Inty shares his thoughts on a recent string of bum decisions, the sort of crap that sours casual sports fans and exiles the fight game to the Kid's Table of spectator sports.
Now that he's done the heavy lifting, here I come with my two cents.
I agree with his all his observations so I'll comment on a tangent, why the sport is structurally incapable of addressing its most serious problems.
Boxing is an anachronism, a fractured, ferociously atavistic sport that survived into the modern corporate age like a Japanese soldier hiding out deep in the Burmese jungle, still fighting WWII - crazed, perpetually starving, periodically bursting into nearby village squares to gibber unintelligibly, menace locals with a stub of corroded bayonet and make off with a stray goat or chicken.
Potential remedies for boxing's multifarious problems all founder on this reality: you aren't dealing with a business populated by self interested but basically rational individuals so much as with a mud caked, bug-eating psycho who prefers living in a hollow tree, drinking his own urine and using an ammo belt for a jockstrap to admitting his team lost the war.
Most will scoff at this as comical exaggeration.
Hardcore boxing fans know better.
Where other major spectator sports have governing bodies which keep the overall health of their industry in mind, boxing has Don King, Bob Arum and a vast patchwork of loosely connected local commissions. It's like the jigsaw puzzle from Diva- innumerable pieces, all the same color, each demanding separate accommodation before you can even begin piecing them together.
If you want to improve refereeing in the NBA, you can take it to David Stern.
If you have a great idea for improving the judging of fights, who to address?
For starters, the NYSAC, the CSAC and the NSAC, the state athletic commissions of New York, California and Nevada respectively.
For the sake of argument we'll pretend you manage to get all three on board over the vocal objections of boxing promoters, a breed who's love of the status quo is exceeded only by their financial leverage with these big state commissions and hatred of each other.
Promoters who don't like your new rules (hint: all of them,) will move their cards willy nilly to the nearest Indian casino, where state authorities are persona non grata and rinky-dink tribal commissions hold sway.
And beyond the tribal commissions you'll find an ever-widening network of regional, county and even city jurisdictions, each ensconced cozily at the center of their local web. Whenever you hear about high profile guys fighting in weird out of the way places, they're usually in trouble with the bigtime commissions and gone shopping for a more amenable one.
Lewis/Tyson was a huge heavyweight fight, a roaring avalanche of profit for everyone involved.
So how did it end up in Memphis, Tennessee?
Because none of the big commissions would sign off on Tyson, who hadn't shown an iota of mental stability since the EARpocalypse with Holyfield in '97. His ensuing fights included a pair of No Contests (his KO of a plainly terrified Andrew Golota was vacated after testing positive for weed and Orlin Norris suffered a dubious knee injury and refused to continue when Tyson clocked him after the bell in round 1), a couple of gimme KO's of career opponents (Lou Savarese, Juluis Francis) and a pair of uninspiring victories over journeymen- The White Buffalo, Francois Botha, controlled their bout handily until walking into a haymaker in the 5th and against Brian Nielsen Tyson looked flabby and disinterested, only to be rescued by his even flabbier and less interested opponent throwing in the towel at the halfway mark.
Given this uninspiring lead up and Tyson's history of avoiding Lewis (Team Tyson paid Lewis $4,000,000 in step-aside money to set up a title fight with Bruce Seldon in 1996, then vacated the WBC belt a few months later when Lewis popped up as his mandatory challenger for that strap) you might be surprised that Lewis/Tyson raked in more than 100 million dollars in PPV buys, a haul unsurpassed until De La Hoya/Mayweather in 2007. It remains the highest grossing heavyweight fight of all time (which dovetails neatly with my previous post on the power of wishful thinking in the heavyweight divison).
The concerns about Tyson were well founded- he bit Lewis on the thigh during a press conference brawl and capped the event with a bizarre homoerotic tirade-
Lewis, the consummate professional, salvaged the promotion (and career best payday) by keeping quiet until after the fight and only then extracting 300k from Tyson by way of apology.
Summing up, a marketable guy can always find somebody somewhere who'll let him fight, however unsuited he is to the endeavor. A more recent example is Antonio Margarito, the Tijuana Tornado, 'banned from boxing' for one year after trying to load his gloves against Shane Mosley.
With even the most podunk US venues honoring the ban he went south of the border.
Another unsavory example involves Baby Joe Mesi, a massive regional draw in Buffalo that got a big HBO push around 2004.
In a showcase fight against former cruiserweight champ Vassily Jirov (who's classic bout with James Toney I urge you to watch) Mesi suffered two subdural hematomas. Jirov landed a crushing right in the closing seconds of the 9th round after Mesi beat him like a rented mule over the previous heats. Jirov pursued his advantage in the 10th, pummeling Mesi around the ring, scoring two more knockdowns.
Postfight tests revealed bleeding on Mesi's brain, a condition universally recognized as a career-ender.
Except in this case Mesi (or his father, it being hard to separate the ambitions of one from the other) decided to carry on, in the face of advice from his personal physician, a ban by the boxing powers that be and the condemnation of assorted medical bodies. Lawsuits were filed and boxing being boxing Mesi eventually fought again, although never again on a big broadcast stage.
So, you're dealing with a fragmented regulatory structure that cannot effectively stop a guy who loaded his gloves from stepping in the ring for the duration of its 'ban', that can't keep a fighter who demonstrably suffered not one but two subdural hematomas from fighting on.
Good luck improving the refereeing and judging.
And even great, consistent, fair judging will engender controversy.
It's a tough gig, and as Inty notes perceptions of fights and decisions change over time. I vividly recall the aftermath of De La Hoya/Mosley II, won by Shane. It seemed Inty and I were lone voices crying Robbery! in the wilderness of a DLH-hating internet. But hit a forum today and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to admit they scored it for Shane.
In the aftermath of any big fight you can find guys yelling 'fix!' and 'robbery!' however clear cut the decision. The intense individual connection hardcore fans feel for their favorite boxers has no direct corollary in other spectator sports, which impose a civilized distance between competitors, and thus between competitor and fan. The primal individuality of boxing persists inside the ring, where a fighter is due only as much justice as he can earn with his fists. Often his partisans become so enmeshed in the success of 'their man' they jettison objectivity and common sense- rooting for your fighter becomes a direct extension of the battle in the ring.
As boxing at the elite level requires a certain self deluding confidence (even in triumph boxers absorb permanent, irreparable damage) so it seems does rooting for those elite fighters. When your fighter falls short you have fallen short, and a loss in boxing isn't necessarily abstract, simply being outscored, but is oftentimes a literal beating.
Which is why genuinely bad decisions in boxing are more grievously discouraging and contemptible than in other sports. Every fight takes something out of the combatants. Even a superlative athlete who breezes through a contest against an overmatched foe will emerged from the other side reduced in some way by the grueling preparations direct combat demands. The history of the sport is strewn with talented fighters upended by overlooked opponents, careers derailed by lackadaisical gym work. The best train relentlessly for each fight regardless of the perceived quality of their opponent.
Boxing is a marathon that looks like a sprint.
We fans see the last 10 or 12 rounds of a journey that began weeks or months before. Manny Pacqiuao reportedly sparred 140 rounds for his recent title bout with Shane Mosley, who was widely perceived (correctly, it turned out) as a spent force.
The fight itself was a 12 round walkover for the Pac Man, but he still trained for a war.
And every time the structure of the sport conspires to steal a boxer's hard earned decision, whether through malice or incompetence, the victimized fighter is only the most visible of many losers.
A sport demanding so much sacrifice from its competitors owes to them the fairest, most objective results possible. The cluster of promoters and money men erupting like tapeworms from the business end of the sport, so obsessed with consuming more shit than their competitors that nobody notices their host dying of malnutrition, are the shame of the sport.
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