King Kaufman's Sports Daily

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A fix boxing needs: Arum to retire? [PERMALINK]

I don't know who should have been declared the winner of the Oscar De La Hoya-Shane Mosley rematch Saturday in Las Vegas. I didn't see the fight. Those who did are split, with more than one observer noting that those present at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas seemed to think Mosley had won, while those who watched it on TV favored De La Hoya, who lost by unanimous decision.

De La Hoya, who also lost the first fight between the two, says he'll put his considerable resources to work in launching an investigation into the judging. Boxing is badly in need of fixing, but not the kind of fix De La Hoya's lawyers will be looking for. In fact, if promoter Bob Arum follows through on his threat to quit boxing over Saturday's decision, De La Hoya will have done more for the sport by losing than he ever did as a winner.

Arum and Don King are the chief architects of boxing's current reputation in the sports world, which lies somewhere between that of pickpockets and pickpockets' assistants. To get a handle on the kind of slimy character Arum is, you only have to hear his most famous quote: "Yesterday I was lying. Today, I'm telling the truth." In the early '90s, when NBC dropped boxing despite decent ratings, a network executive remarked that when boxing guys came in for meetings, everybody at the network made sure to watch their wallets.

It's wishful thinking, of course, to imagine Arum and guys like him leaving boxing and some sort of John McCain-approved national commission stepping in to create order, sanity and fairness, for fighters and fans alike. But as sick and fading as boxing is, Arum's blowhard claim in the fight's aftermath that gamblers had gotten to the judges and fixed the outcome was just ridiculous.

The judges came from three different continents, and all are respected officials who were approved by both fighters' camps. If gamblers are going to fix a fight, it seems a lot more efficient to try to buy off or sabotage a fighter than to pay off judges, whose opinions could very well be rendered obsolete by a knockout. Arum pointed to the officials all scoring the fight the same way -- 115-113, meaning seven rounds to five, for Mosley -- as evidence that the fix was in, but he knows better. The judges arrived at those scores by disagreeing wildly about individual rounds in the first half of the fight.

The divergence of opinion among viewers of the fight shows that it was a close one. As Nevada Athletic Commission director Marc Ratner put it, "If it went the other way, Mosley's camp would have been the ones protesting."

Judging a close fight is difficult work. It's not just a matter of counting punches, which is tough enough, despite the statistics confidently presented as objectively accurate on boxing telecasts. There are judgments to be made about things like ring generalship and the effectiveness of the punches that do land. Boxing experts sitting right next to each other and watching the same fight can disagree wildly, and that certainly happened Saturday.

The Toronto Globe and Mail's Stephen Brunt, for example, a world-class pug writer, wrote that he "thought that Mosley won going away," and he "found the scoring absurdly close." Bob Mee, another champion typist, wrote in London's Daily Telegraph, "At the end of 12 high-class rounds I had no doubt that De La Hoya's more accurate punching had staved off Mosley's powerful second-half assaults to win -- by three points on my card."

More than one writer has noted the difference in the way those who attended the fight and those who saw it on TV judged the fight, with people in the building tending to think Mosley won. Even the heavily pro-De La Hoya crowd at the MGM Grand didn't raise much of a fuss when Mosley's hand was raised. People who watched the tube, on the other hand, tended to agree with announcers Jim Lampley, George Foreman and Larry Merchant that De La Hoya was the clear winner.

It's long been clear to me that watching a fight in person and watching that same fight on TV are two very different experiences. I've never been able to figure out if one gives you a better, more true view than the other, allowing for better judging. In my days as a boxing writer, I would watch tapes of fights I'd been to and score them again, to see if my perception of a bout changed when the method of viewing did. My scoring tended to be pretty similar to what I'd seen from ringside, but of course that's an unscientific experiment. As a TV viewer I already knew how I had seen the fight, and I'm sure that colored my judgment even as I tried to ignore it.

HBO will replay the fight Saturday at 9:45 p.m. EDT/6:45 p.m. PDT, so those of us who skipped it the first time can judge for ourselves. I wonder if, knowing that TV watchers tended to favor De La Hoya, we'll see the fight that way too. If you watch it, let me know how you scored it.

Meanwhile, De La Hoya will launch his lawyers. It's always a temptation to cry fix when there's a boxing decision you don't like, but it seems to me if this fight were going to be fixed, it would go De La Hoya's way. Mosley won the first fight between the two, so a De La Hoya win would set the stage nicely for a lucrative third match. The crowd, which can influence judges consciously or subconsciously, favored De La Hoya. And it's De La Hoya who's big business in Las Vegas and on TV. He sells tickets and pay-per-view orders -- take that into account when weighing the announcers' championing of his cause -- and creates buzz like no other fighter going. If the money interests are putting the fix in, they're putting it in for him.

I think De La Hoya will realize all of this once he calms down, and he'll quietly let his "investigation" drop. But whatever its outcome, if his loss to Mosley really does convince the oily Arum to retire from boxing, he will have done the sport a great service. If only we could have a decision so bad that Don King quits in a huff.

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