Is boxing really becoming hugely corrupt at the moment, or is it just that the influential people in the sport are just plain useless? I'll give a few examples:
The WBA Heavyweight Circlejerk - I've seen the strange way that John Ruiz just kept getting WBA title shots explained as corruption. Really? What does the WBA have to gain by fixing title shots for a guy that nobody wants to watch? I've seen similar claims about Hasim Rahman's inexplicable climb up the WBA rankings. I don't see corruption here - I see incompetent, out of touch idiots who think that there's some amazing prestige to having a man who was briefly The Man a decade ago fighting for their trinket.
Khan, the referee and The Man In The Hat - This time we've got a bizarre refereeing performance arguably costing a fighter his title. Had this been the other way around, I'd wonder about corruption. But Khan's the potential Golden Boy cash cow. Even if it was local bribery, rather than grand scale, why would a world championship referee put his career on the line for one fight? Again, I concluded that it was just an incompetent refereeing performance.
This isn't to say that I don't believe corruption is around too - Marquez got robbed against Pacquiao so as not to endanger a potential Mayweather fight, I have no doubt about that. But did anyone organise it, or did the judges do what they (wrongly) thought was best for the sport off their own backs? Were the judges that scored Froch-Dirrell and Helenius-Chisora paid off or were they swayed by crowd reactions and the atmosphere on the night?
Basically, do you think the clearly incorrect scorecards, the bizarre title shots and strange actions of the sanctioning bodies that we see as evidence of corruption might actually be symptoms of bad management and aging judges?
The WBA Heavyweight Circlejerk - I've seen the strange way that John Ruiz just kept getting WBA title shots explained as corruption. Really? What does the WBA have to gain by fixing title shots for a guy that nobody wants to watch? I've seen similar claims about Hasim Rahman's inexplicable climb up the WBA rankings. I don't see corruption here - I see incompetent, out of touch idiots who think that there's some amazing prestige to having a man who was briefly The Man a decade ago fighting for their trinket.
Khan, the referee and The Man In The Hat - This time we've got a bizarre refereeing performance arguably costing a fighter his title. Had this been the other way around, I'd wonder about corruption. But Khan's the potential Golden Boy cash cow. Even if it was local bribery, rather than grand scale, why would a world championship referee put his career on the line for one fight? Again, I concluded that it was just an incompetent refereeing performance.
This isn't to say that I don't believe corruption is around too - Marquez got robbed against Pacquiao so as not to endanger a potential Mayweather fight, I have no doubt about that. But did anyone organise it, or did the judges do what they (wrongly) thought was best for the sport off their own backs? Were the judges that scored Froch-Dirrell and Helenius-Chisora paid off or were they swayed by crowd reactions and the atmosphere on the night?
Basically, do you think the clearly incorrect scorecards, the bizarre title shots and strange actions of the sanctioning bodies that we see as evidence of corruption might actually be symptoms of bad management and aging judges?
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