Kaye Scott felt she defeated Olivia Curry, but aims to win definitively in a hypothetical rematch.
Scott fought Curry to a majority draw at the Fox Theatre in Detroit on Friday. The bout was for the vacant WBA and WBC women’s middleweight titles, but as one judge scored the bout 98-92 and the other two had it 95-95, the belts will remain without an owner for the moment.
Scott, 4-1-1, felt she should be returning home with the titles.
“To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with the result,” Scott told BoxingScene. “I was very confident I had done enough to win. Then, when the first scorecard was announced, and then to walk away empty-handed is just a little bit hard to digest, when you know deep down inside you did enough for it.”
Scott rewatched the fight after flying home from Detroit to Sydney, Australia. Her feelings are unchanged. Scott, 41, does believe she can improve from this performance. One thing she noted was that she stood and exchanged with Curry, 7-2-2 (2 KOs), a style of fight that played to Curry’s strengths.
“I don’t think they expected that at all,” Scott said. “That is probably why I got dragged into sitting and trading a little bit too much.”
Scott, since her loss to Desley Robinson, has been working on fighting on the inside for the past nine to twelve months.
“I was barely on the ropes,” Scott said. “I was pushing her around. I think I had that drilled in my head so much. I had lost some parts of technical boxing, because I wanted to keep pushing forward and control the exchange.”
When asked if she had too much success on the inside, Scott admits, “Yeah, probably if I am being 100 percent honest.”
Scott spoke about how she will approach the rematch with Chicago’s Curry, 35.
“I did the job, but we are going to have to do a little bit more of a refined job,” Scott said. “I don’t always need to be pushing forward.”
Nonetheless, her progress in exchanges was a major milestone, as she had the opposite approach in her IBF women’s middleweight title fight against Robinson. Scott says she has to find a happy medium. The other major takeaway was that the mental work she spoke to BoxingScene about in the build-up to the fight had paid off.
“The fact that I know deep down inside that I did win,” Scott said. “I already did enough, and that all the work I did do, and will keep doing, is only going to strengthen me even more.”
