Scoring controversies in big fights are almost as old as the sport itself, and yet as we move towards 2025 boxing is yet to come up with a workable solution to negate the risk of scoring squabbles, and talk of foul play, when it comes to fights that go to the cards.
If you strip it right back, from the moment the sport was conceived, boxing was designed to be one of the easiest of all sports to understand. The rules book then was pretty sparce in terms of content, and while the ‘last man standing’ is victorious mindset of boxing’s early years was not particularly nuanced, the right person almost always won (often in unsafe and barbaric circumstances we grant you).
Things eventually became a lot safer, with championship fights first moving to 15-rounds and now the universally accepted 12-round distance (and 10-rounds for women).
So, in the modern game, unless there is a stoppage, those completed rounds are scored separately by three judges, and their scores determine the winner.
Judging in fighting sports has always been a huge issue. Some judges will score favourably towards aggressive fighters, while others fonder of the ‘sweet science’ will prefer and score for a fighter who can control a fight from distance and hit without being hit.
And truth be known some of the judges are just straight up trash and should not be in the chair to start with.
In professional boxing what the judges should be scoring are clean and effective punching, effective aggression, defence, and ring generalship. Yet given the fact that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, opinions often differ wildly. And this is what causes the controversy.
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Due to the frustratingly fragmented nature of its overall governance, the noble art has been much slower than other sports to embrace innovation or tech.
It is interesting that other sports have utilised technology to make sure the big calls are correct. In tennis there is a computerised Hawk-Eye line calling system that gets to the bottom of any close line calls made by the officials, while in football VAR has arrived with a bang in recent seasons.
Could VAR work in boxing? WBC Mauricio Sulaiman and founder and CEO of BOXXER Ben Shalom are both on record saying they feel it can. But it would be tough.
The frenetic nature of a prize fight - and the lack of breaks in the action - mean the notion that video replays could be used to overturn judges’ decisions after a fight are sadly unworkable.
How to stop the cries of 'robbery'?
In terms of reviewing the action during a contest, obviously, we have a 60-second window between rounds, but is the minute break long enough to review VAR footage and make a decision about a low blow or whether a cut was caused by a head clash or a legal blow for example?
Former WBA world heavyweight champion John Ruiz memorably said "Boxing is the only sport where you can get robbed without a gun" after losing a hotly disputed majority decision – and his cherished WBA belt - in Berlin to Nicolay Valuev in 2008.
Cries of robbery are common in big fights, with the statement being thrown around on a regular basis. In the age of social media any decision that goes against conventional opinion is immediately branded a ‘robbery’.
However, the confusion around scoring, which leads to online outrage and bandwagon jumping, has less to do with actual corruption and large sums of cash changing hands in brown envelopes, and more to do with the subjective nature of scoring a fight.
With this in mind, the sport is probably long overdue a widespread review of how fights are scored.
It is hard for the general public to understand how a fight is scored. In this era of dumbed down instant gratification a consequence of that is that it will surely be hard to draw in new audiences when they do not understand how the sport is scored and how a fight is won.
Fans, promoters and even fighters crying ‘robbery’ will never die out completely, but if the sport can somehow make use of new tech without disrupting the violently rhythmic percussion of a prize fight, we may at least be able to swerve discussing these so-called robberies every weekend.
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