By Gerardo Granados: Last Saturday night at Bayamon, Puerto Rico; we got the chance to see a good fight. In theory it wasn’t supposed to be too difficult for the WBA-WBC light welterweight belt holder Danny Garcia (W28-L0-D0), but the challenger Mauricio Herrera (W20-L4-D0) proved to be a good boxer and put up a great performance. The fight was very competitive and there were hard rounds to score, at the end I scored it even 114-114 with two close rounds that could have gone to either fighter.
But was it a major factor to have had the “open scoring”? This system has been criticized by boxing fans, even boxing analyst and authorities can´t find consensus on its effective use. When Saul Alvarez defeated Austin Trout some believed that it hurt Trout to know he was behind on the score cards, last Saturday night when the score cards were announced in the fourth and eight rounds I believe it didn’t influenced negatively the performance of both fighters.
Professional Boxing has been criticized as corrupt in the past so to implement new ways to avoid any suspicion of wrong doing must be applauded and if needed then make adjustments instead of simply void it for not being perfect. Maybe it could be possible to keep the open scoring available for the corner men so that they can adjust if they know his fighter is behind or ahead on the score cards. Let us not forget that a prize fighter goal is to win but the audience expects them to put on a good show; you can take Herrera as an example because he lost the fight on the official score cards but he must have won the interest of boxing fans to watch him fight again.
I believe it is great to have “open scoring” because it keeps it clean of suspicion, can you remember the last time you saw that the announcement of winner was delayed more than ten minutes? Maybe as I just mention it shouldn’t be announced to the audience but let the corner men know it, so that they can decide what is best for their fighter. If Meldrick Taylor´s corner had known he was ahead on the score cards they wouldn’t have told him he needed the last round.
Perhaps boxing technicians could take advantage of this scoring system but the majority of boxing fans will never agree on the official scoring cards when a fight is competitive and close. I think it is a good idea to have the open scoring on any fight, but what about the reader?
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