The referee Howard Foster, not for the first time in his career, was responsible for a controversial stoppage when after one minute and 54 seconds of Saturday’s heavyweight contest between Joseph Parker and Fabio Wardley he intervened to rescue the under-pressure Parker from further punishment.
Parker, 33, is among the world’s most durable heavyweights. The 30-year-old Wardley has some of its heaviest hands. Like many observers of Saturday’s fight, between them, BoxingScene’s experienced team is struggling to agree.
Tom Ivers: In my opinion it was early. Parker had weathered worse storms earlier in the fight and Wardley wasn’t really landing with anything really clean. Parker was doing a good job of slipping and riding with the shots. Howard Foster was looking to jump in for about 30 seconds prior to him actually jumping in. I’m not accusing him of UK bias, but he has a history of jumping in early. With everything riding on that fight, you need to let the contest play out to a decisive conclusion for the fighters’ sake.
Declan Warrington: I’d no objections to it at all. I understand why Parker wanted to carry on, and also why Andy Lee – who likely knows him as a fighter better than anyone else – believed he could have. We’ve seen Parker hurt and survive before – it happened as recently as March 2024 against the heavy-handed Zhilei Zhang – and he and Lee would have known when he agreed to fight Wardley that he would have had to absorb some punishment (which will have been partly why he recorded his second heaviest ever weight). But he was sufficiently hurt in the second that he spat his gumshield out to recover and was more hesitant thereafter, was even more hurt in the 10th, and hurt again, even more significantly, in the 11th. If Foster intervened narrowly too early, he was likely speedening up the inevitable.
It was an entertaining fight. I happen to suspect the controversy of the stoppage will be used to build a rematch.
Tris Dixon: Anyone who knows me will know I would always favor a punch early over a punch too late. Imagine Wardley landed a huge right hand with his next shot and Parker was laid out. I’m sure people would have said it was too late. The margins like that are fine and Foster had to act on the spot. For context, I woke up to the highlights on Sunday morning and during that salvo was thinking to myself, ‘You better throw something here, Joe’.
He didn’t, and it was stopped. Then I went back and watched the fight as a whole and given the context of how rough it was, I was even more understanding. I saw the outrage online and I get it. I do. But Parker seemed okay with it. More pertinently, straight after the fight he was in a position to say, “So what I lost? Let’s do it again”.
Another few seconds and you’re running the risk of him not being so lucid.
David Greisman: Yes, Parker was in trouble. He wasn’t holding. He wasn’t doing much to deter Wardley’s onslaught. But no, the fight did not need to be stopped. Parker was still slipping and blocking many of Wardley’s shots. It wasn’t that Wardley was scoring with everything he threw – though some bombs were definitely landing. If anything, the fight could have been stopped before the final sequence. Even after that barrage, however, Parker was not badly hurt enough for the fight to be over (the most important thing for a referee to gauge) – not yet, at least. And he was still able to competently defend himself (the next thing for a referee to scrutinize); two of Wardley’s final three shots missed their target. If you didn’t stop the fight before that sequence, then it shouldn’t have been stopped because of it. Nor is the situation any more palatable just because there have been worse stoppages in the sport (many from this same referee). I saw some people arguing that Parker should’ve known Foster’s reputation and not given the ref any reason to halt the fight. That to me feels like blaming the victim.
Jason Langendorf: Has boxing seen worse stoppages? Absolutely. And yet, that’s a terrible defense for a bad one. Foster unquestionably jumped the gun, and the conspiracy theorists and nationalists and crap-stirrers will have a field day over whether he favored Wardley based on his country of origin. Then again, Parker was in a very bad way in the 10th round – and then things really took a turn for the worse. It should be a ref’s obligation to assess the entirety of a fight’s circumstances when making a stoppage judgment. Given Parker’s 39 career fights, the resilience of his chin, the wobble in his legs and the amount of punches he was taking without answering back, Foster’s decision wasn’t an outrageous one. There’s a thin line between embracing boxing’s inherent violence and blood for the sake of bloodlust. Start normalizing protecting fighters.
Matt Christie: It’s easy to understand the criticism. Parker was ahead, he’s known as being durable, he’d taken some hearty blows and fought back earlier in the bout. Not only that, Wardley might have been only one more swing from gassing out. But Parker looked badly hurt at the end of the 10th round and hadn’t really recovered coming into the 11th. That’s an awfully long time to be dazed and confused. At that point, he’s on the brink of being knocked clean out. Perhaps that outcome would have prevented this argument but, frankly, I’d rather see a fighter leave the ring on their own steam. Again, completely understand the controversy, but happy that Parker didn’t suffer the kind of blackout that is impossible to come back from.
Jake Donovan: Watching the fight in a vacuum – forgetting the stakes, who may have been ahead at the time of the stoppage, who was the referee etc – I didn’t have a problem with the stoppage in real time. I get the argument either way and I’m by no means applauding the decision. I don’t necessarily subscribe to “err on the side of caution” – it’s a crutch used to defend poor officiating. That said, I feel like more is being made of the situation based on the intangibles and especially because of Howard Foster’s shoddy record, particularly in fights on this level. I don’t disagree that Parker could have continued but he put himself in a horrible position to argue that point. It’s happened many times before in this sport, and the outrage was nowhere nearly as vocal as it’s been in this instance. It sucks more for Parker that he’s been screwed out of a deserved title shot and now suffers this setback. That’s on his team, though, and should have nothing to do with what took place at that moment.
Ryan Songalia: I think it's a bit ridiculous that Parker was even in this situation. He has been interim titleholder for a year and a half, has shown over his past three fights that he was the second best heavyweight in the world, and should already have gotten his shot at the undisputed championship. That said, it isn't as cut and dry as either side of the debate is making it out to be. Viewing just the stoppage in a 30-second highlight makes it look less defensible, as Wardley was missing as much as he was landing and looked to be out of steam by the time the fight was stopped. On the other hand, it had been a grueling fight where both had taken lots of damage, and Parker had been hurt several times, including the round before and just before the stoppage. What makes it even more divisive is that it was Howard Foster making the call, and he's long had a reputation for controversial stoppages. That's really something that the team of the visiting Parker should have considered in pre-fight negotiations. It comes down to your philosophy on when a fight should be stopped, but my feeling is when there is so much at stake, it's hard to justify stopping the fight just as the other boxer starts firing back.
