By Scott Gilfoid: According to the punch stats from last night’s fight between WBC super middleweight champion Badou Jack (20-1-2, 12 KOs) and Lucian Bute (32-3-1, 25 KOs), Jack out-landed the 36-year-old Bute by a wide margin. Jack landed almost a 100 more punches.
It’s not the fight I saw. I thought Bute landed more shots and I counted him landing many more punches than Jack in their fight at the DC Armory in Washington, DC. The Jack-Bute fight was scored a draw by the scores 117-111 for Jack, and 114-114 and 114-114. I thought a draw was fair. I have no problems with that score.
Jack obviously does have a problem with it, but what can you do? He’s just going to have to live with it.
Jack connected on 278 of 703 punches for a connect percentage of 40 percent, according to Compu-Box. For his part, Bute landed just 179 of 857 shots for a connect percentage of 21 percent. I’m just wondering if they had it backwards because I saw Bute landing many more punches than Jack in the fight, and I had Jack missing many more shots. I have to throw out Compu-Box’s stats because they don’t jibe with the fight I saw. Bute dominated the last seven rounds of the fight and made Badou look really bad.
Jack, 32, wasn’t happy after the fight because he thought he clearly won. Unfortunately, the last time I checked, Jack wasn’t one of the judges working the contest. If he could have put himself in four places at once, then maybe he would have won the fight if he were the three judges and the fighter in the ring at the same time.
Since Jack isn’t able to clone himself multiple times, I have to go with how the judges scored the fight. They’re the experts, and they’re the ones that judged who won. It’s impossible for a fighter to ever disentangle themselves from their self-interest when judging whether or not they won the fight. You’ll find that more often than not that fighters that are beaten, don’t seem to know it.
“We want to be treated fair,” said Jack’s promoter Floyd Mayweather Jr. “We need to get some new judges because this is not right for the sport of boxing.”
It would have been a good win for Mayweather to have his fighter Badou bag a victory over an old former world champion like Bute. It would have been a good scalp for Jack to add to his collection, but now he has to settle for a draw instead of a real scalp. Again, it’s Badou’s fault that he didn’t win the fight because he was too lazy in the last seven rounds of the fight, and no, I don’t buy the punch stats that are listed above.
I think Bute landed more shots and definitely out-worked Jack. The unification fight between Jack and IBF super middleweight champion James DeGale will still take place in the fall, but it just won’t be as big as it would have been had the two fighters won their fights last Saturday night and looked good in doing so. Jack looked terrible against Bute, and DeGale looked worse against Rogelio Medina. They both looked lazy and too economical with their punches. It made for bad fights.
It wasn’t much of a crowd at the DC Armory in Washington, DC. Only 4,135 fans showed up for the fight. I guess DeGale will be able to ring in more fans if the DeGale vs. Jack fight winds up getting staged in the UK later this year.
If Jack is going to have a chance of beating DeGale this year, then he’s going to need to throw more punches and work a lot harder than we saw him do against Bute. Jack looked like he gassed out after five rounds. He needs to sit down and watch the replay of the fight with a good cup of coffee so that he can see for himself that his punch volume went down in the last half of the fight.
Jack gave the win away by not letting his hands go the way he needed to for him to have a chance to win. You don’t win a fight by throwing five punches in a round and hope that you can bag the round. Bute was fighting much better in the second half of the contest, and working for three minutes of every round instead of just one like Badou Jack.