"All judges have questionable cards, especially when you’ve judged for as long as she has. When I looked at it from my phone, there was 422 pages of fights she judged. If she was that bad, she would’ve been figured out a long time ago," stated Bellator light heavyweight King Mo Lawal, who shared his thoughts on judge Adalaide Byrd's controversial 118-110 score for Canelo over Golovkin. Check it out!
PC: You always seem to think a little differently. You are definitely in the minority on this one. You think people are being unfair to Adelaide Byrd.
KM: I do think differently because I try to think of it from both sides. First off, I was like, “You know what, it was wrong, her score was too wide, but, you know what, say she gave 3 rounds to Triple G; Canelo was still going to win on her card anyway. There was a lot of close rounds.” Then I look at it from the other side thinking how terrible she is and she should never judge again. If you think like that, that she is terrible and should never judge again, those are the ones I want to address. So I wanted to look back at some of her past cards because I’m sure she had some other fucked up cards as well. I got into this argument with this cat, and this is the reason I pulled up the fights she’s judged because he was like, “Yeah, she’s terrible as a judge. She actually scored the Brandon Rios and Richar Abril fight for Abril.” I was like, “Abril won. I watched that fight.” He was like, “Nah, Rios won that fight,” and I was like, “Nah, the two other judges robbed Abril of a victory.” So he was trying to argue with me and while he was trying to argue with me, I went back and looked at every big fight she’s judged from 2012 until now. What I found is that she was pretty much on point. There are a few scorecards that I saw from her that I disagreed with or that was way off from the other judges. I disagreed with her Amir Mansour and Gerald Washington scorecard. That fight was close. I could see why she gave it to Gerald Washington, but at the same time, I had it for Amir Mansour. He landed the bigger shots, the harder shots, and a lot cleaner shots from the 5th round and up. It could’ve been a draw. I just think that people are overexaggerating and getting mad about nothing. If they want to see how “bad” she is, go to boxrec, put her name in the search engine, and look at her scorecards to all of the fights she’s judged. You can look at her track record. All judges have questionable cards, especially when you’ve judged for as long as she has. When I looked at it from my phone, there was 422 pages of fights she judged. If she was that bad, she would’ve been figured out a long time ago.
PC: How did you score the fight?
KM: Man, I’m gonna be real with you, I had Canelo by one round. There were a lot of close rounds. My boy Coach Anthony had it 116-113 because he had a few 10-10 rounds. There were a few rounds where it was just depending on what you like; like the 7th round. On Twitter, I saw where Ariel Helwani said, “Oh, Adalaide Byrd scored the 7th round for Canelo and that was Triple G’s best round.” If that was his best round, I must have missed something because I think Triple G’s best round was the 5th when he came on with the pressure. It just depends on what you like. Do you like someone being busy, moving forward, but not landing clean and missing shots? Or do you like someone not being busy enough, but landing the cleaner shots in spurts.
PC: It seems like you’re mainly bothered by the notion that people took her Canelo-Golovkin card and turned it into a “she’s always been bad” narrative.
KM: I just think the people who are saying that is trippin, man. They have to realize the judges only have one chance at it. The same people that say how bad she is and how bad her card was are the same people that say, “I’ve watched that fight four times and I had so-and-so winning.” It took you four times to watch that shit to come up with your final conclusion as to who won, but you want judges to be perfect after watching it once live. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do their job right, but it’s never going to be perfection that way. They are not going to always get it right. If people want to end this structure for judges, how about we do this, when they watch fights, they should watch them with ear plugs in so they won’t be influenced by the crowd; they watch fights live, score it live, but then they get to go home and watch it from different angles: the overhead angle, the side of the ring where they weren’t posted angle. Let them see it from every angle possible so that they can see just where the punches landed and then three days after the fight, they could render a verdict of who won the fight. But you’re not going to get that instant gratification that we all wait for when the decision is announced immediately after the fight. You’re going to feel shorted for the price of admission that you paid to attend the event; you’re going to feel shorted for the amount of money you paid for the PPV because we won’t get the results until three days after the event, but I bet the scores would be better that way. But fans don’t want that. They want instant gratification and understandably so, but you can’t expect perfection. But even if they went to that format, they would assume the judges were paid off because they had three days for promoters to contact them and influence their cards. I mean, what, lock them in a room while they view the fights and take their cell phones until a decision is rendered? Regardless, the judges are in a no-win situation.
PC: So you’re saying the way to get the most accurate scorecards is to have some sort of delay in the process of announcing a winner.
KM: I’m not saying they should do that, but I feel that’s the only way we are going to get near perfect scorecards. And on top of that, when the fight's over and they go to the decision, they should give the judges an extra amount of time to write down why they feel like so-and-so won the fight. Why did you score it this way? So when the scorecards are read, it would be like, “Adalaide Byrd scored it 118-110 for Canelo due to cleaner punches landed and better defense, so-and-so scored it 115-113 for Golovkin because of his pressure and he felt like he controlled the pace of the fight, and so-and-so scored it 114-114 because he feels like the pressure wasn’t affective aggression, but the counters weren’t in abundance and there just wasn’t enough separation between the two combatants, therefore he scored it 6 rounds even.” You would definitely slow down a fast moving sport doing it that way, but it would eliminate some things. They would instantly know why everyone scored the fight the way they did. Because immediately after the fight, people were like, “Fuck Adalaide Byrd, she’s blind; that bitch corrupt.” By the time she came out with a statement, they weren’t trying to hear it. I think the judges should write down something as to why they had the guy winning the fight or had it even or whatever. Now, I do think judges should be tested and reevaluated every year or two. I don’t know her track record judging MMA, but in boxing, I think she’s biased towards slick boxers, but that’s no different than someone who is biased for a pressure fighter, like unofficially a Harold Lederman.
[ Follow Percy Crawford on Twitter @MrLouis1ana ]