Fights in which people disagree on the winner

The great Hugh McIlvanney had Hagler winning it too and told Leonard to his face.

 

Jason Welborn versus :
Ryan Aston
Craig Cunningham
Matthew Macklin
Tommy Langford twice.

 

Out of curiosity how did Lenny respond?

 

Not well. Terminated the conversation and Shug was ushered away.

 

I just watched Ellis-Patterson for the first time a little over a week ago and I thought Patterson won pretty clearly, even if not by a wide margin.

 

I can't for the life of me see why anyone would be confident about who won that fight. To feel any such confidence myself I'd have to know just how much harder and more flush Hagler's leaping/lunging shots were than Leonard's flurries. The only thing that is clear to me is that Leonard far out-landed Hagler -but this ain't Olympic fencing.

Whenever the older guys discuss that fight, I get the strong impression that I'm missing a lot of contemporaneous you-had-to-be-there context.

 

Hopefully it’s okay to post more contemporary fights in here, but I would say both Golovkin vs Canelo fights (especially the first one) and Kovalev vs Ward I.

 

GGG vs Canelo 2 personally I thought GGG won
Kovalev vs Ward 1, I personally thought Kovalev won
Whyte vs Chisora 1, I personally thought Whyte won
Muhammad Ali vs Jimmy Young
I personally thought Young won
I can’t think of any more, there will be though

 

every split decision ever

 

Lewis Holy 1 given a draw... Everyone disagrees and gives it Lewis

 

A couple that I disagree on that are lesser known but that I've watched recently - Golota vs Norris, Golota got the decision, I scored it a draw and Larry Holmes vs Maurice Harris, Holmes got a gift there imo, I thought Harris won it.

 

I think I scored one of the Hop and Taylor fights as a draw
De La Hoya didn't 'beat' Pernell
Ali lost the rubbermatch with Norton and likely the Young fight too,
Lewis definitely beat Holyfield in the first fight
I have scored JLC as just beating Floyd in the first fight at times.

It always comes down to your stylistic preferences and biases - sometimes, you just have to turn the commentary off - it's very hard to divorce your own opinion about a fighter when watching a fight retrospectively to provide an objective assessment of the result e.g. knowing the No Mas result and the first Liston and Ali result, watching the fights again properly, you can see they weren't complete blow outs on the scorecards.

 

Do we really need this once or twice a month???

 

I've yet to see one person who actually scored it a draw (or better yet for Holy) and would be interested in someone making a case.

 

Speaking of drawn fights...Has anyone seen a fight which was scored a draw which they absolutely agreed with?

Let me clarify what I mean. I'm discounting blatant highway jobs like Chavez-Whitaker, Burnett-Conteh, Lewis-Holyfield I etc. I'm talking more about fights which were generally pretty close and yielded a draw. Usually when this is the case, you can live with it and don't think one fighter was outright robbed, even if there is a general consensus that one guy deserved it more, or if you as an individual did. Take the first McCallum-Toney fight as an example. I feel Toney won the fight (think that's broad the consensus without being universal) and the draw was a lot kinder to McCallum than it was to him - but I have to acknowledge that it was close enough to make a draw an acceptable result, even if Toney was a little unlucky. The first Marquez-Pacquiao fight is a good example, too. There's no way in my eyes that Pacquiao won that fight, but an argument could be made that he didn't lose it, either. If anyone deserved to be deemed the winner, it would have been Marquez, and I think he won it by a couple of rounds or so...But again, it was close enough for me to live with the draw without kicking up too much of a stink.

So usually, in close fights which ended a draw, the result is a bit kinder to one man than the other, even if it's a reasonable result. But can any of you remember a drawn fight which you felt was equally fair to both men, and in which neither fighter had any cause for grievance at all?

There's only one which really sticks out for me, and that was JC Chavez against Miguel Angel Gonzalez in 1998. That one ended a draw, and it's the only one I can think of where I felt that a draw was the only possible outcome. I felt every round was pretty clear and straightforward to score, and they split them right down the middle. I don't think I've ever seen a unanimous draw on all three cards after a full bout, but that would have been the one time it was appropriate.

Can anyone else think of any draws which they felt were the perfect result?