Bram Cohen ([info]bramcohen) wrote,
@ 2008-05-25 01:50:00
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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.



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[info]sonjaaa
2008-05-25 10:18 am UTC (link)
Olympic boxing is very different and safer.

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[info]riumplus
2008-05-25 11:12 am UTC (link)
Such a change would probably do to preventing match fixing. And that right there is exactly the reason as to why they will not implement it. ;)

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[info]uke
2008-05-26 01:34 am UTC (link)
+1 obvious!

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[info]wisedonkey
2008-05-25 04:09 pm UTC (link)
You seem to be confused. Professional boxing isn't a fair and honest sport. It's a money-making scheme.

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[info]dragonladyflame
2008-05-25 05:41 pm UTC (link)
I imagine the knockout thing is partly because the original rules of boxing were much worse. The current (Queensberry) rules are practically a paragon of humanity compared to what went before -- ten whole seconds to get up, rather than getting kicked while you're down? Awesome! I do not have the impression that other sports are recovering from quite the same history of brutality, although they might be -- I hardly know anything about this except for the few hours of research on boxing that I did, as it happens, yesterday afternoon.

Also, I venture to guess that the biggest reason boxing rules are so horrible is that no one in the business really cares about changing them. Most of the audience seems drawn to the bloodshed, and the boxers themselves have both resigned themselves to their bodily sacrifice and somewhat glorify it. There's a really interesting Q&A by Loïc Wacquant, the French boxer-sociologist, available here: [ http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:S6xAHHc9Qx0J:sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/wacquant_pdf/BUSYLOUIE.pdf ]

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[info]lupoleboucher
2008-05-25 06:31 pm UTC (link)
1) not knowing the score adds to the excitement of the game. It's a sport equivalent of cranking up your Beta in a CAPM stock market bet. I'd have to suspect the corruption comes from the people playing the sport, rather than the judges: it's cheaper and easier, since they're more marginal citizens.

2) believe it or not, removing the pads on the gloves would do more to prevent injury than changing the count out rules. Every time you get punched in the face with a padded glove, your brain is rattling around inside your noggin and giving you brain damage. It accumulates. Getting knocked out isn't always a concussion; often it's more like the vulcan nerve pinch. I'd rather get knocked out than stand up and get punched in the face with a padded glove for an hour. MMA generally has lower levels of brain damage for this reason, even though they do things like choke each other into unconsciousness.

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[info]bramcohen
2008-05-25 08:03 pm UTC (link)
Hiding the score creates the drama of the final score reveal, but makes the last round or two far duller than they ought to be. How interesting would you find the fourth quarter of a basketball game if you didn't know the score at the end of the third?

Any idea why there's so much less bleeding in MMA? They seem to use little glove-like things on their hands these days, which makes their hands get cut open less, but their faces seem to get cut open a lot less as well, and I'm not sure why.

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[info]lupoleboucher
2008-05-25 10:32 pm UTC (link)
Re: bleeding: a wild guess would be that a lot of the face bleeding was actually hand bleeding. There are also now rounds in many of the leagues, which allows you time to have your cut man work on your face. When it was a solid X-minute fight with no breaks, the cut-man didn't get to ply his trade (they can do amazing shit with silver nitrate amd superglue).

For me, the excitement of a boxing match isn't who wins or loses -certainly not when it is a decision: it's how they play the game that's interesting. Triumph is always nice, but technical skills, brains and heart are wonderful to watch.

Heart:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UhGKyi8eego

Brains + Skill:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RmaHGY7BEog

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[info]bramcohen
2008-05-25 11:20 pm UTC (link)
Your classification of heart vs. brains and skills might be a little off - Gatti learned how to actually box later, quite well in fact, and probably wouldn't have been able to win a belt without it. And Ali was renowned for his iron chin, which is probably a big part of why his brains are so scrambled now.

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[info]lupoleboucher
2008-05-27 12:28 am UTC (link)
The Gatti/Ward fight was a total heart fight. Did you see the video? They could barely hold their arms up, but they kept trying! It was like a Rocky movie.

Ali had an OK chin, and a lot of heart, but nothing exceptional. The only reason to watch the guy fight was for his brains and skill, which are still amazing for a heavyweight. His record as a champ is nothing special either. He was just super entertaining. He was a real scientific boxer with a ton of flair.

You'll probably never see anything like him again, because heavyweight fights are now won by the guy with the best genetic sensitivity to Boldenone or whatever they use these days. Lolz at Tyson, who was obviously jacked to the gills from an early age, which is one of the reasons he is so short.

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[info]chouyu_31
2008-05-27 08:19 pm UTC (link)
With the small pads in MMA, there is significantly less bone to bone contact, reducing face splits and removing almost entirely knuckle splits. Also, at the start of fights, you'll notice that they grease up the faces of MMA fighters (I haven't watched a boxing match in years, so I don't know if they do the same thing with boxing), which reduces abrasion-based skin tearing.

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