Influenced by the Commentators?

Well like I said earlier I thought the commenting for the Lewis - Klitschko fight was terrible, especially in the 6th round in the last 20-30 seconds, when Lewis landed an overhand right and Vitali was hanging on for dear life. Lewis is doing his best to get separation between himself and Vitali so he can finish him off, and as this is happening Lampley is saying "that's all Lewis can do to keep from falling over"

And I'm thinking to myself What fight is this guy watching?

No wonder Klitschko fans thought Lewis was going to loose if the fight continued, with commentary like that, an uneducated fan or someone listening to the fight would think Lewis was on his last legs. Instead he was going for the KO.

Then for the first time in my lifetime, they use how he sits down as some kind of justification for their comments. I mean in shape or not, Lewis certainly never lost even one fight in his life because he was to exhausted to continue, nor off the top of my head can I think of any heavyweight champion who has, other than perhaps Foreman, who strangely enough was the one most critical of Lewis' conditioning.

Now I'm not saying Lewis was in the best of shape, but he sure as hell wasn't doing what Lampley said near the end of the 6th. It was Klitschko hanging on for dear life, not Lewis.

 

This is probably going off-topic a bit, but Lampley truly can be terrible. He calls things only he sees.
I remember not too long ago when Seth Mitchell was fighting Chazz Witherspoon, Lampley screamed into the mike "And Seth comes back with a huge left hook." What was obvious to even a blind man was that the hook missed.

That is typical Lampley, and if you're not paying much attention, he can actually influence your perspective of the fight.

HBO and Lampley in particular were bad when Paquiao fought Bradley the first time. There is even a youtube video on how badly they called that fight, how they claimed punches that Pac missed where landing, and how nothing punches were apparently bombs.
I can't be bothered to find the video, but it's hilarious when pointed out incident for incident how pathetic the commentary on that fight was.

 

How is it biased commentary when you agree that Hagler lost the first two rounds? In the context, which others have explained better than I could -- Leonard coming out of retirement, Hagler being seen as an irresistable force, etc., should the commentators NOT have mentioned that Leonard was off to a good start? How is this an example of them being biased?

You admit you were rooting for Hagler (as usual). You even watched this along with several other Hagler fights ... could your being a Hagler fan not be a built-in bias of your own, one you may not even be consciously aware of (heck, to be unbiased why not watch and score it again after watching Leonard's greatest hits instead of Marvin's?) Watching his fights may have predisposed you to his style, to look for things he does well, etc. It's all very subtle, all very subjective, but what you bring into the scoring is part of the lens through which you view the fight (and, obviously, the scoring).

Most of all, I can't understand how a 7-5 victory decision can be dominant (or "dominate") -- flip one round over to Leonard's column, and there are close rounds that could go either way on both sides of the ledger, and all of a sudden Leonard is your winner.

That's not dominating someone. That's you looking at a close decision, one that probably could have gone either way, and saying you think the guy who came out on the short end should have won.

That says to me more about your bias than that of the announcers -- not that you thought Hagler won so much as that you consider 7-5 a dominant decision.

And don't take this as a flame -- I've got guys I like and I probably lean their way in scoring, whether I'm trying not to or not even thinking about it. I'll give Larry Holmes the second Spinks fight 100 times out of 100 and I tell myself I can make a case that he should have won the first one.

My point is we're boxing fans. We're passionate. We all have our biases. How I look at the commentary of a fight probably has more to do with which guy I am rooting for than anything else -- it's a reflection of my bias, not theirs.

 

Pac/Marquez 1 is a most recent glaring example of commentaters coooing ooozing bias, Pac won a hard fought fight IMHO, but just because JMM survived the 3 knockdown typhoon & fought back competitively to make for a close fight don't give them the write to squeal robbery or hand JMM 9+ rounds, Pac won fair & square in my view, but just because JMM survived against all odd's it's now looked at as a robbery & that's a big wrong in my eyes.