Dear Santa: Please Bring Down the Chimney Better Scoring in Boxing for 2016!

By Andrew “Drew The Picture” Hames

As we enter the 2016 boxing year, we should probably all thank the boxing gods and Santa alike for delivering us a rather festivity-filled 2015 calendar, featuring the long-awaited “Fight Of The Century”, which may have been underwhelming to most, but let’s not forget that the world was driven into virtual Mayweather-Pacquiao atheism for 6-years, losing all faith and belief that the fight would ever even exist. The re-emergence of boxing on network television through the Premiere Boxing Series not only provided even the casual fans an opportunity to unite or reunite with the sport without the prerequisite of cable subscriptions, but it even aided in at least temporarily ending the “Cold War” between Top Rank and Golden Boy, which has left many potential great fights and potentially great fighters as casualties over the past few years (Ironically, Bob Arum and Oscar formed an alignment in the courtroom against PBC Promoter Al Haymon, but whatever gets the ball rolling).

We got to see Canelo Alvarez solidify himself as a top tier champion in a long-awaited fight with Miguel Cotto, Golovkin try his hand in PPV, Terence Crawford continue his dominance in a higher weight class, Sergey Kovalev continuing to “Krush” Light Heavyweights and even a late pulse in arguably the lightest Heavyweight division in the history of boxing eras. We even got to see boxing score a significant blow in its battle with MMA with the meteoric rise and fall of beloved UFC former champion Ronda Rousey receiving a humbling boxing lesson in a cage match by former boxer and current UFC Champion Holly Holm.Yes, Santa left the stockings quite stuffed this year.

With all this in mind, it almost feels greedy to demand more of the boxing gods, or Santa’s toy supply, but the beauty of the fight game from a fan’s standpoint is the fantasy aspect, which occasionally works its way into reality. This is why my 2016 advance Christmas wish list will be for Santa to deliver less of something for once: Horrible scorecards and robberies…
It’s often difficult to distinguish the difference between corruption and incompetence in our beloved sport, but I believe that a level of incompetence has been instilled in the very criteria of ringside scoring, and urgently needs to be addressed before further tragedy strikes. The tragedy begins with the four primary criteria judges are instructed to score rounds on, and ultimately fights for, namely being “clean punching, effective aggressiveness, ring generalship and defense”. I personally believe this system to be flawed by nature.

All boxing fans would likely concur with the significance clean punching has on a fight (defined as all punches landing on the face, side of the head, or the front or side ), but I contend that the idea of placing effective aggressiveness behind it is somewhat redundant and causes undue confusion in scoring. Effective aggressiveness ideally suggests that a boxer demonstrates his upper hand in a fight by “consistently and successfully coming forward in a controlled manner”. This sounds good in theory, except that having already covered clean punching, it leaves room for serious question marks. How “successful” would a fighter be merely for coming forward if the punches he’s throwing aren’t landing cleanly? Do we still score the punches that weren’t landed cleanly as well as the punches landing cleanly? Wouldn’t this defeat the purpose, as well as defy all sports logic? This proposition appears, at least to me, to be a form of rewarding achievement over effort, because one would figure that, by way of comparison, a basketball team could take a thousand field goal attempts, and if none of them actually went in the basket, they’d still have 0 on the scoreboard. Points aren’t rewarded for hitting the rim.

In addition, doesn’t this scoring system essentially discriminate against tactical or calculated boxers in favor of the more aggressive fighter, regardless of whether he’s effective while coming forward or not? Who determines the point value of a blocked punch versus a clean, scoring blow? And since the criteria of defense mandates that judges must credit opponents who execute skilled defensive maneuvers, how do we accurately determine who to award the higher points to in an exchange between a puncher coming forward with blocked “effective aggressiveness”, and the opponent who skillfully evaded the entire barrage? And doesn’t “ring generalship” honestly come down to the perception of the observer? For instance, wouldn’t a counter-puncher prefer his opponent to be coming forward in the first place? If he’s landing while backing up against a steadily advancing opponent only scoring clean blows on occasion, should the perception automatically favor the idea that the aggressor is still dictating the action? It sure would seem to leave a lot of aspects of a fight open to interpretation.

The problems somewhat intersect here. Having both clean punching and effective aggressiveness in the same criteria basically implies that aggressiveness will be rewarded one way or the other, and awarding defense at the same time can really complicate the mathematical factors of round scoring. Ring generalship is an assumption at best, because realistically, we’re not in a fighter’s head to automatically assume that the style or pace of the fight isn’t going exactly the way he planned, when he very well could be planning to tire frustrate his opponent in the process of allowing him to come forward. Therefore, it would appear to me that the only provable criteria to judge a fight off is the same basic one we naturally use when observing a street fight, which is “who’s landing the clean, telling blows”. It’s the one clear aspect of a fight that can be verified even by the most casual observer, and ultimately spells control of a fight better than any assumed aspect, such as a fighter merely coming forward and throwing punches. Of course, this leads to an interesting problem as well, which is the fact that judges often can’t tell what punches land clean and which don’t, pending their vantage point from the ensuing action. Fortunately, I spoke to Santa and the boxing gods alike, and we’ve collectively devised a potential alternative and New Year’s Resolution for boxing…

Considering the very issues we’ve listed, as well as the additional factors of crowd noise and commentary essentially separating the fight we see from the fight we hear, as opposed to the traditional routine of placing the judges on different sides of the ring, why not allow them to incorporate what so many fight fans have come to do recently, in watching the fight on mute? Ringside judges could conceivably be placed in a sound-proof room, and even allowed to confer and review the action they’re seeing, devoid of any outside influences or unfounded assumption. It would seem to be a more just scoring system, or at least a sound attempt at rectifying the problems of yesteryear. I’m sure this wouldn’t alleviate robberies or poor decisions all together, since corrupt promoters, corrupt networks and basic incompetence would still exist, but I wouldn’t mind if Santa stuck a new judging system under my tree for 2016.
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