Was Louis vs Walcott 1 a Robbery??? Analyzing the Scorecards

Many people have called the verdict of this bout a robbery against Walcott, but I've never seen those people bring up the official scorecards despite nearly all of them agreeing with Ruby Goldstein's score 6-7-2 in favor of Walcott.
Even worse, many watch the limited highlight reel and give the fight to Walcott, despite the fact that only 15 minutes of action are available out of the 45 minutes of fighting that happened that night.
Considering that 70% of the fight footage doesn't exist, it is impossible to score it by video, so I will look into the official cards to see if I can come up with a new score to find the winner.

To determine which fighter won which round, I'll check how many judges voted for a fighter for a particular round. If all 3 agreed on one guy winning that round, chances are he probably won it.
Otherwise, if the judges aren't all in agreement I will use the points system to award rounds. For this fight they awarded anywhere between 1-3 points to the winner of each round, the more points a fighter got for each round, the more dominantly they won that round.
For example, Walcott knocked Louis down in round one was awarded the round by all three judges and was awarded 3 points by each of them.

Now if for a round neither fighter has all three judges on their side, and they also were merely given the round with one point, I will award the round to the fighter who was given the round by at least two of the three judges.

The reason I am not immediately awarding the rounds based on majority rating is because Louis would be the clear winner by default as he had more rounds given to him by at least two out of three judges than Walcott (the end result would be 9-6 Louis).
Once you judge each round using absolute agreement between the three judges and the points system, you get a closer result between the two fighters.
This will lead to rounds that were awarded to Louis by two of the judges being instead given to Walcott because the one judge who gave it to him did so with 2 or 3 points, which shows dominance, as opposed to Louis with just one point given by two judges.

Here is the link to the official judges score cards that I will use to make a re-evaluated score: https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto's/judges-score-cards-from-joe-louis-james-walcott-match-dec-nieuwsfotos/514891438

Each round Walcott won with a clear lead (all three officials backing him) there is a bold red

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next to it.
For Louis it's a bold orange

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.
Rounds that neither fighter won on all three cards are marked as "Unclear".
For Unclear rounds where a fighter was given two or more points, it will be signified with the fighter's letter&color, (

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or

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) and the number of points next to it.

The scorecards re-evaluated: https://imgur.com/a/o71KTBJ

Walcott gets rounds 1, 2, 4, 12 with all three judges backing him.
Louis gets rounds 3, 6, 14, 15.
Neither of the fighters showed dominance during the middle rounds with the exception of Louis winning the sixth.
The scoring is 4 - 4 - 7 which is a Draw.

But when I award each fighter the rounds where they won with extra points, Walcott gets rounds 8 and 11, Louis gets rounds 10 and 13.
The scoring is now a 6 - 6 - 3 Draw.

The remaining rounds that are still Unclear are the middle rounds 5, 7 and 9. Neither fighter got more than one point on these rounds so to determine the winner I will use Majority Verdict and score the round for whichever fighter got the round on two out of the three cards.
Round 5 is L1 E0 L1 a Louis round.
Round 9 is W1 E0 W1 a round for Walcott.
Round 7 is L1 W1 L1 it's again a Louis round
Score: 8-7 a super tight decision win for Louis.

But what if I go with Ruby Goldstein's scorecard, the official who gave the fight to Walcott, to determine the three questionable rounds?
He scored 5 and 9 a Draw and round 7 for Walcott making it 6 - 7 - 2 for Walcott , again, a very close Decision win (which also happens to be his official scorecard).

With all that in mind, it becomes challenging to determine who clearly deserved the win and the probable case seems to be a draw, considering that tallying up the rounds for which each fighter was dominant leads to scores 4 - 4 - 7 and 6 - 6 - 3, both of which are Draws. The swing rounds made Louis the winner by a fraction but Walcott could've easily been the one to win the fight if just one more of those even rounds was scored in his favor.

But what if the two judges were biased against Walcott? What if the judges thought punches Louis was missing were actually connecting? What if they couldn't appreciate Walcott's fine boxing style and were as befuddled as Louis himself and they couldn't understand what was going on?

Goldstein obviously doesn't have to answer for any of these as he scored it for Walcott, so it leaves us with Frank Forbes and Marty Monroe.

Frank Forbes voted 5-4 in favor of Walcott for Walcott vs Elmer Ray 1, a fight which was given to Ray by the two other judges. Ray was listed number 44 in The Ring magazine's 100 Greatest Punchers.
Forbes could appreciate Walcott's fine boxing against a puncher and be the only judge to award him the fight.
As for any bias towards Louis, he gave Joe the lowest score out of the three judges in his fight against Ezzard Charles, a 2-13.

Marty Monroe on the other hand never officiated any Walcott fight before or after Louis-Walcott 1 after which he retired.
He did however act as a judge in Ezzard Charles vs Elmer Ray 1, and he was the only one of the three to give the fight to the backtracking boxer Charles with a wide margin of 8-2.
Edit: Monroe officiated during Louis vs Conn 1, he gave Louis the least amount of rounds, his scorecard being 7-4 in favor of Conn. The other two had it 7-5 and 6-6.

Neither of the two judges ever showed discrimination against Walcott, nor did they show bias towards Louis or any bias towards the puncher in boxer vs puncher matches, so to say they couldn't tell Walcott was slipping punches is a baseless claim. To say they couldn't evaluate smart boxing and only scored on aggression is equally false.

 

Using the cards the conclusion is similar.
Walcott is clearly the superior in rounds 1, 2, 4 and 12, while Louis wins 3, 6, 14 and 15 on all three cards, which makes them dead even with 7 undecided rounds left to spare.

Now this is something I challenged near the end of the post. Forbes could appreciate Walcott's retreating counter punching style when he awarded Jersey Joe the first Elmer Ray fight, despite the two other judges giving it to Ray.
Monroe similarly awarded Ezzard Charles the first fight with Ray despite the other two judges disagreeing with him, and based on the description on Boxrec, Charles had to do some holding and surviving against the ever advancing Ray.

If booing crowds meant you lost the fight, Larry Holmes never won a fight in his prime. Louis was expected to crush the less renowned Walcott and almost ended up getting knocked out by him. Considering that Louis didn't return the favor of knocking Walcott down, it's understandable why the crowd was disappointed with the decision after Walcott shocked them not once, but twice and was never in grave danger throughout the fight, repeated jabs to the face be damned.

 

Thanks Saintpat, agreed.

 

Unfortunately for many, it's a grave sin. Louis is only allowed to win via crushing knockout. If he ever happens to be behind before stopping the opponent or wins a decision then that means he was befuddled, out-boxed and his opponent got robbed/got dumb and lost their lead etc. etc.

 

No one is making excuses for anyone. If Walcott had won based on my criteria of judging the scorecards, i would have showed it in the post.
No need to skew the poll by the way, 16 of the writers at the venue saw it in favor of Louis, 24 in favor of Walcott, that's 40% for Louis, 60% for Walcott.
You just ignored the entire post and parroted the same opinion you've been parroting for ages. The judges had no evident bias towards Louis as I demonstrated. Forbes gave Louis the least amount of points in his match against Charles. He gave Walcott the most amount of points in his loss against Ray (more than Ray).
Monroe scored 7-4 in favor of Conn in 1941, he awarded the least amount of rounds to Louis in that fight, but I guess he'd score it for him even if "he dropped dead in the middle of the ring". Some stellar argumentation right here.
Btw hasn't Mcvey already shared a ton of quotes from Louis saying he won the fight, right after the bout and years later? I could have sworn i've seen you two argue over this before.

 

The available fight footage shows 15 minutes of fighting out of the 45 minutes that the whole fight should be. That's 70% of the footage missing, and even still, you can give Louis several rounds based on the highlights to make it a close fight.

 

Think again, posters above already mentioned how hey saw the fight highlights and scored rounds 3, 9, 14 and 15 for Louis, which checks out with the actual score cards where rounds 3, 14 and 15 were given to Louis by all three judging officials.