America At Large: The boxing world has been a house divided since Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya met for the second time at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas last Saturday, writes George Kimball.
Mosley, as he had been three years earlier when the two fought in Los Angeles, was unanimously adjudged the winner by a panel of ringside judges, but millions more watching on television had been persuaded by HBO's broadcasting crew that De La Hoya won easily.
In the days since, De La Hoya and his promoter, Bob Arum, have charged wholesale corruption involving the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC); Mosley and his promoter, Gary Shaw, have demanded sanctions against Arum and De La Hoya for impugning the integrity of the commission; and the judges (Stanley Christodoulou of South Africa, Anek Hongtongkam of Thailand, and American Duane Ford) have been forced to defend their interpretation of events.
Meanwhile, HBO, which stands to benefit from the controversy in that they will replay the telecast in conjunction with this Saturday night's Chris Byrd-Fres Oquendo IBF heavyweight title fight, has been unsurprisingly silent since stirring up the pot in the first place.
It isn't unusual for those with a ringside vantage point to see a fight in terms widely divergent from those who watch from living room chairs, particularly when the commentary has been notably one-sided, and most especially when the argument has been bolstered by statistical data - even though statistics can be almost meaningless in such circumstances.
I wasn't in Las Vegas for Mosley-De La Hoya, but since several of my colleagues asked my opinion, I sat down two nights later and watched the tape. Unlike most who had endured the live broadcast, I made a conscious attempt to ignore the commentary of Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant and George Foreman and to concentrate instead on what I was seeing.
My calculations produced precisely the same verdict - 115-113 for Mosley - that each of the judges had returned. While it's somewhat maddening to come down with the same score as Hongtongkam, a notably bad judge, it was somewhat comforting to agree with Christodoulou and Ford, two very good ones.
It appeared to me that the HBO trio became swept up in the momentum of their consensus. They seemed so astonished to find themselves in unanimous agreement over what they had seen that they developed a collective illusion that they were still seeing it, despite a palpable shift in the course of the action.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came early in the bout, when Mosley landed three straight lefts within 20 seconds. De La Hoya never moved his arms, never tried to block or parry, and certainly never offered a punch, but the action was accompanied by a simultaneous voice-over of the HBO crew congratulating Oscar for imposing his will on Shane.
To its credit, before going off the air, HBO did reveal that, in a hasty survey of writers at ringside, four of the five had scored the fight for Mosley.
"These are honest men and they scored the fight the way they did. To me, there is no controversy," said Marc Ratner, the executive director of the Nevada Commission. "It's a close fight that could have gone either way. This is the way the judges saw it. If it went the other way, Mosley's camp would have been the ones protesting."
Arum vowed never to promote another fight in Nevada, where his firm, Top Rank, has been located for the past two decades, and initially blamed the outcome on legalised sports wagering in that state. De La Hoya had been a 5 to 2 favourite to defend his WBC and WBA light middleweight titles, even though Mosley had prevailed in their earlier meeting, as welterweights, three years ago.
At the post-fight press conference De La Hoya announced that he would use his "financial resources" (he only made $12 million for losing to Mosley) to put his lawyers to work in a "full investigation" of the perceived chicanery.
Then, on Monday, Arum accused one of the Nevada Commissioners, Dr Flip Homansky, with working behind the scenes to secure the appointment of Christodoulou to the panel of judges. Homansky, former chief ringside physician of the NSAC, was instrumental in lobbying for the adoption of MRI testing as part of more stringent medical requirements for Nevada boxers. Top Rank had bitterly opposed the new regulations, and, said Arum, "this was Homansky's payback to us".
"We cannot forget and ignore the public and the fans," said De La Hoya in a statement issued two days later. "It is they who make or break this sport. It is not just about Sugar Shane or myself, it is about being honest with the public. Based on totally independent online polls, it seems that from 70 per cent to 74 per cent of the public thinks that I won the fight."
Mosley's backers weren't long in responding. Tuesday they demanded that the Nevada Commission "immediately commence disciplinary proceedings against Top Rank, Inc, Golden Boy Promotions, Inc and Oscar De La Hoya" for what promoter Gary Shaw labelled "the atrocious post-fight conduct" of Arum and De La Hoya.
"There is no doubt that Sugar Shane and Oscar fought a good, close fight," said Shaw, "but let's not lose sight of the fact that Sugar Shane won by unanimous decision and the vast majority of the ringside media scored the fight for Sugar Shane too. I will not allow Sugar Shane's accomplishment on Saturday night to be overshadowed by the vicious and malicious poison emanating from Arum and De La Hoya. This goes beyond bad sportsmanship. Way beyond."
