The California State Athletic Commission Tuesday voted unanimously to revoke former world welterweight boxing champion Antonio Margarito’s license, and that of his trainer, for one year for having plaster-like substances on his hand wraps before his title fight against Shane Mosley.
Margarito said that he did nothing more than hold up his fists for his trainer to wrap before the fight, but his argument failed to move the commissioners.
“When you’re the top dog, you bear some responsibility for your team,” commissioner Dr. Christopher Giza said to Margarito. “Mr. Margarito felt he did not bear some responsibility for this, and the consequences could’ve been career-ending.”
State inspectors testified that they confiscated two gauze pads that were “firm” and “smeared with a substance” before Margarito made the first defense of his welterweight title against Mosley on Jan. 24 at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Mosley won the fight by ninth-round technical knockout.
The pads, shown in photos to be caked with a white grout-like substance still under analysis by a state lab, were positioned to be inserted atop the knuckles of both of Margarito’s fists, a fact that his trainer, Javier Capetillo, admitted could have injured Mosley.
“Automatically,” he said. “It’s hard. It’s going to hurt.”
Capetillo stunned a large audience attending the hearing in Van Nuys by acknowledging he had mistakenly placed one pad inside Margarito’s right hand wraps and was readying to put another in the fighter’s left glove before Mosley’s trainer, Nazim Richardson, objected.
State inspector Dean Lohuis testified that he immediately declared the pads illegal, and another inspector described the pads as “not hard as a rock, but firm and hard,” and possibly sweat-soaked with a stain of what appeared to be blood. The inspector, Che Guevara, described Capetillo’s dressing room mood while being confronted as “aggressive, upset, agitated.”
But later, Capetillo told his attorney that the pads ended up in his gym bag “by mistake,” and should have never been used in Margarito’s hand wraps. The trainer explained another fighter from a Montebello, Calif., gym where he trains boxers must have errantly tossed his used hand wraps into Capetillo’s bag after slugging a punching bag.
“I grabbed the wrong things,” Capetillo said through an interpreter as his voice rose repeatedly in a distraught tone. “It was something innocent. I committed a big mistake. I don’t want this young man to have problems. I’m here to cover any responsibility. I have full responsibility. It was not ill-intended.”
But commissioners were highly skeptical of the claim. June Griffith-Collison asked why both of Margarito’s hands were to have the illegal knuckle pad inserts, and another asked the trainer, “Do you know the expression, ‘Falling on the sword?’”
Tijuana’s Margarito, 30, won’t be able to re-apply for his boxing license for one year, a sanction that will keep him from fighting in the U.S. unless he follows through with his promoter Bob Arum’s promise to stage his fights in Mexico. The boxer declined comment after the hearing, but Arum expressed outrage and said he wouldn’t stage another Top Rank boxing card in California for the duration of Margarito’s suspension.
Margarito’s attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, said after the ruling that he would explore filing a lawsuit to appeal the sanction in a state court.
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