ISHMAIL ARVIN TKO end of 6 ANTHONY THOMPSON

There is a lot of fuss right now about the scoring controversies in the Olympics, and maybe I will write something about this. Pro boxing has its own controversies, however, and yet another one, concerning a clash of heads, occurred with Anthony Thompson being declared the loser in a fight he was winning against a game and willing Ishmail Arvin.

The rule is clear. If a fighter is deemed unable to continue by an injury caused by a clash of heads, the fight goes to the scorecards if four rounds have been completed.

On Friday Night Fights, the Philadelphia junior middleweight Thompson was cut by an obvious clash of heads in round three against local area fighter Arvin in Washington DC.

After round six the cut over his eye was looking ugly and a swelling had started to form. It was decided that the bout should be stopped.

OK, six rounds completed, a boxer is cut from a clash of heads and is deemed unable to continue, so we go to the scorecards, right? Not in DC we don’t.

Referee Malik Waleed, who had been warning Thompson all night for low blows, some of which looked borderline, said he hadn’t seen a clash of heads. There was confusion.

ESPN commentator Joe Tessitore came to the rescue — or tried to do so. He showed the referee and the commissioner the slow-motion replay. “Look,” Tessitore said, “no cut, there’s the head clash — there’s the cut.”

It all looked so plain and simple. But, no, not in DC it wasn’t. As referee Waleed was saying that he had not actually seen the head clash when the cut occurred, the commission decided that Arvin should get the TKO win.

Now, New Jersey has a video-replay initiative in place that is supposed to clear up things such as this. I know that NJ was hoping that other states would get on board. What, though, is the point of having video replay if it offers clear and incontrovertible evidence that a commission chooses to reject?

What, I wonder, would have happened had it been the local favourite Arvin who had been winning the fight but had been unable to continue due to a cut suffered in similar circumstances? Taking a wild guess, I have a sneaking suspicion that the technical decision rule might have been invoked.

Arvin, let it be clear, showed a lot of heart when fighting his way back after a dreadful third round, in which he was twice floored. He was taking the fight to Thompson, who looked tired in the sixth.

I agreed with guest analyst Shannon Briggs that Arvin was turning the fight around. With four rounds remaining, it looked like being a real struggle down the stretch for the heavily favoured Thompson, and a point deduction for a low blow seemed inevitable. Still, Thompson had the cushion of the 10-7 round in the third. All he really needed to do was to stay on his feet and throw enough punches to win one more round, and even with a point taken away for a low blow — which surely was coming — he would have been able to eke out a win.

Once again I find myself despairing of boxing.

Just last month we had a similar mess in California when Hasim Rahman was cut from a clash of heads against James Toney, when the California commission initially ruled a TKO win for Toney, taking the view that Rahman was surrendering.

However, as I understand it, a commission inspector subsequently reported that he had noticed blood trickling into Rahman's left eye, which gave credence to the heavyweight’s claim that his vision was blurry.

The commission admitted that its original ruling was in error, and the verdict was changed to a no decision.

This, I suspect, is what will happen with Thompson versus Arvin.

In fact, in view of all the circumstances, a no decision would have been the lesser of two evils on Friday night if the commission couldn’t bring itself to let the fight to go the scorecards.

The problem was, the whole thing smacked of Arvin getting the benefit of hometown help.

I thought that Arvin showed real heart and determination, and it wasn’t his fault that the fight ended the way it did. Thompson looked physically weak in the sixth, the same way he had looked in his last fight, when he lost a debatable decision to Yuri Foreman. His punches seemed to be losing their authority.

Once it seemed as if Thompson was a world title prospect. Those days, I fear, are long gone. He looked a very beatable fighter on Friday night, in a performance that suggested he is going nowhere. He did not, though, deserve to lose like this.

We have had this fiasco, the Toney-Rahman mess and, of course, the Humberto Soto-Francisco Lorenzo travesty in June. Maybe there really is some truth in the saying about bad things happening in threes.

(Actually, in pro boxing maybe bad things happen in fours because on July 4 there was the shambles in Turkey when a judge admitted having second thoughts before handing in his scoring slip and changed his score for the last round of the Paolo Vidoz-Sinan Samil Sam European heavyweight title fight, which opened the door for the original verdict of a draw to become a majority decision win for the Turkish boxer Sam.)

One thing seems clear: people in professional boxing are hardly in a position to be bashing the judges in the Olympics — well deserved though such criticism may be — when pro boxing can come up with four debacles in three months.