DECISIONS, DECISIONS

by Nat Gottlieb

If there was a support group for victims of controversial decisions, Winky Wright and Ike Quartey would be charter members.

Wright and Quartey, both former world champions, each have three losses and a draw on their records, and incredibly, all eight of those fights were labeled controversial the minute the ring announcer announced the decision.

Coincidentally, Wright (50-3-1) and Quartey (37-3-1) will be facing each other Saturday night on HBO's World Championship Boxing, and both are coming off fights that --surprise! --were called controversial.

Wright arrives off a June draw with middleweight champion Jermain Taylor, a fight Wright was so sure he had won, that he stormed out of the ring and headed to his locker room after it was announced.

Quartey lost a tight unanimous decision to Vernon Forrest in August, which was loudly booed at Madison Square Garden by a partisan crowd, and was liberally questioned afterwards by the media.

Of course Wright and Quartey are not the only boxers who were involved in controversial decisions this year. Boxing is the most subjective of any major sport, depending as it does on three judges sitting ringside. Victory, like beauty, is definitely in the eye of the beholder in boxing.

As such, virtually any close fight -- or one in which rounds are very even -- is fertile ground for second guessing. For clarification on the issue, we called on the Judge: "Harold, how do you have this controversy stuff so far?"

"Nat, it's extremely hard to score a fight. Some of my best friends today are people who used to scream at my decisions in the past. You can't be a judge and be thin skinned."

"Harold,"as fans of HBO boxing know, is Harold Lederman, the network's unofficial judge for World Championship Boxing and Pay-Per-View fights, who prior to joining HBO in 1986, spent 33 years as a professional judge, scoring more than 100 championship fights on six continents (as of yet, no title fights in Antarctica).

Lederman has also been a working pharmacist since 1982, but none of the pills he dispenses are as hard to swallow as some of his boxing decisions have been over the years.

"There is no such thing as a gracious loser. I judged fights where people were looking to kill me on many an occasion,"Lederman said.

And he wouldn't have it any other way. "People love controversy,"Lederman said. "The fights they remember most, the first Joe Louis-Jersey Joe Walcott and the first Leonard-Duran, they don't remember those fights because one guy beat up on the other, they remember because it was close and they love to kick it back and forth as to who won."

While fans may love controversial decisions, boxers on the short end loathe them. Which brings us to Mr. Wright and Mr.Quartey.

Lederman, who will be working Saturday night's fight, also scored the last bouts of Wright and Quartey on HBO, and as usual, is not shy about offering his opinions.

"In Winky's case, he has nobody to blame but himself,"Lederman said of the draw produced by one judge giving the fight 115-113 to Wright, a second to Taylor by the same score, and the last judge calling it even, 114-114. "He had the fight won and went out and gave away the 12th round."

Whether Wright did in fact give away the final round is open to contention -- just ask Winky -- but what is indisputable is that after being the surprising aggressor for most of the fight, he did not continue to press the issue in the same manner at the end -- nor for that matter did Taylor.

"Winky was running around like the fight was over,"Lederman said. "All he had to do was go out there and be aggressive. He lost the 12th round on all three cards, and on mine. I had the fight a draw, too. He was ahead by one point on my card after 11. I don't think that fight was controversial at all."

Wright hardly agrees. When he finally came out the locker room for interviews he said: "I came to his hometown. I showed everybody that I am the champ. I won the fight. Jermain threw some big shots, but I was picking them off and I was catching him with the clear shots. It's crazy,"Wright said.

Quartey is convinced he beat Forrest, but those who thought Forrest won emphasized the disparity in punch counts as registered by CompuBox. Those statistics, however, are open to interpretation. According to CompuBox, Forrest threw 818 punches to Quartey's 481. But Quartey landed with 201 (42 per cent) shots compared to Forrest's 184 (22 per cent). Quartey also held an edge in jabs (80-52), while Forrest connected on 134 power punches to his foe's 119.

In a recent interview, the CEO of CompuBox, Bob Canobbio said of his company's statistics: "In 21 years of counting (punches), we've learned that 95 per cent of the time, the fighter who throws and lands the most total punches wins."In Quartey's case, then, he lost on total punches, won on those landed. Which brings us to our judge. Harold?

"I thought Ike won,"Lederman said. "You had to be sitting closer to the ring to feel the power of his punches. Ike may not have thrown more punches, but the ones he landed were harder by a mile. No question in my mind he had the cleaner, harder and more effective punches, and he was doing the most damage. For me, the fighter who scores the more effective punches wins the round."

At least two of Wright's three career losses qualify as controversial, perhaps a third. None was stranger, though, then his 1998 loss to unbeaten African Harry Simon.

The fight was in South Africa, at a casino 5,000 feet above sea level -- a fact which no one bothered to tell Wright's trainer Dan Birmingham about -- and Simon was no ordinary boxer. After taking Wright's junior middleweight title that night, Simon would go on to defend it successfully six straight times, before two car accidents and legal troubles forced him to retire at age 30 with a perfect 23-0 record.

There was nothing perfect about his victory over Wright, however.

In an open stadium drenched with rain, the two fought a tremendously tight fight. When the final bell rang and the scorecards were read by the ring announcer, it was ruled a draw. Birmingham will never forget what happened next in the hostile, pro-Simon arena.

"On the way back to the dressing room, people were throwing bottles and chairs at us,"Birmingham said. "I was taking off Winky's wraps when the announcer came in and said the scorecards had been changed because of an error and Simon had won a majority decision. The announcer asked if we would come back to the ring. I said, 'No way!' People were rioting out there. We ran to the van."

That loss, only the second in Wright's 40 fights at that point, has always been regarded as something of a "hometown call,"but not to Lederman. He knows the real deal.

Okay, Harold, how do you see it?

"My daughter was a judge for that fight,"Lederman said of Julie Lederman, a veteran of 13 years as a judge. "Julie told me that when the draw was announced, she walked over to supervising judge Stanley Christodoulou and said, 'I didn't have it a draw.' So Stanley got down in the mud under the scorer's table and he pulled her color-coded 12 scoring sheets from the mud and put them in two piles, one for Harry, one for Winky. She had indeed scored it 7-5 for Harry. What happened was the guy who was taking the individual cards after each round and transferring the score to a master card gave a round mistakenly to Winky."

The last loss on Wright's record came the following year against the then unbeaten 22-year-old champion Fernando Vargas (17-0). Again, it was a hotly contested, close fight, as reflected on two of the three scorecards -- 114-114, 113-115 -- with the third more open, 112-116 for Vargas. Many among the media and fans at ringside thought Wright had won, but Lederman, present as always, did not.

"I thought 'Ferocious"Fernando definitely won,"Lederman said.

Wright has never agreed, and after his draw with Taylor, he alluded to that fight by saying of the June decision, "It was another Vargas."

Quartey's three career losses and a draw were uniformly controversial. In fact, it was back-to-back disputed losses in 1999 and 2000 to Oscar De La Hoya and Vargas which caused a frustrated Quartey to retire in the prime of his career and return to his native Ghana, where over the next five years he became a highly successful real estate developer and multi-millionaire.

When Quartey suddenly decided to return to boxing last year, in an interview with HBO in July he was asked about the defeat which most haunted him -- to De La Hoya -- and said: "I know I beat him. When they (judges) said I had lost, I thought, ‘this is too much politics.'"

Quartey's journey to retirement began in 1997 when he was an unbeaten (34-0) and highly popular welterweight champion. In a bout that year with Jose Luis Lopez, it was announced after the fight that Quartey had won. A week later, however, Quartey was informed that a scoring error had been discovered and the bout was ruled a draw.

Lederman thinks the ruling was laughable. "Ike was winning against Lopez, then in the 11th and 12th round Lopez beat the hell out of him, which may have influenced the judges. But it wasn't a draw. Ike was ahead like 10 rounds to none at that point."

For various reasons -- fight cancellations, an injury suffered by De La Hoya -- it would be 16 frustrating months later before Quartey's next fight, which was with the then unbeaten Oscar (24-0). De La Hoya had been Quartey's number one target for years. In Ghana, where Ike was a huge national idol, the country whipped itself up to a feverish pitch.

For the first six rounds, Lederman said, Quartey was clearly winning the fight. But in the sixth round, De La Hoya dropped Quartey -- who later in the round returned the favor -- and the tide started to turn. The ensuing rounds were close, and De La Hoya may have swayed the judges with a 12th round knockdown of Quartey.

When ring announcer Michael Buffer took the mike, he said, "It is a split decision."One judge had it 116-112 for De La Hoya, another had it 115-114 for Quartey, and the deciding judge gave it to Oscar, 116-113. Many felt Quartey had won the fight, including Lederman.

"I was one of the people who thought he did beat Oscar,"Lederman said. "But Oscar may have turned the fight around by dropping him in the 12th. Certainly Oscar will remember that as one of his toughest fights."

Quartey was unequivocal in his feeling that he had won during the post-fight press conference: "I out-boxed him. Everybody saw the fight around the world...It was a bad decision, you saw it."

Quartey, who had been used to fighting several times a year, had to wait 14 more months for his next fight, with Vargas. Again, more heavy action, some close rounds, and a decision that went against Quartey: 111-116, 113-114, 111-116. Most felt Vargas simply threw more punches and was the busier fight, while Quartey seemed to have problems letting his hands go. Quartey, while not saying outright he won, disputed two of the cards. "I think 116-111 is just too much. The difference is too great. It was a much closer fight.

Shortly there after, a disillusioned Ike Quartey retired from boxing.

Is there a solution to taking the controversy out of boxing? The WBC apparently thinks so. At its annual convention in Croatia last month it decided as of Nov. 13, WBC bouts with have "open scoring,"meaning the ring announcer would read the scorecards after the fourth and eighth rounds. Nevada and the British Boxing Board of Control immediately rejected the ruling for their venues, and it is likely more commissions will follow. Lederman thinks the WBC ruling is bad for boxing.

"Open scoring ruins fights,"Lederman said. "What happens is if a guy sees he is losing big, he might stop fighting. Or some judge is going to hear what the other two judges have scored and might feel he must get more in line with them. It's a horrible situation."

Most importantly, Lederman feels it takes the drama out of fights. "I love it when a fight comes down to Michael Buffer having in his hands those scorecards. It's one of the great moments in all of sport."

Wright and Quartey might quibble with that. What is of more immediate concern for both fighters, however, is that they put their recent controversial decisions behind them and win Saturday night. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

Once again, Wright and Quartey must answer that question.