George Kimball / America at Large: The first indication there might be a problem with last Friday's weigh-in came when a Nevada commissioner spotted the shoe of one of Jose Luis Castillo's seconds wedged under the scales.

Using his big toe in the time-honoured manner of a butcher's thumb, the Mexican cornerman was attempting to nudge up the platform as Castillo stood on it, in case his man might need help making the 135-lbs lightweight limit.

Once his handler had been caught red-footed and expelled from the premises at Caesars Palace, the reason for his concern became apparent: Castillo was overweight by three and a half pounds, and though he was given the obligatory two hours to shed the excess poundage, he returned even heavier on his subsequent trip to the scales.

Last Saturday night's rematch had been hotly anticipated, reprising as it did a savage and bloody war that had seen Diego Corrales climb off the canvas last May to stop Castillo in the 10th round. And even when it became clear that Corrales's WBC and WBO championships would not be at stake, the encore remained promising.

Corrales obliged by agreeing to go ahead with a 12-round non-title fight, saying it would be "unfair to the fans" to do otherwise. The bout, while it lasted, was entertaining enough, with the action fast and furious until Castillo abruptly ended it with a solid left hook 47 seconds into the fourth round.

Corrales, once he had revived from the knockout, proposed a third fight "It's 1-1," he said. "We have to do it again." To his credit, Corrales did not attempt to blame the weight issue for the result. "I'm not going to muck up his win by even entertaining the idea that he had an unfair advantage," said the loser.

It's unclear how much the attempted chicanery with the scales might have affected the outcome in any case, but it wouldn't be the first time such a weighty issue had obtained. Five years ago in New York, former lightweight champion Joey Gamache was scheduled to fight Arturo Gatti in a light-welterweight preliminary contest underneath the Oscar De la Hoya-Derrell Coley title bout at Madison Square Garden.

At the weigh-in on the eve of the bout, Gatti jumped on and off the scale so quickly that the needle never came to rest, but a New York commissioner obligingly certified him at 140 lbs and, despite screams of protest from Gamache's manager Johnny Bos, refused to reweigh him.

When HBO weighed the participants in their dressingrooms the next night, Gatti outweighed Gamache by 16lbs. The fight was predictably one-sided, with Gatti meting out such a beating that Gamache wound up in the hospital and never boxed again. He did later sue the New York Commission, and the botched handing of the weigh-in cost chairman Tony Russo his job.

All of which put us in mind of another weigh-in, almost a quarter of a century ago in Washington, DC. Although Eddie Mustafa Muhammad was the reigning light-heavyweight champion, the bout was being promoted by challenger Michael Spinks's man, Butch Lewis.

Mustafa was convinced that Lewis and the District of Colombia Boxing Commission, with whom the flamboyant promoter still had some juice in the spring of 1981, were plotting to lift his title by manipulating the scale.

On the afternoon of the weigh-in, Michael (Wolf Man) Katz and I visited Eddie Mustafa in his suite, where he predicted that the scales had been rigged in Spinks's favour. "You watch," Mustafa presciently forecast. "Spinks is always in the 172-173 range, but he'll be exactly 175. And I weighed myself at on a hospital scales last night, but I'll be overweight."

He was dead right. When Spinks, after being announced at 175, stepped off the scales, a handler was standing by with a bowl of stew and a bottle of juice mounted on a tray. Spinks was defiantly slurping away by the time Eddie stepped on the scale and weighed in two pounds over the limit.

Moments after that weigh-in, Bert Randolph Sugar, the boxing historian, plagiarist, and at the time, editor of The Ring magazine, dashed out to a nearby supermarket and bought a 20lb sack of - naturally - sugar, which he brought back and weighed on the same device. It weighed 22 lbs on the DC commission scale. Sugar then took the sugar down the street to the United States Bureau of Weights and Measures, which certified that it was within an ounce or two of its advertised weight.

Although he had two hours to make the weight, Mustafa followed Spinks's lead and started eating, too. Since the champion obviously wasn't going to make the weight, Lewis attempted to salvage his show by staging Mustafa Muhammad-Spinks as a non-title bout but, when offered a reduced purse, Eddie declined. The WBA might have vacated his title, but he knew the loss of his purse would be minimal compared to the financial bath Butch Lewis would take when the card was scrapped, so Eddie was a satisfied man as he righteously tore into his sandwich. As an old French boxer once said, "La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid."