Body Blow

I was too busy throwing things at my television following the Celtics' loss to actually watch the Manny Pacquiao fight. However, by all accounts it was an unbelievably bad decision in which Pacquiao was screwed over by two judges' decisions. Now, one or two people complaining about a decision would be par for the course, but everyone seems to thinks this was shady and conversely I have yet to see anyone come out to defend the judges' ruling. It seems every legitimate reporter has said they had Pacquiao winning easily and half of them have called for an investigation to be launched (when a ton of money suddenly comes in on the other guy late in the afternoon in Vegas, it is usually a sign that some kind of fix is in). When even the guy who won the fight is surprised that he was ahead on the cards than there is probably something to that claim. See, this is why I don't like boxing anymore. Some people stop following it because of the lack of heavyweights, others stopped paying attention because too many fighters are content to win by decision instead of going for the knockout and they find the sport too boring. I stopped watching because I find the sport too corrupt.

Every time there is a bad call in sports people like to joke that the umps must be on the take. (Of course, this was only fueled by the time it turned out that an NBA ref actually did bet on the games he was calling.) Still, most of the time fans are only saying it out of frustration or looking for someone other than the players to blame. But at this point there have been too many controversial decisions in boxing for me to keep looking the other way. I'm all for an upset win, but I want it to be a legitimate upset - not happening because some judge wants a new car in their driveway. When you can't trust the product you are slapping your hard-earned money down to watch than you may as well start switch over to professional wrestling, because at least there the good guy is guaranteed to eventually win. This Pacquiao loss was just another in a long line of (being charitable) "questionable" decisions in the sport. Considering it was already losing ground to MMA, I'm not sure how many more of these boxing can survive.