Influenced by the Commentators?

I scored it Leonard 7-5. Leonard got five of the first six rounds, and two of the last six. But some of the rounds are really close, and you could give it to Hagler.

Hagler close, draw, Leonard close, all are acceptable.

In this case, I go with the official decision.

 

What made it worse in this fight was the fact that nobody gave Leonard a chance, so when he turned out to be even mildly competitive it looked better than it actually was. As he said himself years later, it was all done with smoke & mirrors.

In general though, yes bias judges can influence how you're viewing a fight. Latest example was Brook v Porter.

 

If an announcer brings up a good point, yes it could influence the television audience. But the judges at ringside don't look at them and their talking points are often filtered out by the crowd.

7-5 for Leonard.

 

The fight was too close to be a robbery , I gave it to Leonard by about a round.Hagler's laid back corner were rubbish.

 

I had it as close as one can get and still give it to one guy, 6-5-1 in favor of Leonard. This is coming from a big Hagler fan. Talk about being biased.

The OP's point is a good one though, and of course we have extrernal influences affecting our judgement. I remember reading here in Classic years ago about a Puerto Rican national (can't remember the poster's name now) who claimed to have been there the day Wilfredo Gomez was gifted against Rocky Lockridge, one of the worst robberies of the last 30 years. He swroe up and down that "you had to be there to understand, but Gomez won, trust me."

That speaks exactly to the point of this thread, I think. People can be swayed to think damn near anything.

 

I felt the announcers were extremely biased against Lewis when he fought Vitali. During the last 20-30 seconds of the last round, Lewis hit Vitali with an overhand right that caused Vitali to hang on for the rest of the round. Lewis was trying his best to create distance so he could finish him off and Lampley is saying "that's all Lewis can do to keep from falling down" I'm thinking to myself what fight are you watching??

 

excellent point, 'you had to be there to understand'.
watching a fight live often bears little resemblance to those two 8 inch tall fighters on the tv screen, all neatly packaged with a handy voice to tell you whats happening etc.
the power and effort of a pro fight is shocking to watch in the flesh and this hardly translates at all on tv.
I think the people present get the only real version of the bout and the tv audience get a somehow thinned down washed out, one dimensional sometimes misleading version. The sickening shots up close which make ringsiders wince are mostly missed completely by the tv audience, and even the clear as day big shots are much heavier live.

 

Salient enough point, but what I was trying to say was that this guy who was in the audience that day was as blinded by the partisan cheers of the crowd rooting fopr Gomez as many TV viewers are when they listen to biased announcers. There's no way Gomez deserved that decision, but he was convinced he did because of the reactions fo the crowd.

External influences and all that. I think I just explained it badly.

 

a quick point on commentators, like any profession there are bad ones and great ones and its not always easy to tell whether someone would be good at it.
Ray leonard was a fine fighter but his commentary, his reading of the bout and even just blow by blow announcing were all awful. his commentary on the Chavez taylor fight for example was probably the worst commentary ive ever heard.
Roy jones on the other hand (at least in the few times ive heard him) seems knowledgeable, insightful, and most importantly, aware of whats happening in the fight.
Foreman is a legend in then ring but not the best analyst with the mic.
reading a fight live in real time is an art even with a lifetime of boxing experience behind you. very few are actually any good at it. it cant help but influence us either into agreeing with them or hating them and going against everything they say

 

"Tim" was Tim Ryan. Ryan and Gil Clancy worked a lot of CBS boxing cards in the 1980s. They were both excellent boxing commentators.

I was working at a closed-circuit venue the night Leonard fought Hagler. What you have to remember is most people thought Hagler would stop Leonard midway through the fight.

Hagler was among the pound-for-pound best at the time, and Leonard retired with a bad eye, came back a few years later and got dropped by a welterweight in winning a decision, then retired again for a few more years.

People "expected" Hagler to knock out Leonard or hurt him permanently ... and we'd never see Sugar Ray Leonard again. And then Hagler would rematch with Hearns and probably beat him again.

And Hagler would break Carlos Monzon's record and retire soon after the best middleweight ever.

The fact that Leonard started well and was fighting on even terms with Hagler was absolutely shocking. When Leonard seemed to be winning rounds, and Hagler wasn't hurting him, it blew peoples' minds.

That was one fight where everyone got swept up in the emotion. People were going insane in the convention center I was in. I've never experienced that at a live event or watching a fight with others ever since.

If you go back now, knowing Leonard won the decision and he fought for years after, and Hagler never fought again, and count the punches landed and try to score with the volume off, that is fair ... but those weren't the conditions surrounding the announcers and the judges that night.

That night it was arguably the best fighter in the sport finally getting his big payday taking on one of boxing's biggest "names" who had retired years and years earlier with injuries, and it was assumed Leonard had no business even being in the ring because he was going to get himself killed or go blind ...

And some bought a ticket just to see Hagler kill him or blind him, a lot of them were around me, ...

And people were stunned and excited and couldn't believe what they were watching.

That night, everyone seemed to be experiencing the same thing. Even if you weren't rooting for Leonard, the fact that it was close, and Leonard was even winning rounds, made it seem like Hagler was losing.

That night, I thought Leonard won.

I've gone back and tried to score it "objectively" with no volume, etc., and I've sat with people who say "See, how could they give Leonard that round? Hagler did this and that." And they're right, but THAT NIGHT Leonard was doing so much better than everyone thought that the close rounds went to him.

Same thing happened in the Duran-Barkley fight. Go back and score that with the volume off. Barkley wins a pretty straightforward decision.

But Duran was fighting so much better than anyone thought. When he knocked Barkley down in the 11th, I believe, one of the announcers (it might've been Gil Clancy) says, "That could've been a three-point round for Duran!"

How in the hell would that have been a three-point round? But everyone was so swept up in Duran doing better than expected, they were trying to justify giving the win to Duran by saying utterly ridiculous stuff like that.

In cases like those, whether you're at the fight or watching on T.V., I think people are more influenced by "expectations" than the commentary. If you view someone as overmatched and expect them to get destroyed ... and the fight is close ... the close rounds don't tend to go to the guy who was supposed to win easy ... they go to the guy who is doing better than we expected.

I think that's just human nature. You can go back later and see that you were wrong, but at the time you've got 30 seconds or so to turn in a score and you go with what you're feeling.

 

Terrific, terrific post. That's EXACTLY how it was viewed at the time, and that gets lost a lot here in translation when people look at older fights they may not have been around to see live. It's easy enough to go past everything else this many years on and start picking apart the minutae of each minute of every round and build a case for damn near anything you want if you look at it with just the right color glasses. And the people who have that argument aren't encumbered (or blessed) by the real-time feel of an event to let that color their opinion. They're just watching it on youtube decades later, after thousands of others have already picked up the banner of their argument and run with it about as far as it can go.

 

Thanks.

 

Also, dont forget that the crowd the expectations etc are all part of the event. The fighters know the reactions that are coming and try to address this accordingly. When Sugar Ray threw the Bolo punch or faked to, he wasnt necessarilly doing that to showboat, but he was getting the crowd on side and rowdy which in turn must have created the impression that he was doing even better than he was, in the judges mind. This in turn helped him win rounds, because it made the judge think he did better than he did. the fighters could feel this crowd atmosphere and needed to adjust their game accordingly. That is all part of the fight. IMO, both fighters did in the Leonard Hagler fight.

This is a legitimate skill. Ali used to excel at little tricks like that. Others like Holyfield fought in spurts at the end of the round for this reason. Provided the judge makes an honest appraisal, then their opinion is all that matters and everyone else is wrong.

It is just a shame that their have been so many crooked decisions (and blatantly crooked) that people are so paranoid now. Just thinking, but maybe the sport might just benefit by publicising the judges adn their decisions and building a profile for each judge? Something to try to break the blatantly obvious bad decisions. Personally i think publishing their scores after a round would also help but that is a completely different question that i know a lot of people are against.