Do same-day weigh-ins really matter?

The main reason was that Eddie Mustafa Muhammad was overweight by two and a half pounds when he came to fight Michael Spinks. Spinks refused to fight him and the promoters had to cancel the card, return millions of dollars in ticket sales, pay $200k to rent the stadium, and HBO had to change their programming to play a movie at the last minute.

It's less about health than just insuring that the fight will come off and the right people can cover their ass. Now, when a guy comes to the scale overweight the promoter has options. He can replace the fighter with someone else. The first fighter can try and lose the remaining weight, or come to an agreement to pay the lower weight fighter part of his purse. And if no compromise can be made and they have to cancel the card at least people have a day's advance notice to change their plans.

 

Usually when a bigger fighter is drained, he was already draining to fight at his normal division. Draining to go down one more division is unhealthy. A good example was way pas his prime DLH, he had no business fighting Pacquiao at that weight. DLH's body couldn't even rehydrate weighing less than Pacquiao fight night. Another example is Canelo, the few extra pounds he had to lose against Floyd clearly affected him. I think Floyd beats him anyway but Canelo was never in that fight.

Then there are big men like Chavez Jr whose main skill is losing weight and are comfortable doing so in their division. He was huge against Andy Lee, Martinez.