Welcome back to Weight Cut, a biweekly column about the experience, techniques and dangers of cutting weight. Today’s interview is with Sergio Mora, a career-long middleweight who boiled down to 154lbs three times: once to win the WBC title from Vernon Forrest, and the others at immense physical and mental cost.
Previous editions of Weight Cut: Timothy Bradley, Paulie Malignaggi, Andy Vences, Amelia Moore.
Sergio Mora is a natural middleweight if ever there was one. He fought almost exclusively at 160lbs throughout his 18-year professional career – even in his last bout, contracted at 168lbs, Mora came in at a hair over 162. He thinks 6-9 pounds is an ideal rehydration, a far cry from the dozens of pounds many fighters put back on after weigh-ins these days. The rare times he has missed weight, he took the following hours to make it.
But Mora, a late starter to boxing, didn’t know ideal practices to make weight early in his career.
“I made the Olympic trials at 156. At that point, I could have been making 147 if I knew what I knew when I was a professional,” Mora told BoxingScene. “My team didn’t know shit. I was their first boxer. We all learned on the job together. My coach was a police officer. My trainer worked at a warehouse. And then I had never boxed. We just did it the way we thought was normal – restrict your water, eat less, work harder. That wasn’t the way [laughs].”
Once he learned healthier methods, Mora had no issues whatsoever making 160. He phased out dehydration, broke up his usual three big meals into five smaller ones throughout the day, and snacked on all the vegetables and almonds he wanted. Compared to some of the other stories featured in this column, it sounds like a boxer’s paradise.
Mora ran into trouble, though, when trying to make 154lbs in a push for a world title.
The first attempt went fine. He squeezed his six-foot-tall body into that of a junior middleweight to take on Vernon Forrest, and he won by upset majority decision. The WBC junior welterweight title was his.
“I went into my Roberto Duran party mode,” Mora said. “I got the call to have the immediate rematch within six weeks. I had a six-week camp. I had to lose 28 pounds. I lost nine and a half pounds the day of the weigh-in. I can tell you that was the closest to death I ever felt.”
Mora successfully purged the pounds via a steam room, but weakened his body to an alarming degree to duck under the 154-pound threshold.
“My trainers had to carry me in. I would lay down in the steam room, and they would come and carry me out. I would step on the scale. Oh, you need six more ounces. Back in!”
Mora traveled between the official scales and the steam room in a golf cart because he was too frail to walk – not to mention talk.
“You feel like a ghost,” Mora said. “You feel like a shell of yourself. It feels like a dream, actually. You’re floating, there’s no strength. It’s weird. Your eyes are protruding, your cheekbones are protruding out of your skin, because there’s no liquid in your face. That’s when you get injuries to your brain, there’s no liquid in your head. Your brain can bounce off your skull. It’s the worst, man. It is the worst.”
To compound matters, Mora couldn’t sleep the night before the fight. As the sun crept over the horizon and peeked into his hotel room at 5:00 a.m., he finally drifted off, but had gotten nowhere near the adequate amount of rest before a huge fight. Forrest reclaimed the title in a dominant unanimous decision.
“No matter how strong and confident you woke up the very next day, come the sixth round of that fight, you start questioning yourself,” Mora said. “Do I have enough legs, and conditioning, and strength? Should I hold back?”
Believe it or not, that wasn’t Mora’s worst weight-cutting experience. Two fights after the rematch loss to Forrest, Mora had the opportunity to fight living legend Shane Mosley – but again at 154lbs. He jumped at it.
“I said, ‘Fuck it, I can do this!’ I got the best strength trainer, I got the best conditioning, I worked out hard. I did everything right. But I’m six foot. I’m a natural middleweight. Losing those extra six pounds were death on my body. And it showed. It showed in my performances. Two out of three of those 154 performances were the worst performances of my career.”
Mora did his damnedest to prepare for the weight, and even thought he was on weight – but the official scales recorded him at 157lbs, requiring him to surrender 20% of his purse. Unlike Keyshawn Davis this past weekend, Mora took the next hour to ensure he made the weight.
Once again, he couldn’t sleep the night before the fight. “I was just so full of adrenaline. I can’t believe I’m going through this shit again! I did everything right, what the fuck happened? I didn’t sleep that night either. And if you don’t sleep, you’re not gonna be at your peak.”
I told Mora that especially given all that, fighting Mosley to a draw was a hell of an effort. He went quiet for a moment.
“You know, out of all my fights, 37 professional fights, I felt worse getting a draw with a legend than fucking losing any other fight – against Vernon, against [Brian] Vera in Texas. I felt worse getting the draw than actually losing,” Mora said.
One reason why was that Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant had spent the call making fun of Mora’s low-action style in about every way imaginable. Lampley called his effort “pathetic” and said “this decision sucks” when the scorecards were read. Earlier in the bout, Lampley said, “any judge who scores this fight for Mora should be a candidate for a lobotomy,” – in the fifth round, before even the halfway point of the 12-round bout. Yes, most thought Mosley did enough to win, but the commentary was belittling, all the more so in light of what Mora went through just to make weight.
In the ring after the fight, HBO’s Larry Merchant asked Mosley whether he thought he had won. Mosley gave a classy response, saying he and Mora both fought hard.
“Come on, Shane,” Merchant said, with Mora standing inches away from him. “You were the aggressor for 35 of the 36 minutes.”
What played for laughs on HBO had a significant, deleterious effect on Mora’s life.
“It was the worst feeling getting the draw on that big stage, and then getting blackballed by HBO and being criticized on air by Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant, just shitting all over me,” Mora said. “I couldn’t get over that. It took me about two, three years to get over that. I hated the world, man. That performance made me hate boxing, hate commentators, hate fans, hate a lot of things.
“And it was because of that weight cut. I wasn’t a 154-pounder. What the fuck was I doing trying to make 154 again?”
Owen Lewis is a freelance writer with bylines at Defector Media and The Guardian. He is also a writer and editor at BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky and can be contacted at owentennis11@gmail.com.