By Scott Gilfoid: Showtime commentator Paulie Malignaggi says he heard that WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder was unhappy with his commentary over his recent fight against Tyson Fury on December 1, which Paulie says was a match that he felt Tyson had won. Malignaggi thought Fury was robbed by not being given the decision on the night.
The judges scored it a 12 round split draw by the scores 115-111 for Wilder, 114-112 for Fury, and 113-113 even. However, the challenger Fury was knocked down twice in the fight in being dropped in the 9th and 12th, and that hurt any chances he had of winning. It’s extremely rare in boxing for the challenger to be given a victory against a champion when they’ve been knocked down twice in the fight.
“Wilder did have Fury down twice. I felt Fury won the fight,” Malignaggi said to IFL TV. “I heard Wilder was unhappy with the comments I made, and I’m open to debate about my scorecard. I thought it was a robbery. I’m welcome to debate with Wilder.”
The question is, why would Wilder want to debate Malignaggi over his scorecard when he’s not one of the official judges that worked the fight on December 1? That would be pointless. Malignaggi is just another person with an opinion about the Wilder-Fury fight, but without a say so in terms of the actual scoring of the fight. Malignaggi seems to have his mind made up about the fight. Wilder would gain nothing in trying to debate a person with an entrenched position like Malignaggi appears to have. If Wilder were to agree to debate Malignaggi over the scores fight, which is now academic, he could start with by asking how many times in the past have challengers been given wins over champions after they’ve been dropped twice? It’s safe to assume that it’s not happened very often.
”It’s not on a personal level with me. If I thought Wilder was robbed, I would have gone to bat for him, but I didn’t feel that,” Malignaggi said. ”I’m not Dan Rafael, who scored it 114-112 for Deontay Wilder, but can’t even tell how he got there,” Malignaggi said.
Rafael saw what a lot of boxing fans saw in the fight. He saw Wilder drop Fury twice. He also likely noted that in the first half of the fight, many of the rounds were close but Wilder was landing the harder shots consistently in those rounds. The judges are trained to score fights for the fighter that lands the harder blows, even when they’re being hit a few more times by their opponents. Fury’s weak punches were nowhere near as powerful as Wilder’s, and he wasn’t landing that many more shots per round. Fury’s edge in connected shots was small during every round of the fight. The only way the judges could differentiate them was based on which fighter was landing the harder blows. That was Wilder. If Fury had a little more punching power, then it would have been easier to give him rounds, but he was slapping with his shots all night long. The only one that was connecting with authority was Wilder.
Why wasn’t the fight stopped in the 12th?
What Malignaggi doesn’t talk about is why didn’t referee Jack Reiss stop the fight when Fury was knocked down in the 12th round, and he had his eyes closed and appeared unconscious on the canvas. The thing for Malignaggi to be debating is why the referee didn’t stop the fight on the spot when Fury was knocked down. It was a scary looking knockdown, and it could have ended badly for Fury if he was seriously hurt. Wasting valuable seconds giving a count to a fighter with his eyes closed was arguably a risky thing for the referee to do. If you look at it from the way that fights are normally conducted, a referee would have likely waived off a fight if a fighter was knocked down the way Fury was in the 12th round.
Only the referee knows why he didn’t stop the fight on the spot when Fury was knocked down in round 12. Did the referee give Fury more of a chance to get up because he’s a popular fighter? Does the referee do the same thing for less popular fighters or does he stop the fight right away when he sees a fighter looking as hurt as Fury was? Malignaggi should be debating Wilder on why the fight was allowed to continue in the 12th round after the knockdown of Fury, since a lot of boxing fans think the fight should have been stopped right away to protect the British fighter.
The real controversy is the referee giving a count to a fighter that appeared to be knocked out. If the referee had stopped the fight the way that a lot of other referees would have in a similar situation, then there would be no point in Malignaggi squabbling about the fight being a robbery. It would have been a clear knockout win for Wilder, which a lot of people think it should have been. For boxing fans that have forgotten about how hurt Fury looked in the 12th after getting dropped, they’re seemingly ignoring that and just focusing on Tyson out-boxing Wilder when things were going well for him during the fight. Things weren’t going well for Fury in the championship rounds, and especially in the 12th round when he got knocked down. The real bone for contention is why the referee didn’t stop the fight. If there’s a standard where referees halt fights under a certain circumstance like a brutal knockdown, you have to ask why the fight wasn’t stopped in this case.
The scoring showed that Fury didn’t do enough to get the victory, and you can blame his inability to stay on his feet in the championship rounds for him not getting the nod by the judges.
Was there a slow count given by the referee in the 12th?
Some boxing fans think the referee gave Fury a slow count to give him time to recover from the knockdown. That’s another debatable point that Malignaggi fails to mention. If Malignaggi wants to debate Wilder, then he needs to watch the 12th round again, and look at it in slow motion and take a look at Fury’s face when he was knocked down. Should the referee have stopped it? Was the count the referee was giving Fury a slow count like some boxing fans say? The fight could have ended very differently than it did if the referee halted it in the 12th. Few boxing fans would have complained if the referee Jack Reiss had stopped it, given how badly hurt Fury looked. You couldn’t fault the referee for stopping it with Fury looking like he was unconscious.
