You can take the man out of his role as boxing judge, but you can’t take the boxing judge out of the man.
Steve Weisfeld, widely regarded for the last decade or two as the most reliable ringside scorer in the game, tried something different on one occasion. When he was learning the proverbial ropes as an amateur judge in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he took one shot at being the referee in a bout.
“It wasn’t for me,” he quickly learned.
And how did he know that?
“I was supposed to be focused on the responsibilities of a referee — the safety of the fighters, enforcing the rules. And instead I found myself scoring the fight in my head.”
Judging fights is second nature to Weisfeld. The New Jersey native is now 60 years old, and he’s been officially scoring professional bouts for 34 years. He’s closing in on 40 years since his first gig scoring amateur fights. And he’s a few months shy of 50 years since the very first time he decided which boxer gets 10 points and which one gets nine.
Weisfeld was 10 years old when he became a fight fan, and it’s easy for him to rattle off the exact date: January 24, 1976. That was the day his paternal grandmother died, so Steve and his sister, who were typically limited to about an hour of television per week, were granted special dispensation by their parents to offset some of their sadness by turning on the TV.
The Weisfeld kids happened to flip on ABC. Steve had never watched a boxing match before.
He picked a pretty darned good one to start with: George Foreman vs. Ron Lyle, with Howard Cosell on the call.
“That one fight really made me into a fan — that fight gave me the love for the sport,” he recalled to BoxingScene this week of the iconic four-knockdown heavyweight slugfest. “It just so happened that that day I was allowed to turn the TV on, and, I mean, if I had stopped turning the channels and landed on demolition derby or Evel Knievel, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
Weisfeld started watching all the fights he could — on ABC, on NBC, on CBS, on Saturdays and Sundays and sometimes Friday nights — and once he’d been exposed to a handful of controversial decisions, his motivation to always see the right boxer awarded the victory generated a particular interest in scoring. He didn’t entirely know what he was doing at first, but if young Steve was watching a fight, then young Steve had a 3x5 index card and a writing implement with him and was scoring that fight round by round.
He started going to live fights, often Main Events cards at Ice World in nearby Totowa, New Jersey, and he wasn’t shy about striking up conversations with the officials.
“I’d see the judges there and I would ask them, ‘How did you become a judge?’” he said, noting that these judges were “big-time celebrities” in his mind at the time. A few years later, while an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Weisfeld would take the SEPTA train to the Blue Horizon, meeting more judges and getting more in-person practice scoring fights.
The judges he spoke to all told him to start with amateur fights, so when he turned 21, that’s exactly what he did. He passed the amateur judging test, became an amateur apprentice and then became an amateur judge from 1986-’91 (while dabbling for one night in amateur refereeing).
As easily as Weisfeld can tell you off the top of his head that January 24, 1976 was the day he fell in love with boxing, he can similarly recite instantly the date of September 20, 1991 — the first time he worked a professional boxing card.
He remembers where it was — the Ramada Hotel in New York, across the street from Madison Square Garden. He remembers what the main event was — Larry Barnes (best known for challenging Felix Trinidad a few years later) vs. David Taylor. And, because he’s Steve Weisfeld, he remembers who the other two judges working the fight were — George Colon and Harold Lederman.
Actually, that last detail is one anyone with half an interest in boxing judging would remember. If you’re on one side of the ring, and Lederman, the most famous fight judge of our lifetimes, is on another side, you don’t need a Weisfeld-level passion for judging in order for that detail to stick with you.
Lederman became one of Weisfeld’s mentors, as did Tommy Kaczmarek, the author of a book on judging, You Be the Boxing Judge!: Judging Professional Boxing for the TV Boxing Fan, who died earlier this year at age 96.
According to BoxRec, Weisfeld has scored 3,173 professional bouts over the last 34 years. According to me and to just about anybody else who follows boxing closely, he’s the least likely judge in the world to surprise you with an out-of-whack scorecard.
A few months ago, Weisfeld was one of the officials for the Jose Resendiz-Caleb Plant fight, a competitive bout that underdog Resendiz clearly deserved to win. The scores were read, and one judge saw it 116-112 Resendiz, but another had it 115-113 Plant. Oh boy. Here we go. But once I heard the ring announcer say, “And Steve Weisfeld scores the bout,” I was able to exhale. I didn’t need to wait to hear the score (116-112) or the boxer’s name (Resendiz, of course).
Boxing judges are under a certain amount of pressure, as they hold fighters’ fates and futures in their pencil-gripping hands. Weisfeld has a staunch take on the pressure he’s under and the concept of battling nerves.
“Well, I mean, you’re only human,” he said, “but I read something once by a stage actor, who said, ‘If I’m nervous, I stop for a second and I realize it’s a form of selfishness because I’m really thinking about myself.’ I do hope people like my scorecards, but it’s not supposed to be about me, as a judge. I think a good way of taking the pressure off is asking myself, ‘Why am I here?’ I’m here not for myself. It’s not about me. It’s about doing what’s right for the fighters, and that means staying fully focused on what happens during every round.”
Weisfeld said the greatest compliment he ever got came from then-Pennsylvania Athletic Commission Executive Director Greg Sirb in 2019, when Sirb approached him after a walkout bout and said Weisfeld seemed as focused as he would expect a judge to be during a championship fight.
“I said to him, ‘Well, that’s how it should be,’” Weisfeld recalled. “My focus should be the same for every fight. You have to have full focus for the entire three minutes — it would almost be a sin not to.”
As for the actual practice of judging a round, Weisfeld says different judges employ different techniques, but the key is to know where you are at all times during the round.
“Throughout the round, you have to know not just who’s winning, but who’s winning and by how much. People have different mental computers on how they keep track of this. Some people have a commentary in their head — like they’re calling, for example, a horse race. Some people use numbers. Some people use fractions.”
Weisfeld’s mental methodology is most akin to a sliding scale, tracking whether a fighter is ahead closely or decisively and all points in between. A round could end at any second and go the cards due to an accidental foul, with that partial round possibly needing to be scored depending on the jurisdiction, so Weisfeld stresses constantly knowing who’s leading. He doesn’t believe in ever scoring even rounds, except in the very rare instance that a round is stopped so prematurely due to an accidental foul that nothing has happened yet.
All that said, Weisfeld acknowledges that scoring a round can sometimes be extremely complicated.
“In boxing, there are two different goals: to land more punches than your opponent and also to knock your opponent out,” he said. “It’s not like basketball, where the goal is to just get the ball through the hoop. So, as a boxing judge, how do you equate the two goals? Yes, you give credit for landing punches, but you also give credit for how hard the punch is, and what’s more important than how hard it is is how effective it is. If you land a jab on me and I go staggering back, that should count for more than me landing what looks like a hard punch on you that doesn’t seem to affect you, because your punch got you closer to the goal of ending the fight.
“There’s definitely a little bit of subjectivity in scoring boxing. But the element of subjectivity, in my mind, is overemphasized. If you look at most rounds, one fighter is just better than the other fighter. If a fighter lands more punches, lands the harder punches, lands the more effective punches in a round, then it’s not subjective. And that’s what most rounds are. Most rounds, there’s a clear winner.
“The subjectivity comes into play when you have a round that’s very, very close, maybe because the two fighters are landing almost the same number of punches with almost the same effectiveness, or because one is landing a greater number and the other is landing the harder punches and it becomes a balancing act. And sometimes a close round is just a close round and there’s going to be a case for either fighter and people’s scores won’t all look the same.”
Because of that subjectivity, yes, even Steve Weisfeld has handed in a controversial card from time to time. For example, he was one of the judges in the final fight of the career of one of the men who first inspired his passion for boxing, Foreman. Shannon Briggs’ decision over Foreman on November 22, 1997 in Atlantic City was hotly disputed (including by Weisfeld’s friend and mentor Lederman, who scored it unofficially for HBO as a 116-112 fight for “Big George”). Weisfeld’s 114-114 scorecard was not popular.
But it was a lot less unpopular than the cards of Weisfeld’s two ringside colleagues that night, each of whom had Briggs winning by four points.
For a guy who’s judged more than 3,000 fights, the controversial scorecards with Weisfeld’s name on them are relatively few, and relatively mild.
But he’s seen and heard plenty of judges come under heavy fire from media and fans over the years, and he generally comes to the defense of his fellow official scorers.
“I would say that very, very few of those people who are being critical are concentrating 100 per cent on scoring the fight round by round,” Weisfeld said. “I don’t mean to be negative toward the media, but they’re often not seated closely at ringside anymore, and sometimes the scorecards the public is seeing are from people who are broadcasting at the same time, so they can’t devote 100 per cent of their attention to judging a round.”
Weisfeld speaks from experience on that one, as in 2013 and 2014, he gave up judging for nearly two years to score unofficially on HBO broadcasts. He says he loved doing it, but he acknowledges that any time he was asked to spend 15 or 20 seconds of a round speaking about his scorecard, he was no longer judging that round properly.
When he isn’t working boxing cards, Weisfeld earns his living as an attorney specializing in commercial and residential real estate for the law firm of Beattie Padovano.
He’s no longer a Jersey boy — he’s lived for the last five years with his wife in Port Washington, New York. Weisfeld has a daughter from a previous marriage and two stepsons.
So, yes, he has a life outside of boxing.
But if you told me that when he’s meeting with clients, putting together legal documents or enjoying a nice dinner out with his family, Steve Weisfeld is also constantly scoring fights in his head, I’d be inclined to believe you.
This has been his passion for 50 years now, and his side gig for almost 40 of those years.
Hopefully, he still has plenty of years of judging ahead of him. For those of us who, like Weisfeld, care deeply about seeing the right fighter win, we can use more nights of hearing a ring announcer say his name before reading the final card, and having our worries wash away before the score is even revealed.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.