I don’t see how any impartial observer could have viewed the Lucian Bute-Librado Andrade fight last Friday night without coming away with the feeling that referee Marlon B. Wright was at best incompetent, and at worst, perhaps even the Tim Donaughy of boxing. It’s not much of a choice but on that night he was either a dunce or dishonest.
Over 16,000 partisan fans were on hand at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada, to see their hero and local resident Bute defend his IBF super middleweight belt against the Mexican-American Andrade. The fight was televised on Showtime as part of its ShoBox series and will be replayed on Wednesday night at 11 p.m. ET. Even if you have to record it I highly recommend that you watch it if you missed the original airing so you can see for yourself what a travesty of justice this really was.
The judges were from Florida, Canada, and England, but their scores of 117-109, 115-111 and 115-110 for Bute were in line with my score of 116-110. Bute controlled the fight from the onset, even if Andrade’s shots left evidence on Bute’s face, including a huge welt under the right eye by the end of the fight. He looked like anything but a winner.
But on the whole, because of Bute’s early success Andrade deserves some type of award just for talking a licking and keep on ticking. For most of the fight Bute landed hard combinations with swift movement, using the ring masterfully.
Just hypothetically, if one wanted to fix a fight or just provide some insurance, whom would one speak to first? I’m guessing that the answer is the referee.
The referee, in this case Mr. Wright, was all wrong for this fight. And the primary reason for that is that Wright, like Bute, hails from Montreal. And that kind of cozy hometown brotherhood will almost always leave even the best decisions up for debate.
I don’t know Mr. Wright, nor his character, or truthfully anything about him. But there is a mountain of video evidence to suggest that he acted improperly or even participated in a fix, take your pick.
The press and the ringside announcers, Steve Farhood and Nick Charles, understandably have become fixated on Wright’s long count at the fight’s finish, but the fact is that Wright helped out Bute in each of the final three rounds, intentionally or not.
Beginning in round 10 Andrade went down from what appeared to be the fighter’s legs interlocking and an obvious push. Wright scored it a knockdown.
In round 11, an Andrade left hook hurt Bute and Librade bulled Bute into a corner. Wright immediately sprang to Bute’s defense and halted the action to talk to Andrade about his actions. A clean break might have been more in order and not given Bute extra recovery time.
Between rounds after the 11th, Bute’s corner told him that if he wanted to be champion he needed to go all out in the final round, an inexplicable strategy for an exhausted fighter who was up 5 to 8 points in the judge’s scoring.
Consequently Bute came out willing to mix it up and before long Andrade was chasing him around the ring in an effort to land the big shots. Flailing around the ring helplessly, hurt and exhausted, somehow Bute managed to elude the End Game punch although his legs were long gone and he could barely stand up. As the closing seconds ticked off, Andrade had Bute on the ropes and Wright separated them, buying precious moments.
With two seconds remaining, Bute finally went down for the first time in his career from a right hand and sat on the canvas with a blank stare with both legs under him and one arm resting on the ring rope.
Here, Wright’s assistance came to particular good use. Bute would have to get up and be able to continue in order to keep the title.
Wright appeared to be a bit slow on the draw even getting around to the count. Then he interrupted his count because, in his eyes, Andrade didn’t remain in a neutral corner.
Horse feathers, it’s a good thing that Wright didn’t preside over the Mosley-Mayorga fight. Mosley was practically on Mayorga’s back during the count.
Anyway, if that wasn’t bad enough, when he returned to the count he repeated “six.”
Showtime’s Charles, a longtime fight veteran, estimated the count to be 24.
In any event, with the additional time to recover Bute arose but staggered around like a drunk on payday. He was clearly out on his feet and in no condition to continue, but Wright completed the long count anyway.
Never once in this sequence do we see Wright looking into Bute’s eyes.
Actually you could make a case, as Andrade did after the fight, that Bute was out on the floor and there shouldn’t even have been a count. He added that he didn’t come for a decision; he came for a knockout.
We all know the reason for that. It’s tough to get a fair decision on the road anywhere. But in Canada, like Germany, it’s virtually impossible unless you really beat up your opponent. Apparently, it’s now reached the point in which you can’t win with a knockout.
In an interview after the fight, Wright said, “Andrade cost himself the fight by leaving the corner. Bute would not have gotten up in time if he stayed in the corner.”
I think I saw his nose growing.
Interestingly just moments before that statement Wright acknowledged that Bute was “out on his feet,” even prior to the knockdown.
Then, uh, duh, why was the fight not stopped then? I think we know why.