Pacquiao vs Marquez Was Biggest Robbery Ever According to Nacho Beristain

After reading the countless articles, blogs, and comments people have written over the last couple of days since the fight, what I think has become very clear to me is that really all this debating about who won, whether it was robbery or it was not, is really a dabate about clarity, about standards, about perception, and in some degree a debate about empathy.

Everyone seems to have an idea of what the judging criteria should be, clean punching, effective agressiveness, effective defense, ring generalship, to name the ones most mentioned. Yet the problem is that how each person interprets each one of this is different, to make matters worse, each one of us gives different weighting factors or bias to each of this, so for some agressiveness may be more important than defense or vice-versa. If the problem were only with the fans or the media it would be one thing, but even the official judges carry this baggage, and Keith Kaizer of the NSAC said as much in an interview a day or two ago. To me this is really a problem of standards and perception and not necessarily bad judging on anyone’s part, when anyone can see whatever they want, and assess it in whatever way they want, then it is no surprise that results can be so controversial when a fight is close.

The next issue, clarity is a by product of the preivious. since we really don’t know how the official judges came to their decision, what was the criteria each one of them used?, how each one of them values each one of those criteria?, it’s anyone’s guess how they came to the decision. When someone calls something robbery I guess it is simply a leftover from boxing’s history of fixed fights, I think in reality what people say is it was an unjust or unfair decision, and with good reason, if based on your criteria fighter A should win, to hear that fighter B won will always appear as an unjust decision, but again, the problem is that everyone is judging things differently. If the judging scales are not only not the same across people, but also people don’t know what everyone else uses (particularly with regards to the official judges) no matter what arguments are used, agreement will never be reached. If the judges call a fight the same way you did in their score you assume they have the judging criteria you have, even if your round by round socres are different, but reality is that who knows what each of them saw. You assume the judge did a good or fair job because he came to the same or a similar conclusion as you did, but in reality you could have been assessing the fight in completely opposite ways, so that had you known that judge’s criteria you might be tempted to call the judge a putz.

The final issue that I’ve seen is a bit of lack of emphaty, and for this I don’t mean empathy between us fans, but to the fighters, the guys actually doing the training and getting hit for a living. We are quick to call a fighter whinny if he complains of a bad call, we use phrases like well it was a close fight or a close round that could have gone either way, he should just move on, or he still got paid for it. I guess as a fan I really have no problem with this comments and to a degree I agree, as a fan none of this comments really affects me, what happened in a fight really has no bearing to my personal life, as a fan I simply move on to next weekend’s fight and put things in my rear view mirror. But I don’t know I guess that post-fight interview of Marquez really made something snap inside me. Everything from the entire picture to everything he said and how he said it (and sorry but the english translation was awful), it was shocking to me, it was not the image of a defeated fighter but of a broken man. Here was a man who prior to the fight most people saw as another stepping stone in the path of boxing’s biggest star, who people saw as old, as too small, too slow, someone who would likely be blown out easily, someone who would be lucky to not get badly hurt given the damage Manny had done to bigger men like Margarito and Cotto, someone who according to Ariza would have no chance even if God himself stepped into the ring to give him a hand. Against all odds, he had the fight of his life yet he lost, whether it was fair or not depends on what I mentioned earlier, in his mind he clearly had done enough, and he honestly felt that the judges have him a bad deal again. To make an analogy, they told him he was crazy for even attempting to climb Mount Everest, yet when he did, they told him that was not really the top of the mountain. We can shrug it off, but what he said was that the judges can take away the entire work and sacrifice of a lifetime, and its not fair. Its not fair not because they necessarily did a bad job, but again, because who knows how they decided that. I’d never call anyone, Marquez or any other fighter a whinny if he felt he got a bad decision, because at the end ot the day that decision does affect him, it affects his legacy, his career, his future income, why should he just shut up about it. I mean I think most of us complain at the restaurant when they give us the wrong meal or the food is cold, or to the phone company if they overcharge us, and those are pretty inconsequential things from a lifetime point of view. We would all complain like mad if we felt unjustly treated at work. Staying on the topic, as a fan I understand the notion and saying that it was a close round, therefore it could have gone to either one, or won’t complain if one or the other gets it, or I’m happy with either one getting it. Thinking as a fighter I would see that as a punch in the face, not because the round or the fight were not really close, but because if a person says that either outcome would be fair, in essence what they are saying is let’s just flip a coin and whatever lands that’s the result and its still a good one. I know a lot of people don’t like draws but if you are saying that a round or a fight is so close that it can go to both then in a way what you are saying is that it should be a draw, therefore I think that’s what the call should be, it may not be what us fans want to hear, but I think it at leasst is fair in that it does not feel like a flip of a coin where one fighter simply happened to be the unlucky one.

All these long ramblings to mean that if boxing wantss to get rid of controversial decisions or at least minimize them, it should reform the way it judges fights. For example, instead of simply judging rounds 10-9 with three judges, why not have one judge for every criteria that boxing wants to judge, one for aggressiveness, one for clean punching, etc, and each judge gives a score to each fighter per round, plus added point s for knockouts. At the end, you can either add the points per round (if you want to keep things on who won more rounds), or add the pointss from all rounds at the very end, so that way there is a more clear way of how each fighter was rated on each category, and the fighters and the fans know what the criteria was and that it is always the same.

If you don’t want to go that far, then at the very least have the judges meet the fighters and trainer prior to the fight like the ref does to go over what things each one will focus on, so everyone knows what the refs are looking for. If for example all three judges liked fighters that come forward over precise counter punching Marquez had no chance of winning that fight no matter what he did, since his fight strategy was to fight that way, so eventhough he effectively forced Manny to fight his way he still lost. In addition like I said before, if a round is too close to call or you feel that it can go either way and it would be a fair call, then it should be called a draw.

Sorry for the long post, sometimes I get a bit carried away when I write. Those were my 2 cents (or 2 dollars based on the length)