Bobby Chacon v Cornelius Boza-Edwards 2 immediately comes to mind. It is one my favourite fights of all time, but Ferdie Pacheco was absolutely insufferable as a commentator. He spent the entire fight downplaying Chacon's successes and calling for fight to be stopped. He was making it seem like Chacon was on his deathbed. And when he conducted the post-fight interview, he actually had the nerve to tell Chacon to his face that he believed Boza-Edwards won. Just keep your worthless opinion to yourself, man, and let Chacon enjoy his hard-earned victory ! Also when I rewatched Morales-Barrera trilogy last year, I purposely sought videos without HBO commentary because I remember them being horribly biased toward Barrera.
I think Chris John vs Marquez is also a very biased commentary,my man Undang Suhendar was definitely a legendary sports commentator here and I had John winning a close one,but he didn't have to lick John that hard.
I like Cosell BUT he had people believing Hagler Antuofermo 1 was close as well as Holmes v Norton. I had both Holmes and Hagler comfortable winners. Yes Ferdie Pacheco constantly played favorites. One of the worst announcers ever.
Pacheco was awful. Somehow being Ali’s doctor gave the networks the idea that Pacheco knew how to analyze and commentate boxing. Lampley had a huge mancrush on Barrera and it would show during the fights.
I do agree with what has been said here about the HBO team and their affection for MAB. Aside from the Morales fight I also saw their partiality in the MAB v JMM fight. Another glaring one was the first fight between Jose Luis Ramirez and Pernell Whitaker. Depending on how you saw it (I personally had it a draw) is irrelevant but when you had the 2 biased announcers (Don Chevier and Angelo Dundee), you would swear that Whitaker was doing a paint job on the guy. I remember one point - without ever saying one good thing that Ramirez did - they murmured, "Ramirez probably won that round" It's a bad idea to have one's best friend at the mic, which is what happened during any fights of Derrick Gainer and Roy Jones, who used to supplement Gainer's purses financially. Oh, man, he would just laud Gainer throughout any of his fights. Also, I watched recently the fight between Saoul Mamby and Monroe Brooks. It was a good, competitive fight but you would swear there was only one person in the ring according to Mamby's best friend Larry Holmes who was doing ringside commentating.
I like Lederman because he was a hard core fan of the sport as well, but in their first fight Harold was saying how Williams was dominating the fight against Quintana. The opposite couldnt have been more true where Carlos was timing Williams perfectly and taking him to school. The rematch obviously a different story
Recent ESPN fights involving Tim Bradley and Joe Tessitore have been almost unbearable to listen to. Raymond Ford vs Otabek Kholmatov was a great FOTY that was ruined by the hugely biased commentary.
Bowe vs Tubbs was bad. They completely ignored what Tubbs was doing for the first few rounds, and when Bowe kept walking into his jabs, it was described as “Bowe wearing him out by absorbing the shots”. Harry Carpenter was unashamedly rooting for Frank Bruno and Herol Graham in all their fights.
'Get in there Frank!'' The most endearingly biased moment of the great Harry Carpenter's career. He always said he was embarrassed about it but I loved it. Same can't be said of Ferdie Pacheco, an absolute shill for the Showtime house fighter, who never had a clue what he was watching and even less interest.
Witherspoon vs Holmes...... Literally both commentators couldn't hide their bias especially Angelo Dundee I don't know if he had a bit of grudge against Holmes for beating a shot Ali. But his fanboying of Witherspoon especially when he did his poor Ali impression in the later rounds whilst doing nothing effective was actually cringe.