Arum whips up storm after Tornado tamed
Taylor’s promoter has valid point with potshot at judges
BOB ARUM had a point. Josh Taylor wasn’t awarded enough of them on Saturday night. Whoever you thought won the grudge rematch — and the majority opinion favours Jack Catterall as deserving of his revenge — it was a close fight.
Much closer than the gaping margins on the unanimous cards of the official judges.
Arum, the legendary US promoter of Scottish fighter Taylor, was among the minority when claiming that his man had won.
But his rant about the margins of Catterall’s victory was valid.
Two cards of 117-111 were, as Arum put it, ‘absolutely ridiculous’. The third, at 116-113, was nearer the mark but still wide of reality.
Watching through the fish-eye lens of television is not the ideal way of scoring a fight and it certainly would not provoke an argument here if Catterall had been proclaimed the winner by one or two points.
Nor am I much of a fan of the computerised method of counting punches landed, which happened to record Taylor narrowly ahead at the end. Sometimes one or two punches thrown in combinations can be too quick for the eye and the finger prodding the buttons.
Controversy does not rage as heatedly as it did after their first meeting in Glasgow two years ago, when howls of protest greeted Taylor being on the right end of a split decision despite being knocked down. And yet Saturday’s scorecards again question the quality of judging.
Arum proclaimed: ‘I will never bring an American fighter to the UK after this.’ His implication being that Catterall benefitted from homecountry judging in Leeds.
Actually, there was a whiff of a different kind of influence this weekend. One reminiscent of the two fights against Evander Holyfield which ended with Lennox Lewis becoming the undisputed world heavyweight champion.
When Holyfield escaped with a draw from their first fight, which most observers thought Lewis had won comfortably, the furore mushroomed from Madison Square Garden into a US Senate investigation into the state of boxing. As they moved on to Las Vegas for the rematch, Holyfield shrewdly observed: ‘After what happened in New York, I will have to knock Lennox out to get the win.’ Sure enough, the judges felt obliged to vote for Lewis even though Holyfield looked to have done enough to win on points. If history has repeated itself here, it is to the detriment of Taylor. The Tartan Tornado did not endear himself to the public when he insisted that he deserved the original decision in Glasgow. Nor again this weekend, although he was less bullish in that assertion in Leeds.
‘I thought I won the fight by one or two rounds,’ said the man from Prestonpans. ‘It was certainly close, though.
‘After all the noise of the first fight, I think they gave it to Jack.
‘No excuses from me — I won’t be phoning the police or writing letters into parliament.
‘I could have boxed better at times but I still think I nicked the fight.
‘I think there could be a case for a third fight to settle the score.’
Catterall’s promoter Eddie Hearn said: ‘I agree with Bob (Arum). For me, and I think the general public, the feeling is that Jack won the fight but the scorecards were too wide.’
Taylor is certainly being denied the respect that his career deserves.
It seems to have been forgotten that when Taylor first burst onto the scene, he was anointed by Ken Buchanan as the heir-apparent to the throne of Scottish boxing. A prophesy he fulfilled as the only Scot to emulate the great man’s feat of becoming an undisputed world champion.
He did so as the first UK fighter to become undisputed in the four-belt era and only the fifth in the world in any division after Bernard Hopkins, Jermaine Taylor, Terence Crawford and Oleksandr Usyk.
At 33, Taylor may have subsided into a strong wind during his first two defeats, by Teofimo Lopez and now 30-year-old Catterall.
But those two still have a long way to go if they are to match Taylor’s achievements. Which include triumphs over a sequence of truly elite boxers during his reign as king of the light-welterweights.