Full Stop… Boxing Scoring Is a Mess!

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

An opinion piece from the only Donald worth listening to…

Full Stop – In British English grammar a full stop is a lengthy pause, in the US, you call it a period. In the UK that tends to suggest feminine products. Here it means a period of time where I look at something in boxing in a little more depth. I am typing from my perspective of a fan who watches the sport closely. It’s an opinion. It is my opinion. Don’t like it? There are other opinions out there but if you don’t like it then good, debate and democracy are a good thing. If you do like it, feel free to spread the word.

What’s the score with scoring – Can boxers count on the judges who fail to count?

Their arms are hanging at their sides, one hand is held by an official between the two of them. Nerves jangling as their efforts over several 3- or 2-minutes exhibitions of violence are to be judged.

They await cliches from “and the new” to “and still”, nervously hoping that their arm shall go above their shoulders to be hailed as the victor.

Pundits will have had their say, fans will have spoken out loud their opinions and those who know, for once are clueless – why? Because the judgments about to be delivered are never truly certainties.

And then they come.

Decent and true judgments are seldom raised or heard about thereafter. The correct decisions made are never controversial because they are just that – right.

But the ones which leave everyone shaking their heads – they are too terrible to mention. Except nobody shuts up about them.

In the United Kingdom, we would consider our judges to be amongst the best in the world. In comparison we believed that anyone facing Marco Huck in Germany would need to take him out with an assault weapon to win, or anyone facing an Italian in an Italian ring better make sure they are the only one standings after 12 or 15 rounds.
But we have been guilty in the UK of stinkers.

Raymundo Beltran v Ricky Burns, Jack Catterall against Josh Taylor?

Your reputation for fairness is often defined by the adversity which challenges your assertions and here we have all been found somewhat lacking.

But it is easy to trawl through many of the worst decisions in boxing history. It is always fascinating to find out who got a nod for which their prowess in the ring did not deserve and it is always good to have a moment to reflect upon it.

But what about the clangers which did not affect the result?

How about those single cards that were not just out of kilter with the other judge’s decisions but were also wildly out of sorts with what everyone else witnessed? They get swept aside – why – because the right result is all that matters.

But is it?

If the high-profile contests have people officiating who struggle to get the right result or who are out of synch with their colleagues that makes things tricky. The right result was reached, people will say to me, what are you moaning about?

Let me explain.

Firstly, if there are high profile, recognizable judges making the wrong decisions in fights watched by thousands or even millions of people able to scrutinize their work, then the standard of officiating further down the levels might be worse, where there are less eyes and less scrutiny.

Might be.

I have no evidence of that. I have not spent any time looking at whether or not such an assertion is true, but it is true that the best tends to be picked for the high-profile scraps, leaving less experienced officials to take up the mantle in smaller hall shows. And read or listen to any journeyman. They will regale you of fights which they won, but, for the needs of their opponent, they have the decision go against them because they need to be seen to lose and the big ticket seller needs to win.

Without an overarching body, a regulatory one if you will, it means that various bodies can impose their rules and if Mrs. X is not that great a judge in one place, they may have still a gig to go to in another. If their rulings in one contest are a little generous for the defeated fighter, then a review of that might not happen when they are in another part of the country in another state, in the US or they might be needed to make a show happen in an out of sight place where they can “recalibrate” their judging…

Is there any revision training for judges who are consistently wrong or out of sorts? I do not see any and as for recent examples, one ripe for such reeducation is the judge who had a battered and beaten Joe Joyce ahead in his fight against Zhilei Zhang before it was waved off. This is simply one example of something people should be looking into.

What I do see is a lot of money at the top end swilling around and the sport getting a lot of criticism because of the way it is and is not run. In the UK, the largest regulatory body, the British Boxing Board of Control is simply not big enough to run this type of rehabilitative process – they will be struggling to get enough officials to all the events happening on a weekly basis. With the Millions being spent and invested at the top, maybe what is needed is for there to be more focus on the lifeblood of the sport and investment into the whole edifice before the cracks start to bring it down.

People misjudging is a decades old problem, corruption has been the tainted history of the sport for too long and there needs to be some investment in ensuring that, as far as possible, hands on hearts can allow sense to prevail and real change lead to judgments being made of sound and independent minds…Because these decisions do not come because they happen in isolation. Offenders do not begin at the top of the game, they are at it much early on and we should be doing more to root that out.

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