WEEKEND REVIEW: Cuts, confusion and crushing finishes

Cuts, controversies and craziness — it was a hectic weekend for boxing and the usual feast-or-famine situation for fans in the U.S., with PPV shows going head-to-head on Saturday plus a Showtime card.

Controversy? Let’s start with the judging of three of the weekend’s fights.

Scoring was all over the place in title bouts in Puerto Rico and Mexico, but the biggest furore was centred on the heavyweight fight in Britain that saw Tyson Fury win a gruelling struggle against John McDermott by a ludicrous score of 98-92 from referee and sole arbiter Terry O’Connor. That scoring was so wrong as to be indefensible. I’ve looked at this in a separate report.

Two judges were seeing a different fight from the third arbiter in the junior flyweight rematch between Ivan Calderon and Rodel Mayol, with the Puerto Rican keeping his title on a split decision over the dangerous Filipino. One experienced judge had Mayol winning clearly but the other two saw Calderon comfortably ahead when the Puerto Rican’s cut brought a premature conclusion. I’ve looked at this fight in a separate report, too.

There was more wildly divergent scoring in the 105-pound title fight between Donnie Nietes of the Philippines and Mexico’s Manuel Vargas on Saturday’s Latin Fury 11 PPV show in Mexico, with Vargas a wide winner on one scorecard yet Nietes winning convincingly on the other two cards.

I found it little short of astonishing that Thomas Nardone, a judge from Florida, could give only two rounds to Vargas after a tough, close and competitive fight.

The TV commentary was misleading, with ex-champ analyst Raul Marquez making Vargas the winner by 117-111. I saw Vargas as the winner by 115-113 but my impression was that the fight could have gone either way.

It seemed to me that the TV commentary made much of how Vargas was walking through Nietes’s best shots while failing to point out that the sharp, clear, hard blows that the Filipino fighter was landing are the sort of punches that impress the judges.

Nietes showed good boxing ability, blocking and dodging many of Vargas’s punches, and the Filipino was scoring with a variety of blows, his uppercuts being particularly impressive.

Vargas missed a lot with big hooks and right hands but he did some good banging to the body and there were times when he was driving Nietes back around the ring.

The four-minute wait before the verdict was announced indicated to me that there was some puzzlement at the officials’ table, as if the commission members couldn’t quite believe the scores.

I’m not often surprised by scoring in a boxing match, because when a contest goes to the cards you always have to hold your breath these days, but that 118-110 score in favour of Nietes was as off the wall as Terry O’Connor’s lopsided scoring in the Fury-McDermott fight.

A cut terminated the bantamweight fight between Fernando Montiel and Alejandro Valdez on the Latin Fury show, and yet again there was controversy, with Montiel stopped due to a cut and then three verdicts being given, one after the other.

Officially, it seems, the bout was a three-round technical draw under Mexican rules as four rounds had not been completed and no title was at stake. This was the original ruling, but then a gentleman from the commission told the crowd that Valdez was the winner by TKO — only for the verdict to be changed back to a technical draw. (Had the bout been for Montiel’s WBO title, and not a non-title match, the verdict would have been a no decision.)

The technical draw ruling was, of course, based on Montiel being cut in a clash of heads. The TV replay appeared to indicate clearly that a stiff right jab from Valdez’s southpaw stance caused the cut.

I thought that Valdez was very unlucky not to have won this fight.

Down from a left uppercut in the first round, Valdez had Montiel backing up and bloodied before the round was over.

Valdez was coming on strongly in the second and third, taking the fight to Montiel and letting the punches fly.

Montiel was in trouble, with his left eye starting to close and blood leaking from the cut above. The fight ending the way it did after three rounds almost certainly saved Montiel from an upset loss.

It was a weekend that was disappointing for those of us who really care about boxing, with bizarre and flat-out wrong scoring and a verdict being changed and then changed back again on the same night.

At least Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and Mikkel Kessler took care of business in emphatic fashion in their bouts.

Chavez, now boxing as a middleweight and looking stronger than I have seen him, looked very good in blowing out the normally tough Jason LeHoullier in the first round. I did think there was a decent chance of Chavez getting a late-round stoppage but I never thought he would destroy LeHoullier in two minutes, 43 seconds. The multi-tattooed trier from Maine moved in behind the jab and wasn’t doing at all badly until Chavez dumped him with a perfectly thrown left hook. Although LeHoullier got up, he was out of the fight. Chavez’s follow-up barrage was impressive. American fans tend to be dismissive of Chavez, but there was no mistaking the delight of the Mexican crowd. JCC Jr is a very big deal south of the border.

Kessler, too, ended matters convincingly although it took him a few rounds longer than Chavez.

Back after an 11-month layoff and making a mandatory defence of his 168-pound title, Kessler, after a slowish start, simply blew through Gusmyr Perdomo to please the big crowd in Denmark. Perdomo gave it a game try but when the lanky Venezuelan southpaw went down late in the third one sensed that the end was near, and Kessler’s big right hand ended matters inside the first minute of the next round. As with Chavez versus LeHoullier I expected more of a wearing-down type of stoppage, but the difference in class and power was pronounced once Kessler got into his stride.

Now Kessler meets Andre Ward as part of Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament in the super middleweight division. This is a fight that will be eagerly awaited by fans.

I know that Showtime wished to keep Ward happy by giving him a tune-up appearance along with Kessler’s delayed-coverage fight on Saturday, but what, really, was the point in Ward’s three-round hammering of poor Shelby Pudwill? No one is being wise after the event here — everyone knew that this was a complete and utter mismatch, and it just seemed a bit distasteful to watch a world-class fighter beating up a victim in a premium cable TV main event, although one could say that HBO were guilty of this in the Roy Jones "mandatory mismatch" years.