Maxboxing.com reader reaction says it all: "one of the best ever," "so incredible it's hard to describe in words," "fight defies all description," "my dad and I were jumping around and yelling like maniacs."

Apparently, I'm not the only one calling the Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo free-for-all "The Greatest Boxing Match I Have Ever Seen." Steve Kim's headline echoed mine: "The Greatest Fight I've Ever Seen." "The action was almost too savage to be acceptable in modern civilized society," Kim, who saw the fight live, held. ESPN.com's Dan Raphael labeled Corrales-Castillo "clearly the fight of the year and of the decade.... one of the greatest ever, right up there with Ali-Frazier III, Pryor-Arguello I, Hagler-Hearns, Leonard-Hearns I, the Zale-Graziano, Bowe-Holyfield, Gatti-Ward and Morales-Barrera trilogies." Doug Fischer, whose readers' reactions appear above, called it "the best slugfest I've ever witnessed live." "All the nobility, all the savagery, and all the brutality of boxing was captured in one three-minute round Saturday night," the Boston Globe's Ron Borges observed. It's all true and more. If you want to see what all the commotion is about, then find a way to be in front of a television that has access to Showtime this Friday night at 11 p.m., as the network will replay Corrales-Castillo.

At its worst, boxing is bad: shady promoters and crooked decisions, clutch-and-grab fests, mismatches, and an alphabet soup of champions. At its best, boxing is the Stanley Cup, the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NCAA tournament all rolled into one. Anyone wanting to test the rectitude of this assertion should tune into Showtime this Friday at 11 p.m.