Is Civilization Ruining Boxing?
Back in them good ol’ days, before politicians, newspaper writers, and preachers started sticking their dirty noses into the manly art of fighting, two guys would go out to the woods, fight without gloves or any of that other sissy stuff, and duke it out until one, or perhaps both, could no longer continue.
That bare knuckle era, where rounds ended with a knockdown but fights ended only with a finish, was replaced by the twentieth century with the more civilized approach we have today. Politicians now directly regulate the sport of professional boxing, there are all sorts of rules and regulations, and a scoring system is in place since you can no longer have those old-fashioned finish fights.
The politicians, in their boundless empathy for humanity, have also given us what they call rules of war. You can no longer use such nasty tactics as torture or poison gasses, and instead have to be content with the more humane love taps of carpet bombing and nuclear weapons. Gas chambers, car bombings, genocide, and the like today draw the ire of these politicians, so long, of course, as they are only used by their enemies.
Now that boxing is so civilized and gentlemanly, we are running into one scoring controversy after another in major fights virtually every week. Last week, as we discussed in a previous thread, it was the apparent robbery of Glen Johnson in his April 12 fight with Chad Dawson. Now we have a new controversy arising from Joe Calzaghe’s split decision victory over Bernard Hopkins April 19.
While Calzaghe’s win was hardly a robbery and many people who watched that fight believe that Calzaghe may have eked out a decision and won the boxing match under the civilized scoring of the unified rules of boxing, it was Hopkins who won the fight. Calzaghe may have set a CompuBox record by landing the most punches ever against Hopkins in any of the 43-year-old’s previous fights, but few did much damage and many were just slapping blows with little impact.
So what do we want, fighting or boxing? Is this current scoring system on the way to reducing boxing to becoming a symbolic contest, like fencing, or, worse, Olympic boxing? How do we balance these contradictory imperatives of having a fight while making sure it is supposedly reasonably safe? And how do we alter this scoring system with which no one is satisfied and yields on an almost weekly basis bad decisions in major fights?
Cleaning out the obvious political influence in the care and feeding of judges is one thing. But when so many unbiased and educated observers regularly disagree about who really won these fights, then the subjectivity of the scoring system must be examined, and the parameters of how to score must be changed.
Or, we could just let the boys slug it out till only one of them is left standing. Maybe we can let the politicians fine tune the return to finish fights by trying it out themselves before inflicting this upon the boxers. Then again, maybe they have never become half as civilized as boxing is today.
Labels: Bernard Hopkins, boxing, Chad Dawson, Eddie Goldman, Glen Johnson, Joe Calzaghe
posted by Eddie Goldman @ 8:08 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Eddie, I know this doesn't address the problem, but I think 15-round championship fights would eliminate some of the disputed decisions, and we'd see a clear winner emerge more often. IF Hopkins-Calzaghe were 15-rounds, most likely Calzaghe would've separated himself from Hopkins. Hagler may have pulled away from Leonard if the fight had three more rounds.
Today, just about all of the upper-tier contenders can fight 12-rounds. It's also easier to prepare strategically for 12-rounds.
I also believe in even rounds as long as it's not applied to liberally. The first round of Hopkins-Calzaghe would've been an even round on my card had their been no knock down. Sometimes there are rounds during a fight that neither fighter did enough to warrant the round. I hate this shit where you have to make a decision on every round. A round for a fighter who landed a clean jab at the end of it could swing the round in his favor, and ultimately be the deciding factor in the fight.
The reason even rounds are frowned upon now is because of the shoemaker judge who scored Leonard-Duran I, in favor of Duran 3-2-10. Which is beyond explanation.
At this point, I probably care about the judging of fights about as much as I care about either boxing titles or boxing writing. The only aspect of judging that matters to me is that the decision, good or bad, often has direct bearing on a fighter’s future income.
But, generally speaking, boxing judges come up the right winner, if often by giddily inaccurate margins.
Although I watched both the Chad Dawson-Glen Johnson and Joe Calzaghe-Bernard Hopkins fights, I didn’t do it with paper and pen at hand. I don’t score fights anymore unless someone pays me to; it’s too much work.
Unlike most professional judges, I know how to watch a fight. Still, there are occasionally fights that are too close to score without tallying them up round by round.
And the fights mentioned above were close. My impression was that Johnson edged Dawson and that Calzaghe edged Hopkins. Aside from the silly margin by which the judges handed Dawson his win, there didn’t seem to be any gross miscarriage of justice in either fight.
I agree with Frank that championship fights should, for a lot of reasons, be fifteen rounds instead of twelve. The decision to reduce their distance was predicated entirely on commerce and public relations; it had nothing to do with the safety of the fighters.
True, most of the time the judges get it right. That said, it always boggles my mind how one of the judges is always so far away from the other two when scoring the same fight. Then again, I think I know exactly why that happens.
I think the scoring system could be changed to place a bigger premium on winning rounds more conclusively. I think the 10-point must is really only a three point system. Usually the variance is between 10-9 / 10-7.
Some bloggish observations:
American boxing writing is generally worse for the mind than a week’s worth of meals at Dunkin’ Donuts is for the body. Brain damage is much harder to treat than obesity.
Week after week, we get questionable decisions in major fights, yet where are the analyses of their root causes? We have judges who are far too poorly trained and far too easily influenced than those in any other major sport (except, of course, mma).
In my interview with Glen Johnson, he charged that at least one of the judges in his April 12 WBC title fight with Chad Dawson apparently did not know which fighter was which. So where are the calls for change? Where is the analysis about how judges are selected and prepared for fights? Or would that type of analysis ruffle the feathers too much of the networks and promoters who sponsor, either directly or indirectly, almost all of these writers and their online, electronic, and print outlets?
The problem isn’t merely direct corporate influence, because many of these writers are unaware that they are tools. They are chosen because they will replicate the values of their bosses, having been culturally trained and educated to do so their entire lives. They go with the flow, and want their readers not to think critically, but happily and blindly to spend, consume, spend, and consume.
Perhaps they are lacking a rebel gene. Otherwise, they might be writing here.
My friends, I agree that the current scoring system for boxing isn’t perfect, but it does work well under the conditions it was designed for. Those conditions require the boxers to engage each other and give the judges some action to work with. We have a generation of fighters who have exploited the scoring system by emphasizing tactics rather than face confrontation. The strategy of finishing lazy rounds with flourishes is nice eye candy but not a surge of authority. How many times have we heard,”That last combination may have won the round for him.” We can tweak the rules, or makes fights longer, but would that inspire better fights? When the judges are down to splitting hairs, is it any surprise that scoring is so uneven?
Anyway, I think it’s ironic that the classic victories by the greatest boxing stylists of the past like Ali, R. Leonard, J. Johnson, Robinson and others were not fights won by doing only enough to stay ahead. They were the fights where all tactics had been exhausted and the boxers displayed remarkable fighting heart.
My friends, I agree that the current scoring system for boxing isn’t perfect, but it does work well under the conditions it was designed for. Those conditions require the boxers to engage each other and give the judges some action to work with. We have a generation of fighters who have exploited the scoring system by emphasizing tactics rather than face confrontation. The strategy of finishing lazy rounds with flourishes is nice eye candy but not a surge of authority. How many times have we heard,”That last combination may have won the round for him.” We can tweak the rules, or makes fights longer, but would that inspire better fights? When the judges are down to splitting hairs, is it any surprise that scoring is so uneven?
Anyway, I think it’s ironic that the classic victories by the greatest boxing stylists of the past like Ali, R. Leonard, J. Johnson, Robinson and others were not fights won by doing only enough to stay ahead. They were the fights where all tactics had been exhausted and the boxers displayed remarkable fighting heart.
I agree with Carl that the 10 Point Must System works acceptably well if you know how to watch and judge a fight. The system reminds me of the kind of restrictive art forms that, in capable hands, can produce the desired result. Let me put it this way (since everyone reading this is a qualified judge of boxing): Have any of you, using the 10 Point Must System, ever come up with the wrong winner and loser because the system inherently failed to provide you with the means to the proper verdict? In a sense, the ability to utilize 10-9 margins to convey not only who won a fight, but the tone of the fight itself, is a good test for a would-be boxing judge.
The 10-point must scoring system may have netted the right result, but it doesn't tell the story of the fight as to what happened in the Ring. Why have 10-points when only three are used. I guess it's eye candy. I don't like it and think it makes it easier to mickey the system for a desired result when needed.
The ten-point must system is too inflexible and almost always relies on knockdowns for a round to be scored anything other than 10-9. That leads to inequities, such as in Chad Dawson-Glen Johnson.
In rounds three and four of that fight, as well as round ten (if I recall correctly), Johnson had Dawson hurt and holding on, but did not knock him down. These were, as far as I know, scored 10-9 for Johnson (all three judges had it 116-112 for Dawson, and there were no knockdowns in the fight). In round six and others, for example, Dawson won, but just threw a lot of punches while running so much that the fans loudly booed him. Those, no doubt, were 10-9 for Dawson, the same margin given Johnson for dominating rounds.
Similar observations could be made about Calzaghe-Hopkins, again to name a recent fight.
Of course, you need better-trained and more honest judges to implement a more complex scoring system with greater differentials than we have now. So we end up once again with boxing’s anarchic structure hurting its credibility, hurting its standing with the fans, and thus hurting it as a business.
I'd agree with Eddie about the weakness of the system, which is of course a separate subject from the weakness of judging (or the strength of market forces, or a little of both). In particular, there have been many times, especially when there's a very good technical boxer in a fight, that I've been frustrated by the variety of rounds that get bundled together under the 10-9 rubric. On the one hand, there are rounds in which a guy completely outboxes the other but doesn't knock him down, or in which one guy hurts the other or does serious body-shot damage to him that will come back in later rounds but doesn't knock him down. On the other hand, there are basically default 10-9 rounds in which the desire not to award too many even rounds puts pressure on me to give the round to the guy who did a little more, or tried a little more, or simply made more of the action. I want something like a 10-9.5 scoring option for this latter category of round. I know that I could score them even, but they're not exactly even, either. I know this is a small-seeming thing, but some fighters' styles and some matchups of styles turn it into a bigger thing.
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