There should be no draws in boxing
Posted: Tuesday March 16, 1999 11:31 AM
So Lennox Lewis was robbed. The public was mugged of some 70 million dollars. It was a bleak night for boxing. Yada, yada, yada! While all the hand-wringing and recriminations are perfectly understandable, surely the main thing that should come out of Saturday night's heavyweight fiasco is a commitment to assuring that it never happens again.
Leaving aside the issue of corruption, which may or may not be proven by one of the three investigations currently going on into the judges conduct, the fact remains that the system itself is badly flawed and in need of a change.
Personally, I would start by displaying the judges scorecards on an electric scoreboard throughout the fight. It's one thing to slant your round-by-round verdict in secrecy, however it would take bare-faced cheek of Don King proportions to do so in the full glare of public disapproval.
Let's face it, once the verdict was announced, judge Larry O'Connell, and more blatantly, judge Jean Williams, had already done their worst. There was no going back. Conversely, if their suspect judgement had been barracked as early as round 5, Lewis' best round which Williams inexplicably awarded to Holyfield, they may have thought twice about continuing on their apparently dubious mission.
Furthermore, in what other sport are the participants kept in the dark about what they have to do to win? Even if you lay aside the injustice of the situation, the fact that Lennox Lewis was sent into the final round unaware that he needed to win it to get a draw is patently ludicrous. What's the big mystery? Tell the fighters how they're doing by making the scoring public, and at the same time expose and challenge those judges who are not judging fairly.
Of course public scoring would not preclude the idea of the result ending in a draw, and that is also something that needs to be addressed. Why settle for a draw? We've eliminated stalemates from many other sports: the tie-breaker in tennis, the penalty shootout in soccer, sudden-death overtime in the Super Bowl. Why not in boxing? The fans hate ties. The fighters likewise. And as far as the money-men are concerned, a close decision always results in a multi-million dollar rematch anyway, so a decisive result is no more damaging to their profit margins than a draw would be.
How would we eliminate draws? Any one of a number of ways. Use the punch statistics as an arbiter. We have the technology. Lennox Lewis outpunched Evander Holyfield by 23 percent during Saturday's bout. Dismissing that figure as a tie-breaker strikes me as very strange in a sport where obvious aggression is one of the prime factors judges use to determine a points winner.
Alternatively, let's have a fourth judge, whose only job is to provide a decisive verdict. He or she would need to be independent, having nothing to do with any of the sanctioning bodies, and the person should probably be someone who can read the fight more subtly than the desk-bound judges, from personal experience. Former referee, Mills Lane, would be my own choice, for his big-fight experience, and his proven integrity in and out of the ring.
If the idea of an individual judge is unpalatable, why not shorten the bout, and have a tiebreak round. Anyone who watches boxing on a regular basis will know that from the 10th-round, if not a round or two earlier, the fighters are usually spent. So why not shorten the fight, only adding an 11th round if the judges scorecards show a draw. The winner of the decisive round would thus be the champion, and if that too was a draw, we'd then go to round 12. In the unlikely event of that also ending in a tie, we could then go to the punch statistics as I suggested earlier. If there's no result after that, we can only assume we're looking at one guy fighting his shadow.
Whatever the solution, there has to be one, or boxing itself is headed into oblivion. In my view, the so-called "noble art" came very close to suicide on Saturday, and only with some drastic and immediate changes can it have any hope of pulling back from the brink.
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