Campbell wins fight, loses bulge battle
When is a win not really a win? When you defeat your opponent but still lose your titles, as Nate Campbell did Saturday.
SUNRISE, Fla. -- We have a bit of disconcerting news for those South Florida housewives who have been valiantly fighting the battle of the bulge down at the Sunrise chapter of Bally's Total Fitness: You might not have lost quite as much weight as you think you have.
Nate Campbell made this discovery the hard way. Knowing he had to shed a few pounds before a scheduled 2 p.m. weigh-in Friday, the three-belt lightweight champion visited the steam room there that morning. After an hour's worth of diligent exercise he was pleasantly surprised to learn that he weighed 134.6 pounds.
A few hours later, when he mounted another scale, this one calibrated and operated under the auspices of Florida's boxing commission, Campbell learned that his actual weight was 138 pounds -- three pounds above the lightweight limit.
Oops!
"Nate had been having trouble with those last few pounds," said promoter/advisor Terry Trekas. "So we went over early to the health club. This time it actually seemed to come off with ease -- or at least that's what the scale said. We'd planned to skip the HBO fighter meetings [at noon] to keep him in the steam room, but once he made weight I phoned [manager] Jimmy Waldrop and told him we were coming back to the hotel."
Once the discrepancy between the scales was discovered, Campbell still had two hours to shed the requisite two pounds. He hastened back to the health club.
"He went into the steam room five times -- you can't leave him in there too long -- and each time he'd shadow-box," Trekas said.
"Nate had absolutely hit a wall," Waldrop said. "I've never seen anything like it. All that exercise, and in two hours all he lost was half a pound."
Campbell glumly returned to the BankAtlantic Center to face the music. When he weighed 137½, he lost his titles on the scale.
Don King's "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" had been troubled from the outset. The site, the home of the NHL's Florida Panthers, was settled upon only a few weeks before fight night, and within a matter of days, scheduled headliner Ricardo Mayorga, who was supposed to have provided a test for hard-hitting Mexican up-and-comer Alfredo Angulo, had gone AWOL.
Campbell's defense against South African Ali Funeka was elevated to the main event. Angulo's prospective opponent changed almost daily. By fight week, King was offering two tickets for the price of one in a desperate attempt to lure a respectable crowd to the "Boxing After Dark" tripleheader.
Campbell seemed to be hoist by his own petard, in view of his scathing reaction to an eerily similar circumstance in Biloxi, Miss., five months earlier, when Joan Guzman had come in three pounds overweight and declined to shed the excess poundage, resulting in the cancellation of the bout.
"I'm shocked and appalled that a professional fighter could behave this way," Campbell said then. Of course, he hastened to point out, his anger was over Guzman's refusal to participate in an over-the-weight match, which cost Campbell his $300,000 purse and plunged him into bankruptcy.
Campbell gallantly insisted on going ahead with his fight, even though he could not regain his titles. Funeka, on the other hand, could win a couple of them if he prevailed.
In January, caught up in the morass of boxing politics, Campbell had resigned his WBA belt. A week later, Trekas received a letter from WBA president Gilberto Mendoza, urging him to reconsider. Trekas agreed, although he noted, "We're probably going to have to give it up sooner or later."
And although King was initially prepared to foot the bill for Campbell's WBA sanctioning fee, the weigh-in disaster rendered the point moot, but Funeka could still have won the IBF and WBO championships by defeating Campbell.
Funeka, who brought a 30-1-2 record to the bout, is a gangly 6-foot-1 praying mantis who had never before fought outside South Africa.
Campbell looked as if he might make a short evening of it when he dropped Funeka with a huge overhand right in the third round, but as the bout neared its midpoint, the strength seemed to be sapping out of Campbell, who began to husband his energy and confine himself to fighting in spurts.
Funeka, in fact, appeared to have drawn even with two rounds to go, but Campbell finished the issue in style. In the 11th, he landed two hard rights and then literally ran right over Funeka before he could hit the deck. The two went down together, and once he got them disentangled, referee Tommy Kimmons completed a mandatory 8-count for Funeka. That, and winning the final round on all three cards, provided the margin of victory in what turned out to be a majority decision in Campbell's favor.
Two judges, American Mike Pernick (115-111) and Canadian Benoit Roussel (114-112), scored it for Campbell, while South African Deon Duarte returned a 113-113 scorecard.
"I had two knockdowns," Campbell said. "Of course I thought I won."
Campbell plans to campaign henceforth at 140 pounds and will be an immediate player in that competitive division, but moments after his hollow victory, he reflected on what he had lost.
"All my life I wanted to be a world champion, to be the best in the world at what I do. And I lost it on the scale. I want to apologize to my fans for that," he said.
George Kimball, who writes for the Irish Times and Boxing Digest as well as ESPN.com, won the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism in 1985. He is the author of the widely acclaimed new book "Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing."
