Wrong forum and 10 years too late, but valid nonetheless. Ironically felix himself was often to be accused of having "home cooked" decisions rendered in his own favour, although the only one I really have triuble with was the Macklin robbery. More recently we saw US judges corrupt the scoring in another middleweight fight; all three judges had Jacobs up against Pirog at the time of the stoppage!
Sturm took him to school and was the far superior boxer...He's a 4 or or 5 time world champ who has been a top 4 middleweight for over 11 years but still doesn;t get the respect he deserves.. yet De la hoya is seen as a ATG.. crazy! Shows the difference being from USA and being from Germany makes in boxiing. He also got robbed in the Geale and Soliman 1 fights...
A close fight, and as mentioned Strum needed a dominant performance to justify scrapping a big money fight in Oscar/Hopkins. In a boxing sense there is zero controversy here.
In a business sense of course Oscar had to win, in a boxing sense, the guy who won the fight was robbed of the victory, that is controversial in every way
Boxing and business go hand in hand. I do not think there is another sport that is more capitalistically driven. As long as de la Hoya was not totally dominated, why was there a need for Strum to win in the sports environment? Hopkins got more money for fighting de la Hoya, the promoters and the MGM Grand did better business, thus the public wanted the fight. Surely in a society that we live in, it was better all round? As for Strum, he could play up the unlucky loss, and a decade later people would still talk about it. I suspect that would not be the case if Strum had won and then lost to Hopkins; he would have been a footnote in history, like Hopkins' defences against Hakkar or Joppy or Council or Vand...
Scoring in boxing is indeed personal, but I struggle to see how Strum schooled de la Hoya. It was a close fight, where the bigger name got the benefit of the doubt.
