Tirico Suave

I’m a casual boxing fan. I’ll show up to whatever random house orders the pay-per-views as long I don’t have to throw any money down. So this is the first time I’ve come across the story of the 1983 fight between Luis Resto and Billy Collins, which is the subject of the 2007 documentary, Cornered (not to be confused with the upcoming Steve Guttenberg vehicle of the same name). For those of those of you like me who don’t know the backstory, here are the bullet points:

Resto’s trainer, Panama Lewis, removed the padding from Resto’s gloves, basically turning his fighter into a bare knuckle boxer. Not surprisingly, Resto goes on to not only defeat Collins (viewed as an upset at the time), but also ended Collins’ career after his iris was torn and he suffered permanently blurred vision.

After the fight, Collins’s father, who was also serving as his trainer, took notice of Resto’s gloves and asked that they be impounded. The fight is later ruled a no contest.

Nine months after the fight, Collins is killed when, while intoxicated, he drove his car off a cliff. Those close to Collins suspect this to be an act of suicide, stemming from depression due to his aforementioned career-ending injuries.

Both Lewis and Resto are brought to trial and convicted of assault, criminal possession of a weapon (Resto’s hands) and conspiracy. Both serve two and half years in jail and are for the most part banned from boxing, although Lewis would later go on to train Frans Botha overseas, amongst others, and also serve as an adviser to Mike Tyson when he fought Lennox Lewis

The story popped up again in the news today, when Resto admitted during the filming of Cornered, that not only was the padding removed from his gloves, but that his tape was also soaked in plaster that night, meaning he essentially pounded Collins with gloves full of rocks for ten rounds.

I decided to take a look on YouTube, and the full video of the fight is indeed there, broken down into five parts. However, embedding is disabled for each video, and I tried being sneaky, clever HTML code guy but that didn’t work either, so I’ll just provide the links. Each of the first four parts are around ten minutes long, but you can get a pretty good idea of the absolute beating Collins took by watching the first three minutes of part five.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Update: Sorry. YouTube yoinked the videos down at some point. Fret not. Because guess what video is still up? This little gem, which to be honest, is the superior brawl.