Newspaper decisions

No!

One newspaper might have it one way and another the other way. Say a boxer was from New York, the papers their might have him winning, and the boxer that was from Philly, their newspapers might have him winning. Sometimes the writers were even paid off to write the winner. When I do my research I go by as many newspapers as possible so I can get the real story.

 

A concensus is the way to go.

 

The telegram reports are the most notoriously unreliable. Sometimes a manager would wire a "result" through before the fight had even commenced, or finished, and it was often a race to the telegraph office to wire a false report. Or so I've heard.

Newspapers decisions were not official, but I think gamblers might still make use of them.

Reporters in those days were low-paid and took bribes to write false reports.

having said all that, are "official" decisions any better ?

 

bump

 

Also, did the newspaper writers use the same scoring criteria as the refs and judges? And what were those criteria, exactly?

 

This.

 

To my mind, a newspaper decision is a 'No Decision'. So, regardless of who was deemed the winner by the press, the referee couldn't score one way or the other and one assumes that the bout was extremely close.

 

What people rarely consider when discussing this topic is IF you can only win/or lose is by KNOCKOUT, that drastically changes how two people approach a fight.

A fighter who punches hard and has scored a number of KOs may spend a lot of time looking for openings and looking to land big bombs, and he wasn't worried about falling behind on points (because no one is scoring and no winner will be announced unless there is a KO).

On the flip side, if you didn't have a big KO punch, you may have spent the fight moving and jabbing and keeping busy to avoid the guy looking to set you up for the KO.

So, after 10 rounds or so, the guy who is trying to avoid the KO would likely appear busier and certainly would win more newspaper decisions, and the guy who was looking for the KO wouldn't care either way because he never feared the weaker boxer and there was no decision rendered anyway.

It's not like a ring announcer ever stood in the ring at the end of a no-decision contest and said, "The winner, according to the newspaper writers, is SO-AND-SO."

If nobody was KOed, they both shook hands at the end and left the ring.

You never heard who the newspaper guys thought won until the next day.

So I've never taken "no-decision" wins as any big accomplishment, regardless. They were all more or less exhibtions, unless someone got stopped.

And, after everyone had left the arena and gone home, it was easy for some writer to type that he felt "THIS GUY" won because he was "busier" (when that person was just slapping and trying to avoid being stopped) and the reporter didn't have to worry about the wrath of the fans - like some officials do when their scores are read immediately after the fight.

Being "busier" didn't mean squat in no-decisions, and everyone knew that going in. Only KOs mattered.

In fights were official decisions were rendered, BOTH boxers would naturally make more of an effort to win rounds and land more scoring punches.

 

Did newspaper writers tend to score rounds (and fights) for the busier fighters, even if the blows had minimal impact?

Were any fighters in that era known for consistently waiting around and eventually knocking out opponents who were outworking and outscoring them?

 

Yes.

 

There were too many fighters from that era to mention who were known for waiting around looking for a KO. Whether they were all being outboxed before they scored a KO, who the hell knows unless it was reported in a paper.

If a guy lost three rounds and knocked out someone in the fourth, he won by KO in four. All that mattered was the knockout. That's how you "won."

There weren't any official judges who were turning in their cards saying "I scored the first three rounds for the other guy." It didn't matter. They were never going to go to the scorecards because there weren't any official scorecards in no-decision fights.

 

Unless the newspapers pretty much unanimously reported the exact same thing, I don't take newspaper decisions too seriously.

 

This is nonsense. In the ND era fighters who were viewed as waiting or not doing anything were penalized. Often losing their purses or getting barred from fighting in that town. Show me all of these fighters from the era "known for waiting around" for a knockout. That's the most asinine thing Ive ever read coming from a guy who has historically criticized newspaper opinions as pointless, meaning you have an agenda in saying this and intend to give the impression that the record is skewed. Again, show me all of these guys from the ND era who lost a ton of fights because they "waited around hoping for a knockout." If you had done any historical research into the ND era at all you would see how ridiculous this comment was. It was far more common in that era to be tossed out of the ring without pay for slacking off than today and today fights are FAR more boring than they were in the ND era. What a crock of ****.

You can argue, rightly so, that some fighters took advantage of the ND rule by fighting just enough to survive and hear the final bell so they could later claim they won in far flung venues and continue their career or even if they were champions to preserve their titles. But how much this actually altered their win/loss ratio is debateable at best and a good argument can be made that if they were fighting to avoid a KO and just hear the final bell then they were likely not that confident of their ability to beat their opponent in the first place and thus likely to lose whether they tried their best or not. Meaning the ND loss was just as legitimate as the judges decision would have been. The bottom line is the cream rose to the top and the majority of newspaper decisions actually jived with each other. In my experience, and Ive looked at thousands of these things, its rare that you cant find a majority opinion for one outcome whether its a win for one fighter or another or a draw.

Furthermore, all the ND rule did was to take the heavy lifting off of judges and put it in the hands of newspapermen. Fighters got title shots based on newspaper decisions. Bets hinged based on the outcome of newspaper decisions. Offers from big venues were extended to fighters based on their newspaper wins. The only thing that muddied the waters were unreliable wire reports filed by unscrupulous managers in favor of their own fighters. This is easily overcome though by a quick scan of first hand local sources, its just most people are too lazy and limited to actually do the leg work. I don't know why a difference of opinions in a newspaper bout is any different than a difference of opinions in a bout with judges. That's a story as old as boxing. In the ND era the vast majority of newspaper writers were far more knowledgeable about the sport than most judges are today. Those guys were very often managers, judges, referees, promoters, ex-fighters, etc. in addition to living and breathing the sport as much or more than we do, being immersed in the gyms and on the fight beat. Youd be hard pressed in any era to find more qualified judges than guys like George Barton, ER Dickerson, or Ed Smith and those guys weren't the exception to the rule, they were norm across the country. It was newspapermen who drove the sport in the first quarter of the twentieth century. To call into the question the majority of those opinions is ignorance.

Whether or not a fighter got a bump because he was a hometown fighter has always been a factor in scoring whether it was done by a judge or not. That doesn't hold weight with me because bias is bias. The idea that judges are above reproach and hold no inherent bias is comical. The only thing a judges decision has over a newspaper decision is the stamp of officiality. But go look at the general forums RBR tallys and see how many, many of you, disregard some of those official decisions as illegitimate. So why should newspaper decisions be held in any less regard?

 

The criteria was entirely personal to the writer. To learn the criteria, you would have to read his article.