| Bram Cohen ( @ 2008-05-25 01:50:00 |
Boxing
After having watched at least one obviously fixed boxing match, and several more which made for just plain bad television, I have a big question about the scoring. Why on earth aren't the judges forced to give their scores after every round? In most cases fixing a bout requires outlandish enough scoring that the judge has to retroactively go back and change their scores on earlier rounds to come up with something even vaguely plausible, and having them commit to earlier round scores would end that practice completely. If the ringside announcers can give a score immediately after every round, there's no reason why the judges can't as well. Hell, my own vague judgments of 'I think I saw X' tend to hit the average of the judge's score better than the individual judges generally do. That's another big issue with boxing scoring - the judges's scores have such high variance that the claim that the winner of a close bout is anything other than arbitrary and subjective is quite ludicrous. Figuring skating is worse, but that's indicative of the situation in figure skating being beyond ludicrous.
On the subject of boxing, I have a suggested rules change which would spare boxers most of the brain damage they now sustain: When you're knocked out, you lose. None of this waiting until the count of ten to see if you can pull yourself together and get up and continue to have your brains scrambled. If you hit the mat and can't get up instantaneously, that means your brain has sustained serious injury and taking any further punishment is extremely dangerous. Other martial arts, including ones with tons of striking, have nowhere near the record of brain injury that boxing does, and the reason is hardly a secret - in those sports, if you're knocked out, you lose.
After having watched at least one obviously fixed boxing match, and several more which made for just plain bad television, I have a big question about the scoring. Why on earth aren't the judges forced to give their scores after every round? In most cases fixing a bout requires outlandish enough scoring that the judge has to retroactively go back and change their scores on earlier rounds to come up with something even vaguely plausible, and having them commit to earlier round scores would end that practice completely. If the ringside announcers can give a score immediately after every round, there's no reason why the judges can't as well. Hell, my own vague judgments of 'I think I saw X' tend to hit the average of the judge's score better than the individual judges generally do. That's another big issue with boxing scoring - the judges's scores have such high variance that the claim that the winner of a close bout is anything other than arbitrary and subjective is quite ludicrous. Figuring skating is worse, but that's indicative of the situation in figure skating being beyond ludicrous.
On the subject of boxing, I have a suggested rules change which would spare boxers most of the brain damage they now sustain: When you're knocked out, you lose. None of this waiting until the count of ten to see if you can pull yourself together and get up and continue to have your brains scrambled. If you hit the mat and can't get up instantaneously, that means your brain has sustained serious injury and taking any further punishment is extremely dangerous. Other martial arts, including ones with tons of striking, have nowhere near the record of brain injury that boxing does, and the reason is hardly a secret - in those sports, if you're knocked out, you lose.