STEVE’S SOAPBOX OPEN RELATIONSHIP By Steve Kim
southpaw from D.C., going back to when he was promoted by Forum Boxing and I watched him from ringside during my earliest days on the boxing scene. On this night, he was boxing beautifully while still doing his fair share of punching. It was vintage Too Sharp, who was well on his way to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. But a funny thing happened in this fight, which happened to have open scorecards. As Johnson and everyone realized that he had built an insurmountable lead going into the championship rounds, he began to play keep-away and employed the “four corners offense.” Basically, he stunk it out. Afterward, he admitted that knowing the score impacted his strategy in the later stages of the contest, which he won by scores of 118-109, 117-110 and 116-110. It was a performance that began with a bang and ended with a whimper. Doug Fischer, our beloved editor-in- chief, has never been afraid to chide me a bit about this. Yeah, I had learned my lesson. For however flawed the practice of opaque scoring was, maybe the traditional way of announcing the final scores after a bout’s conclusion was the lesser of two evils. But that doesn’t mean that open scorecards have gone away. For years, the WBC has implemented a system where the cards would be revealed after the fourth and eighth rounds of 12-round championship contests. But the American commissions have usually barred this from their fights. When Oleksandr Usyk defended his WBC heavyweight title against Rico Verhoeven on May 23
I have a love-hate relationship with open scoring in boxing. There was a time, long ago, when I was an ardent supporter of the idea. In my view, it was the panacea for the bad scorecards that had plagued the sport for years. It made sense. After all, with every other sport, everyone involved – especially the athletes – knows who’s winning as the games take place. Yeah, boxing has judges who score fights, but the boxers and their corners have no idea whether they’re winning or losing. I thought the people actually fighting should absolutely know how the judges are scoring the fight. And that, as it turns out, was the problem with open scoring. It actually could ruin fights, and fans were often the losers.
Mark Johnson’s win over Ratanachai Sor Vorapin featured open scoring.
After years of screaming that open scorecards were the solution, I had a bit of an epiphany as Mark “Too Sharp” Johnson faced Thailand’s rugged Ratanachai Sor Vorapin for the vacant IBF 115-pound title on April 24, 1999. This matchup was part of a Don King- promoted card at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., that was televised on Showtime. For those of you who don’t know me all that well, Johnson was one of my favorite boxers. I always considered it a treat to see this multiskilled quicksilver
the end of limits.
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