**British Boxings Referee's The Third Man Thread**

"BOX ON!!!"

**** me IJL was a little hyped for the B-Hop/Pascal fight

Definitely looked out of his depth in there to me. I don't know how he managed to referee such a big fight.

 

Agreed. I thought he pressed a fast forward button on himself..

 

charlie williams

defend yourselves at all times me old flower

 

IJL was terrible. No authority at all. The fighters just seemed to think of him as an annoyance and gave him no respect. I mean who the **** is he to them?

 

Anyone know the name of the big referee always does under card fights think I've seen him do one main event. Usually does the London cards. Looks greek or something. He's one of those that you rarely see just lets them get on with it. Can't remember him handing in a **** card either.

 

Had a look for him Ken Curtis. Not seen him in a long time though.

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I think he's still about mate. Sure i saw him other week might be wrong though .

 

Think I could of done him a favour and looked a bit harder for a picture of him Just looking at his past fights he isn't afraid to give the win to the journeymen probably why he stands out a bit.

 

Yeah that was who I was talking about on the last page. I like him. :good

 

If, as the old adage holds, the best referee is the one who doesn’t call attention to himself, you’d have to deem Ian John-Lewis a miserable failure. Just about the only ones who managed to ignore him completely Saturday night were Bernard Hopkins and Jean Pascal.

It was Richard Schaefer, arguing for his client Hopkins, who demanded a slate of neutral officials for Saturday’s fight in Montreal, so if you’re looking for somebody to blame John-Lewis’ presence on, you could start with the Golden Boy CEO.

It’s unclear exactly how John-Lewis came to be nominated for his role at the Bell Centre, but it’s reasonable to assume it was not with the recommendation of his national federation. At least half a dozen world-class referees work under the auspices of the British Board of Boxing Control, but Ian John-Lewis is not one of them.

“I was frankly amazed he got this fight,” a British boxing expert told us after watching John-Lewis’ abominable performance in the 46 year-old Hopkins’ historic win over Pascal in the WBC light-heavyweight title fight.

On April 15 of this year, less than five weeks before the Hopkins-Pascal fight, John-Stewart was “severely reprimanded” by the BBBofC for making a royal mess of a March super-middleweight fight at the Liverpool Arena. Although Wayne Reed had cleanly knocked down local Joe Ainscough in the last round of their three-round “Prizefighter” prelim, John-Lewis, who had meted out the count, apparently forgot having done so and scored the round 10-10, awarding the fight to Ainsough on a 30-28 shutout on the only official scorecard.

After the hearing, the BBBofC warned the 48 year-old referee from Gillingham that he was on thin ice and that further transgressions might result in his being banned from the sport.

Just a week ago, John-Lewis drew further scrutiny when he bewilderingly scored a London fight for hometowner Tom Dallas, even though most ringsiders felt the durable American opponent Zack Page had won at least six of the eight rounds. Even Dallas’ promoter Frank Maloney termed the verdict a “lucky” one and described the referee’s work as “a bad day at the office.”

And last October John-Lewis was the referee who allowed Vitali Klitschko to administer such a savage beating to Shannon Briggs that the American wound up in a Hamburg hospital with assorted facial fractures, a concussion, and a torn biceps tendon.

In other words, his work in Montreal wasn’t simply a case of a good referee having a bad night, but one of a bad referee having another bad night.

Granted, two of the aforementioned infractions that got John-Lewis called on the carpet involved scoring, and scoring was not part of his brief in the Hopkins-Pascal fight. At the same time, the referee’s failure to acknowledge two pretty clear-cut knockdowns did potentially skew the judges’ scorecards. (In the ninth and tenth rounds, a Hopkins right hand caught Pascal on the head, and on both occasions Jean remained upright only by bracing himself with his gloves on the canvas mat.)

The rulebook says you get hit and your gloves touch the ring mat, it’s a knockdown. The mistakes in back-to-back rounds seem retrospectively less important only because they did not, in the end, affect the outcome, only the margin of victory.

But John-Lewis’ handling of the fight up until then must also be called into question. From the third round on, he allowed Hopkins to grab Pascal in a clinch and then bang away with his free hand – initially to the short ribs, and as the evening wore on, increasingly to the kidneys. Although he warned him on several occasions, the referee never seemed close to taking a point, and by then it was clear that only punitive action was going to deter Hopkins from the practice. When a fighter keeps throwing illegal punches after he has been ordered to break, it reflects a total disdain for the authority of the referee. No, John-Lewis didn’t lose control of the fight; he never had control. And who can say how much the evening-long assault to his kidneys took out of Pascal in those later rounds?

Hopkins’ arsenal also included a couple of head-butts, a thumb to Pascal’s right eye, and at least one low blow.

Pascal can’t be absolved from blame, either. With equal impunity, he whacked Hopkins with an astounding number of rabbit punches down the stretch. Pascal did not, as Harold Lederman charged after the fight, “get away with it all night long,” but (encouraged by his corner, which by then could be confident that there would be no repercussion from the referee) he did land better than a dozen punches behind the head over the last three rounds of the fight. By then Hopkins had all but given up his own holding-and-hitting tactics; B-Hop needed the clinches for breathing space.

HBO, encouraged by the promoters, made a huge deal out of Hopkins’ quest to break George Foreman’s record for winning a title, and then spent the rest of the night denigrating the title in question. This was at least in part the result of HBO’s institutional stance, which considers the recognized sanctioning bodies the scourge of boxing. They sometimes are, but this doesn’t mean that the IBO or the titles created by Golden Boy’s boxing magazine are necessarily an improvement.

The only mention of the WBC came in Michael Buffer’s bilingual introductions – and then, the organization was consigned to co-equal status with the IBO and Ring titles. Lampley, who sometimes seems to have made this thing downright personal, referred only obliquely to “the governing body” which ordered the Pascal-Hopkins rematch, and suggested that while Pascal had won “a belt” when he defeated Adrian Diaconu, his title somehow lacked legitimacy until he fought Hopkins to a draw back in December.

You want to pretend the sanctioning bodies don’t exist, fine. But then on the same telecast, Lampley waxed rhapsodic about Hopkins’ 20-fight reign as middleweight champion. For the first 14 of those, Hopkins held only the IBF title. He had held it for eight years, in fact, before The Ring recognized him as champion. So which is it, Lamps? You can’t have it both ways.

ALSO…
Adrian Diaconu is a lazy, untalented, clumsy oaf, but Chad Dawson actually managed to make him look good.

With the spectre of Ian John-Stewart hovering over the Hopkins-Pascal fight, by the way, Lampley noted that the Dawson-Diaconu action had been “so clean that I never even mentioned the name of Mark Griffin, the referee.”

Good thing, since his name is Mike Griffin.

---Emanuel Steward performed another bit of quick-change artistry, working Dawson’s corner for the Diaconu fight before jumping behind his analyst’s microphone for Hopkins-Pascal, but did anyone notice that Russ Anber performed the same trick in reverse? The Renaissance Man of Canadian boxing worked the Dawson-Diaconu fight as an analyst for Canadian television, and then materialized in Pascal’s corner for the main event.

---Nothing Bernard Hopkins does should surprise us any longer, but the man is 46 years of age, a world champion again, and a mortal lock for the Hall of Fame if he ever does stop boxing. Why does he still feel the need to come into the ring dressed like he’s about to go trick-or-treating?
http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles/12619-the-kimball-chronicles-the-ref-was-rotten

 

A typical British Stoppage tonight, although it was gonna be stopped anyways but my issue with referee's like Howard Foster and co is fact that they don't warn fighters to fight back. I used to see especially in the States ref's demand a fighter show more or he would be stopped. Either during round or in corner but it seems the British ref's aren't using this and it's leading to premature or poorly timed stoppages.

Foster is terrible for it i've sat ringside where he's done it twice on one night like he had somewhere else to be.

 

I was just going to post the same thing in another thread. The stoppage was going to come sooner rather than later but Foster should have at least warned Jackywicz that he needed to start fighting back or he was going to stop it.

 

Exactly Gaz, Noticed this seems to be happening a fair bit not just tonight and it's something that can help avoid's this sorta criticism.

 

Its bad for the sport.
We wonder why the best dont fight the best, this has to be one of many reasons why as a fighter fighting on someone elses promotion, faces the same problem as the foreigner fighting here.
Absolutely pathetic and a form of cheating IMO.

 

Matthew Barney atsch