Who Won?       

 By Eddie Caliguire  9/14/2003

               Like many others I saw a fairly good fight last night. Oscar De La Hoya was defending some title against Shane Mosely. I have not seen their first fight (also a decision for Mosely) but I did tune in last  night. I am addressing the emerging controversy of who won. I feel the first step is to establish who won what. It has become quite common to refer to last night's event and others like it, as a fight. I feel that if this event was a fight then the decision was correct. I feel that Mosely inflicted more damage on De la Hoya than he received. I believe that the criteria for determining who won or lost a fight is which party inflicts more damage. Mosley clearly to me won based on this. I say this mostly on some of the most brutal right hands to the body I have seen. I think De La Hoya took more punishment than we realized. He is much braver and durable than most people give him credit for.

              But wait a minute!

              George Forman keeps correctly referring to last night's event as a boxing match. In a boxing match the way to win as I understand is to either knock out your opponent or outscore him with accumulated points based on a 10 Pt. must system. Under these rules a boxer can, hypothetically speaking, score with pitter pat (light) punches that don't do any damage and avoid being hit ten rounds. Then in rounds 11 + 12  get hit with hard combinations that hurt him very much, knock him down. To put it bluntly get his ass kicked.

 The correct scoring for this boxing match would be as follows:

           The winner by unanimous decision would be the boxer who scored the most points. My point is I think Oscar De La Hoya lost a fight but he won a boxing match. Now which is it? Because if it's a fight forget the points system and the winner is the last man standing. If it's not a fight De La Hoya got robbed. You can't have it both ways its too confusing and bad for a very good sport.

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