joke that I was in prison in Montana on May 8, 2004. There was a duck hunting incident or something like that. Or maybe that was when I was living in that little grass shack on the beach in Bora Bora. I was drinking copious amounts of coconut-tinged drinks served by a wicked wahine wearing a newly-mowed grass skirt.
I forget.
I have to have an excuse for completely missing the Manny Pacquaio-Juan Manuel Marquez WBA-IBF title bout at the MGM Grand. Actually, I was then defending the unjustly accused (well, some of them actually were) in criminal cases in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Queens.
I was taking a hiatus from boxing as I recall.
Now I?m going to view and score the controversial bout, which ended in a controversial majority draw, and as the Boxingconfidential Detective, hopefully not defective, report back to you, dear readers, as to how I tabbed it.
Something that gets overlooked in the runup to Pacman-Marquez II is that the final scorecards were an amazing 10 points apart.
As you recall, Marquez was knocked down thrice in the opening round. Judge Guy Jutras and John Stewart both penciled in 10-6 scores for the round but Nevadan Burt Clements made it 10-7 on his card.
Was Clements wrong? Or was it a permissive rule, meaning that Clements could?ve made it 10-7 or 10-6 as he saw fit?
The final tallies were: Jutras, who lives in Montreal, scoring 115-110 for the Mexican, New Jersey resident Stewart calling it 115-110 for Megamanny and Clements making it a majority draw with his 113-113 ?push? verdict.
Clements spoke to The Las Vegas Review-Journal after the fight and his words sounded like an apology for getting it wrong on the first round.
?Basically, I screwed up,? Clements said. ?I was of the understanding that in a round with two or more knockdowns, multiple knockdowns, it should be 10-7.?
The newspaper reported also that Clements turned to Mark Ratner, then executive director of the Nevada commission, and said, ?You don?t want 10-6 rounds, right??
There?s no record of Ratner?s response, if any.
Keep it locked on Boxingconfidential.com. Your Detective is on the case.
