I recall reading a poll of sportswriters and boxing pundits taken after the fight, but a Google search turned up nothing. I sure would like to see that poll again!
Might have been Sport magazine, which did that for some big fights. Don’t know if that helps the search.
I'm not sure if this is what you are talking about but I found this on Boxrec. "In a UPI poll of 30 sportswriters, 16 picked Duran to win by knockout and one picked him to win by decision. Of the 13 who went with Leonard, eight thought he would stop Duran."
I've come across a bunch of writers who scored the fight for Leonard in real time, but I haven't seen any actual poll.
Dick Young and Tom Cushman were two of the people I had in mind. Both mentioned it in columns they wrote days after the fight. And Young claimed that Jimmy Jacobs and others agreed with him.
I watched the fight live on closed circuit TV at a huge auditorium and the crowd was solidly for Ray Leonard. Afterwards there wasn't a backlash from Leonard fans screaming that he'd won. The vast majority grudgingly accepted that Duran had whipped his azz, and most thought it was a close but clear win. But this was 42 years ago and objectivity was in greater supply than it is today.
That is a pre-fight poll. The one I remember reading about is a post-fight poll, where each write and pundit scored the fight itself.
It was a poll among many sportswriters, not just two or three. And the results were a little different than what the ringside judges called. I have a good memory for this sort of thing, but as of yet, the poll I read hasn't been found. I.'ll keep trying to find it. Over and out
Ok, I am tired of having this on my to-do list. I'll tell you exactly what I remember, I promise on my recently departed mother's grave (age 89) I'm not making it up. I'm surprised no-one else remembers this I did not actually see the poll, what I read was an editorial that spoke of a poll, that itself was obviously never published. I wonder why? The editorial was by a high profile boxing pundit, I am pretty sure it was Nate Fleischer, was he not senior editor of Ring Magazine at the time? He was highly critical of the judges' decision, and made reference to a poll that cannot be found. Most distinctly I remember that he said the poll went unanimously to Leonard by small unanimous decision. If I could by bothered to start buying up back issues of 40+ year old sporting magazines, I would start with the first issue of Ring Magazine, and then Boxing Illustrated, after the fight. I'm sure that people will remember that before the Internet, it always took two issues for the full story of the fight to be told, usually just a quick note in the first issue. Best I can do.
