By: Sean Crose
When the bell rang for the end of Saturday night’s extraordinary and undisputed lightweight title fight between Vasyl Lomachenko and defending champion Devin Haney, I had an uneasy feeling. Oh, the fight itself is amazing, a truly non-stop competition of two walking, talking skill machines operating at the top of their respective games. What made me uncomfortable was the fact that I let Loma win the two-half match on my private and completely unofficial scoreboard. The truth, as I’ve admitted to myself, is that the fight can go either way (things like that matter when you have enough fans to score points on your own in skirmishes) . If I hid my opinion on one or two of those rounds even slightly, Haney would clearly be the winner on my completely unrelated scoreboard.
Of course, Saturday night’s Las Vegas jury – whose opinions mattered – disagreed with me. Two of the three judges gave a reasonable verdict while one appeared to have watched another match entirely. However, it seems that the public is angry with this past weekend’s results – or at least a good portion of the public. I find this sentiment completely understandable. If it were a duel, the outcome would have been clear: Loma had won against Haney. Sure, Loma had bruises on his face, but he fed Haney so many shots all night that Haney probably saw them in his sleep that night.
However, the truth is that boxing is not a fight. Not when all is said and done. Boxing happens to be a sport, an extremely violent sport that resembles and has many of the characteristics of a parking lot brawl that you might see on a Friday or Saturday night. In the end, it was a round-based sports competition. And the fact that Haney, who we often see Loma clean out last weekend, won a lot of rounds. Finally, a probing jab can count as a left hook in the sport. It all depends on who scores more effectively in the three-minute action chapters provided.
Discouraging? You bet. But dems the rules as they stand. And if a better scoring method comes along, one where the boxer actually beats the other boxer and wins for sure, I’ll be ready to do it all. However, there’s something else to keep in mind as we sift through the debris of Saturday night’s controversy: Loma let Haney win all of the important twelfth and final rounds. He said so himself. “I could give him this round,” he admitted after the match. Considering the match could have had a different ending had he been more aggressive in its final chapter, in a sense Loma largely has to blame himself for Saturday night’s outcome.
