The Great Prize Fight for $2000 between Bradley and Rankin by flickr user Library Company of Philadelphia used via a creative commons license.The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation blew it on Saturday evening.
Put Simply: The judging in the Malinaggi/Diaz fight was atrocious.
I say this as a huge fan of Juan "Baby Bull" Diaz who had a rooting interest for him winning. As a matter of fact, I deviated from my typical method of scoring a fight (watching the fight with video only, no sound) and watched the fight a second time with the sound on to try and take crowd-noise into consideration. My cards?
Card 1: Malinaggi 115 Diaz 113
Card 2: Malinaggi 115 Diaz 114
In both cases I had Malinaggi barely pulling out a win, but that's with the advantage of multiple angles, HBO cameras and HD. A judge, while there, is faced with only one good angle, and a certain amount of guesswork.
That being said judge Gayle Van Hoy's 118-110 scorecard in favor of Diaz is inexcusable in its degree of wrong. That's 10 rounds to 2 in favor of Diaz. If you saw the fight you know how impossible that scorecard is.
Unfortunately the East-coast dominated boxing media is skewing its opinions too far toward New York. The 115-113 Diaz scorebard of judge Raul Caiz is entirely reasonable. It was a close fight and an argument can be made that Diaz won. I won't agree with it, but I could defend it. (Especially after watching the fight the second time, when I included a 10/10 round on my card).
The real point here is that Texas' Combative Sports regulation is pathetic. Obviously some updated legislation strengthening the regulatory agency and some new leadership is in order.
Here are some items that need changing:
1. Disallow promotor selection and hiring of judges. - The regulating board should hire all of the judges and the referee. There should be no bias on the part of the official selection process.
2. Add a $1 ticket tax to combative sports events to pay for the commission. - It also should pay for fight judges and officials (subsidized by a portion of the promoters licensing fee).
3. Adopt strict, new rules for judge selection. - If there is a hometown advantage, then every fight should have a judge from each fighter's home region, and one neutral judge from a different region of the country.
4. Standardized judges review - In the case of Von Hoy. His judgement should be open to review and explenation of the rounds he gave to Diaz.
5. Cut-man certification. - Cut-men should be licensed and regulated, after all they're providing medical triage services, they should have some basic competency. (although not a medical degree).
Last Saturday's fight was a black-eye for combative sports in Texas. There's a lot of money to be made by having a strong fighting commission in place and actively bringing fights to the State.
The next Lege should seriously consider creating one, and Rick Perry should really consider making changes at the top of the current one.