After 37 years, 748 broadcasts and 1,821 fights (including 640 world title fights), Showtime Boxing will close its doors at the end of 2023. When asked about his memories of a boxing network with which he is indelibly associated, Hall-of-Famer Steve Farhood, who has served as an unofficial scorer for Showtime Championship Boxing and Showtime PPVs and as expert analyst for ShoBox, offered up three fights that immediately come to mind – one of them a legendary contest for which he wasn’t ringside.
“The very first fight that comes to mind is Corrales-Castillo, which some people think of as the greatest fight of all time,” he said of Diego Corrales’ epic tenth-round stoppage win over Jose Luis Castillo in 2005. But, he told the Showtime Boxing podcast, he wasn’t even in Las Vegas for the Showtime-televised event because the evening before he had been at Foxwoods Casino for a ShoBox card that produced its own highly memorable main event: junior middleweight Sechew Powell knocking out Cornelius Bundragel in just 22 seconds.
“Double knockdowns with the first two punches thrown in the fight, and then a pure knockout with the third punch,” he recalled. “So, with three punches thrown in the fight, you had three knock downs, and a knockout.”
Then there was the Bite Fight, Mike Tyson being disqualified in his heavyweight title rematch with Evander Holyfield after taking a chunk out of his ear.
“What I remember about the moment was that I knew exactly what he had done the minute it happened,” he said. “It reminded me a little bit in its own way of Duran-Leonard in New Orleans, when Duran quit. “Everybody in the press section kind of turned to the guy next to him and said, ‘Did I just see that?’ It was so unbelievable that you couldn't believe it really happened. It was kind of the same with the Bite Fight. But what I remember most distinctly about it, about an hour had passed since the fight and I was with [then-editor of The Ring] Nigel Collins, we walked upstairs to the lobby of the MGM, and we saw bodies scattered on the floor near the entrance to the hotel. And I remember very distinctly going to one of the security guards asking ‘Are they dead?’ And he said, ‘No, they've been trampled.’ There were gunshots in the casino and I guess when the gunshots went off everybody in the casino panicked and tried to run out and there was a lot of trampling. It was pretty, pretty wild.”
