Aaron Pryor vs Meldrick Taylor @140

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Pryor stops Taylor in the late rounds in a war.

 

Pryor was still pretty green when he beat an aging Cervantes. Cervantes probably never could figure out how he could lose to such an unorthodox fighter.

 

You would have the ref bend the rules for Taylor based on what?

 

Bend what rules? The fight had 2 secs remaining.....Taylor was the champion.

 

That's not the way it works. The rule that if you don't respond to the ref then you lose the fight is obligatory. Had Steele ignored it would have been overturned by the boxing commission. As for the decision being a foregone conclusion, that is sheer nonsense based mostly on the biased commentary which constantly super- hyped all of Meldrick's pitter-pattering while blatantly downplaying or totally ignoring all the bone crushing shots that Chavez was landing. So the fight could have gone either way from an unbiased Judging standpoint. IMHO So I guess we simply disagree on that point.

 

Chavez won that fight fair and square deal with it.

 

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I'm not 100% sure as you are that Medlric's hitting Chavez more frequently was being considered more important than the hard shots he was taking from Chavez. Quality is often given more value than quantity in such fights. Also, you are totally ignoring the fact that when a fighter is asked if he is OK and doesn't respond then a stoppage is the rule. So based on that alone Steele was under obligation to stop it regardless of the time left.

 

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Taylor was clearly winning, I wouldn't call it particularly close either. Further, as we've seen ref don't only and always follow the rules and letter of the law for the governing body; so we can't use that as a deciding factor, instead, we know ref use their own judgement and intuition all the time. It's inherent with the job. So, Steele absolutely could've used his discretion there and not stopped the fight, and nothing would've been overturned. In large part because, as people know, there was no time to do anything further. Fight is over. That is the issue.

Now, whether he should've stopped it or not is one thing, but he absolutely could've let it go, we've seen worse responses and conditions go.

 

he wouldn't beat Hearns. Hearns would land the right and Pryor would not handle it well. Sort of like Duran vs. Hearns.