Once upon a time two boxers fought round after round until one couldn’t continue. This was bad for two reasons:

1. It often took a very long time. (Frankly, once you reach round 80 or so, the crowd’s losing interest.)

2. After hours of punches, fighters tend to suffer fatal internal injuries.

And so the sport was changed so that you could win by decision, which was great as spectators had places to be and the athletes didn’t die quite so frequently. Still, there’s a basic flaw in the system: people pretend decisions are accurate and should be treated with respect, when time after time that’s shown to be wrong.

Decisions aren’t always incorrect (for instance, this weekend pound-for-pound champ Manny Pacquiao took at least 11 of 12 rounds in an unanimous and indisputable victory over Joshua Clottey), but they are much too often. Rocky Marciano retired undefeated…except it’s generally acknowledged he stole a split decision from Roland LaStarza (to his credit, Rock flattened him in the rematch). Likewise, it seems insane that “Sugar” Shane Mosley is still credited with an already iffy split decision win over Oscar De La Hoya now that he’s admitted to being on steroids at the time (De La Hoya hasn’t made much of a stink, probably because he signed Mosley to his company Golden Boy Promotions — it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you get a cut).

Most depressingly, there are bouts neither fighter deserves to win or even tie: they are so bad they should be a double-loss. I’ll cite as an example the much-hyped match-up between “Pretty Boy” Floyd Mayweather and De La Hoya. Both men have been great champions (and, having interviewed each of them, I can add to that “entertaining talkers who return phone calls relatively punctually”). The bout found Mayweather clearly the faster and sharper fighter, going through the fight essentially unblemished…which would have been fine if De La Hoya hadn’t also gone through the fight pretty much untouched (and keep in mind soon after this Pacquiao showed the Golden Boy to be all too touchable when he beat him into retirement). Yet someone had to win, giving the passive Mayweather an ugly split-decision, allowing him to cling to his “undefeated” credentials just like Marciano did so many years earlier.

And I thought, “When a man’s rewarded for putting on a show that caused the audience to suffer more than his opponent, something’s gone very wrong.”

This is not to advocate bringing back the olden days of fighting, which as noted took way too long and tended to kill people. But if boxing ever hopes to regain its place as the sport of kings (or at least, bigger than hockey), it better find a happy middle ground already.

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