More On Pacquiao-Bradley

Grantland:

We were six or seven rows back from ringside, and when it became clear that Timothy Bradley Jr. had been declared winner by split decision over the heavily favored Pacquiao, my companion shot out of his chair and shouted: "WHAT'S HAPPENING? WHAT'S HAPPENING?? THIS IS MADNESS! WHO IS THAT GUY WHO DID THIS?"
That guy (and girl) were Nevada State Athletic Commission judges C.J. Ross and Duane Ford, who each scored the fight 115-113, seven rounds to five, for Bradley. Or, if you choose to believe the whispers that swept through press row at the same time as a chorus of boos filled the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, "that guy who did this" might not have been the judges. According to a conspiracy theory that had been floated and workshopped and all but perfected in the two minutes it took to walk from the arena to an adjacent banquet room for the post-fight press conference, "that guy" was Pacquiao's promoter, Top Rank CEO Bob Arum.
This sounds far-fetched — and it is — but not much more far-fetched than the possibility that three professional judges who also happen to be human beings with eyeballs connected to optic nerves connected to non-lobotomized brains could watch that fight and believe that Bradley won. Or that it was even just a close victory for Pacquiao. There didn't seem to be a single reporter on press row who gave the fight to Bradley, and if there was, he or she must have been too ashamed to admit it. I overheard HBO boxing analyst Max Kellerman saying he scored it eight rounds to four for Pacquiao, and that he thought doing so was being generous to Bradley. Ten rounds to two, nine to three, and even 11 to one in favor of Pacquiao were more common spreads among journalists who covered the fight. So when people tried to understand why Pacquiao lost a fight where he landed 82 more power punches than Bradley and 12 more jabs while connecting on a much higher percentage of his blows, it's no surprise that foul play came immediately to mind. Anyone who searched for a rational explanation for this result was bound to come up empty. After that, what's left but whatever cloak-and-dagger machinations you care to imagine in a sport controlled by a handful of powerful promoters with varying agendas and overseen by a patchwork of ineffectual state athletic commissions?

Those stats are pretty amazing, but I don't buy into the conspiracy theory.  That is one of the real issues with boxing, the scoring is much less than clear cut.  Back in the day, I used to watch Boxing After Dark and Championship Boxing on HBO, and I was usually scoring the fight pretty closely to how the announcers were, even when Prince Nassim Hamed was fighting, whom I hated with a passion, and rooted for him to get knocked through the ropes every fight.  However, the judges oftentimes scored the fight significantly different.   As for my boxing career, the closest I came to a victory was a split decision loss in which my roommates claimed I was robbed.  That's the breaks.