on a motorcycle, but once was enough. I was a freshman at LSU, without a car, and needed to make a run into downtown Baton Rouge to retrieve something that was ready for pickup. I asked around, but none of the guys in my dorm was available to drive me – no one, that is, except Genee, with whom I had attended high school. He had a motorcycle and also needed to go into town, so, sure, he said, he’d take me.
It was dark, late autumn, and we had to go part of the way on a major highway. I sat behind Genee, holding onto him as I might cling to a life preserver in a storm-tossed ocean, as cars whizzed past at what seemed like impossibly fast speeds. They all appeared to be four-wheeled instruments of my imminent death, as capable of squashing the life out of me as I am of stepping on an ant.
Our errands completed, I stepped off Genee’s motorcycle, thankful to God that I had survived and determined to never again put myself in that situation. To date, I haven’t had to.
But it almost was like rolling with Genee again when my older daughter, Melanie, who lives in South Philadelphia and doesn’t own a car, recently purchased a Vespa. It’s not a real motorcycle, she told me, but more of a scooter. It’s economical, a big plus in these days of $3-plus gasoline. And, besides, she said, it’d be for short trips only, where maneuverability in city gridlock would also come in handy.
Solid arguments all. But all it takes is one drunk driver running a red light, or a distracted one reaching for a ringing cell phone, to turn a simple traffic accident into a tragedy. And it wouldn’t make any difference who was right and who was wrong. Dead is dead. It is the ultimate one-way trip from which there is no return.
Melanie has her fears, too. We all do. But hers are different from mine, apparently. That is the way of the world. Most of us are to some degree risk-takers and thrill-seekers, but in a cautionary way. We know how to set reasonable limits and to confine ourselves accordingly.
I attained such a natural high from parachuting that I briefly considered taking up skydiving as a hobby upon the completion of my military service. But my wise-beyond-her-years wife, being a practical sort, pointed out that we were young and of limited means, that skydiving could be expensive, and that my insurance premiums, if you’ll pardon the expression, would be sky-high.
Later on, when I had attained some measure of professional success and financial flexibility, whatever ideas I might have entertained of skydiving again were curtailed by that good woman who always thinks of my best interests. A friend of hers, another nurse, had perished in a skydiving mishap, and I was informed in no uncertain terms that the finest life partner any man has ever had wished to continue as my wife and not learn what it feels like to be my widow.
All these memories came swirling back, like colors in a kaleidoscope, with the news that Corrales finally had pushed the envelope too far.
Those familiar with Corrales’ tip-toeing along the edge probably should have seen it coming. This was not a play-it-safe type, either professionally or personally. The Diego Corrales of our memories always went for the big finish, the emphatic knockout, the exclamation point. He provided his many fans with bursts of excitement in the ring, but it wasn’t easy for him to unwind after the house lights had gone down. He continually had to hurl himself at life as recklessly as he hurled himself at opponents.
You might think that the father of four children, and stepfather to another, might have become more prudent with those increased responsibilities, but then premier athletes exist on a plane beyond the scope of most people’s experience. It is when their stars begin to dip and fade that some ratchet up the danger, perhaps to fill a void that widens with the realization that they are no longer who they used to be, and can never be again.
The high point of Corrales’ 11-year pro career was his storybook 10th-round TKO of Jose Luis Castillo on May 7, 2005, as remarkable a testament to courage and resiliency as these eyes have ever witnessed in a boxing match. Knocked down twice in the 10th round and seemingly on the verge of being stopped himself, Corrales somehow summoned another adrenaline jolt, pounding the surprised Castillo into submission along the ropes before referee Tony Weeks leaped in to wave off a classic fight marked by dramatic shifts in momentum.
“In my 35 years in boxing, that was the greatest fight I’ve ever seen,” said Corrales’ then-trainer, Joe Goossen. “I’ve never seen anybody come back like that, from those knockdowns. We were very worried in the corner. But I remember Diego telling me, `If you stop one of my fights, I’ll kill you.’”
But that was not the only time Corrales narrowly avoided the chasm. On Aug. 7, 2004, he was well behind on points when he launched another desperate rally, flooring WBO lightweight titlist Acelino Freitas in the eighth, ninth and 10th rounds before Freitas signaled to referee Michael Ortega that he’d had enough.
“I was shocked,” Corrales said after the Brazilian did something that Corrales himself probably would not have considered. “Acelino Freitas is one of the biggest punchers in the world … A puncher always has confidence that his punching power can bail him out of anything.”
Tall (5-10?) and spindly for someone who began his career as a junior lightweight and never fought above junior welterweight, Corrales, like Thomas Hearns, packed putaway power in both hands. He was 40-5, with 33 knockout victories, and even in bouts that were going badly for him he never stopped believing that he could land that one big shot that would turn things his way. In a Jan. 20, 2001, challenge of WBC super featherweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr., Corrales was enraged when his stepfather, Ray Woods, threw in the towel in the 10th round, despite the fact he had been knocked down five times and was bleeding badly from cuts inside his mouth.
Corrales was 0-3 since the remarkable comeback against Castillo, and his personal life was often messy. He spent a year in a California prison for beating up his pregnant wife, Maria, who later divorced him. He was separated from his second wife, Michelle, who is seven months pregnant, and was in trouble with the IRS at the time of his death.
For whatever reason, perhaps as a release from his boxing, domestic and financial tensions, Corrales found escape in dangerous activities. He once told the Las Vegas Review-Journal he had jumped from a plane at 14,000 feet, snowboarded on rocky terrain and scuba dived amid sharks.
“I’m only young once, I only get to live once,” he was quoted as saying in that story. “If I couldn’t do this stuff now, stuff I always wanted to do, I would never get a chance to do it.”
Did Corrales die because he was too inexperienced to handle the 2007 Suzuki 1000 racing motorcycle he had only recently purchased? Was he just seeking another thrill by driving it at 100 mph, or was his doing so a disguised cry for help that now will never be answered? We can’t know for certain, and can only speculate.
Former Showtime executive Jay Larkin now has tainted memories of possibly the two most exciting boxing matches the premium cable network televised during his tenure. In the first, on Feb. 25, 1995, in London, Gerald McClellan was left blind, mostly deaf and brain-damaged following a 10th-round stoppage at the hands of Nigel Benn.
“It was the absolute best of boxing, and the absolute worst of boxing within the same 10 rounds,” Larkin said in 2002, prior to the Boxing Writers Association of America awards dinner at which Teddy Blackburn, a McClellan benefactor, was honored. “It was `Fight of the Year’ in one publication, and there was some controversy over that. But it was the most amazing display of courage by two men I have ever witnessed in the ring.
“Standing around a hospital at 4 in the morning, you ask yourself, `Why am I in this business?’ How something that a few hours earlier had been so extraordinarily exciting could result in this tragic outcome is something I found really difficult to deal with.”
Three years later, Larkin was party to another battle royal, the first matchup of Corrales and Castillo, that might even have eclipsed Benn-McClellan for sustained fury. He hoped that the epilogue would prove more satisfying for all involved than was the case in London, that fate would bestow a gentle kiss upon Corrales and Castillo.
“I’m not qualified to play amateur psychologist,” Larkin said when I contacted him two days after Corrales’ death. “But it doesn’t surprise me that someone who can enter the ring and fight with the passion that Chico did would feel the need for some kind of rush outside it. It doesn’t surprise me that someone like that might feel invincible.
“I’m sorry it had to end this way for him. I really liked Chico. To me, he always seemed like a lovely, gentle young man. Now, he did have his demons. We all know that the higher you rise, the greater the distance you can fall.
“What’s really sad is that there are many Diego Corraleses who don’t necessarily die young, but are struggling in their personal lives because their self-image is tied to their athletic prowess. What happens when that’s gone? Can you imagine what it’s like to stand in that 20-by-20-foot ring, your arm raised in victory, and have thousands of people screaming your name?
“When you win, you’re Superman. When the winning stops, you’re just another guy shuffling through the casino. That must be heartbreaking.”
Like Larkin, I’m not a psychologist and don’t pretend to be. Perhaps Corrales’ demons, his marital issues notwithstanding, were in check. But there is no doubt that, all through his roller-coaster life, he felt the need for speed and never took his foot off the accelerator.
Think about it. How many athletes and other celebrities have hopped onto a rocket ship of a motorcycle and figured they were Evel Knievel? That their flesh and bones were more impervious to tearing and breaking than those of mere mortals?
The list of victims is long. Philadelphia middleweight James “Black Gold” Shuler, who cheated death once, when, as a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team, he stayed at home with an injury when the remainder of the squad was decimated in an air crash in Warsaw, Poland, on March 14, 1980, was killed a week after his only pro defeat, to Tommy Hearns, in 1986. He crashed his new motorcycle. Another Philadelphian, undefeated light heavyweight prospect Andre “Thee” Prophet, also died after a motorcycle crash in 1988.
Actor James Stacy lost his left arm and leg and his girlfriend was killed when they were struck by a drunk driver while riding a motorcycle in 1973; Chicago Bulls guard Jay Williams, after having had a promising rookie season, hit a curb and lost control of his new motorcycle in June 2003, suffering injuries so severe they essentially ended his NBA career; Cleveland Browns tight end Kellen Winslow II missed the 2005 season after he crashed his motorcycle, which he was operating recklessly, and the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, underwent seven hours of surgery after a June 2006 motorcycle crash that left him with a broken jaw, broken left sinus cavity, a 9-inch laceration to his head and shattered teeth.
When I go to Las Vegas to cover a fight, I often see Joe Businessman decked out in Harley-Davidson T-shirts and jackets purchased at the company’s outlet store on the Strip. I’m not sure how many actually own choppers, but I’d guess that there aren’t that many. Some – the kind who bought tickets to see John Travolta in Wild Hogs — probably just want to channel their inner Marlon Brando in The Wild One, or Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.
Me? My wife grudgingly allows me to parasail and snorkel on Caribbean vacations, and I’ll do a fair bit of wilderness hiking when we go to Alaska in August. But skydiving is still out and I’m not so much of a hypocrite that I’d wear a Harley-Davidson shirt and pretend I’m something I’m not.
I realize I can be run over by a bus while crossing a street, or driving to my neighborhood convenience store to buy a carton of milk.
But it won’t be while I’m on a motorcycle.
