Boxer's Delivery Is Special

Boxer’s Delivery Is Special

By Bill Dwyre

May 31, 2006 12 AM PT

The image made you blink twice. What you were hearing couldn’t be coming from whom you were hearing.

Diego Corrales, world champion boxer, man of many brawls, in and out of the ring, was doing a play-by-play of the birth of his daughter, Daylia, in March.

“I did the delivery,” he said. “I did it. It was terrifying. I guided her out. Cut the umbilical cord. You have to pull so hard, I thought, one time, I was going to break my child’s back.”

Your first reaction was that boxing had finally crossed the line forever. And this fight didn’t even need phony pre-fight hype.

Corrales, 28, the World Boxing Council lightweight champion from Las Vegas, by way of Sacramento, will fight Jose Luis Castillo, 32, of Mexico for the third time in 13 months Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.

The first fight, May 7, 2005, was the fight of the year, maybe the decade. The second one, Oct. 8, featured a lousy weigh-in and wonderful fight-ending left hook by Castillo.

For this third one, all they needed was to announce a date, then stand clear of the ticket windows.

Corrales was well into his description of panicking about his wife Michelle’s having gone into labor three weeks early before you actually began to believe. The details were too rich. Promoters Gary Shaw and Bob Arum couldn’t make up stuff this good.

“At one point, I ran out to the car, jumped in and backed it out,” Corrales said. “Then I hit the brakes. My wife wasn’t in the car. I’d left her behind.”

The ultimate stamp of truth came from Dr. Nicole Moss of Las Vegas, who’d somehow let this happen.

“Yes, he did all of that,” she said. “He came to almost all of his wife’s appointments leading up to the birth, and he kept asking if he could do it. He said he was good around blood.”

Moss said she’d been right there with him, her hands on the baby’s head right behind Corrales’. And she said the real hero was Michelle, who was fine with all this and did most of the work during delivery.

Still, the contradictions are numerous. Boxer delivering baby is still man bites dog.

Corrales isn’t so much a boxer as he is a brawler. In the classic first fight against Castillo, Corrales rose twice from knockdowns in the 10th round and was in the process of ending Castillo’s career -- many felt ending Castillo -- until the referee stopped it. There has been no jabbing, no dancing, just 100% brawling in both fights, with scant likelihood of that changing Saturday.

“We are two magnets to metal,” Corrales said.

Corrales, who grew up in a tough area of Sacramento and was eventually sent to the gym by his stepfather, Ray Woods, so the fights would at least be supervised, has tattoos all over, including one on his stomach that reads “MOP” and stands for “Made Out of Poverty.”

He also has a rap sheet. In 2001, having had a domestic dispute with his first wife while she was pregnant, and anticipating that boxers with tattoos might not do well in court, he took a plea bargain and spent 14 months in prison in Tracy, Calif.

Still, the thug imagery is dispelled in more ways than the delivery of a baby.

Corrales recently asked broadcaster Alan Massengale, before an interview, if that was “a Burberry tie” he was wearing.

He earned a degree from a culinary school in the Bay Area and says with pride, “I’m a damn good cook.”

He is purposeful in how he refers to Woods.

“He is my father,” he says. “He stepped up, raised me. He earned the title.”

According to his trainer, Joe Goossen, he is well read, inquisitive, bright.

“Diego would be the only boxer who would be interested in the space-time-continuum theory,” Goossen said.

Moss will be attending her first boxing match Saturday night. Her rooting priorities will be slightly different from the expected 15,000 others in attendance. She will be hoping the hands that Corrales will be using to beat on Castillo will come through in a much bigger mission.

“Diego said they want another baby,” she said, “and he wants to deliver it again.”

Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.