First off, great idea Clayton and good fight to have chosen. I don't think I've seen this start to finish but I knew the fight by reputation at least. Also like Clayton, not sure how much of Whitaker I have watched from start to finish, other than the odd YouTube compilation. So I really enjoyed this.
I had some really detailed notes on this, which I didn't save and lost when my PC rebooted for patches last night
So, you'll all have to do without the 6,000 word essay I had prepared!
The short answer is that I had Sweet Pea winning 117 - 111. I gave Chavez the first 2 rounds, and round 9. Other than that, it was a masterpiece from Whitaker, perfect footwork and he just had Chavez exactly where he wanted him all night. Chavez's record before the fight was more than 80-0 with over 70 KOs, so that gives an idea on the scale of the achievement.
One thing I tried to do given the reputation the fight had was figure out how you could score it a draw, and how bad of a robbery it was. I'm not a huge conspiracy theorist with boxing, I think most dodgy decisions have some rationale behind them somewhere. So, how did the judges get to a draw?
As I said, I gave Chavez rounds 1, 2 and 9. There seems to be some online consensus that Chavez won round 5 as well (although I had it as a very clear round for Whitaker). So, lets say 116-112 is the starting point, you've got to find 2 rounds for Chavez somewhere.
I made a note around the 4th that Chavez was hitting fresh air or gloves a lot, and it was getting the crowd going thinking they'd landed. I'm convinced this kind of thing influences judges, so many home cooking decisions to me are based on the crowd cheering near misses. This was happening a lot in the 4th and 5th, Whitaker had the range absolutely perfect but from a distance you might think that Chavez was landing. I've already given Chavez the 5th in this scenario, so we'll add the 4th as well and that gets us to 115-113. Just need one more round.
Now, the controversial round is the 6th, with the low blow. I think Chavez had been landing low blows all night, the commentators even brought it up and said at one point that Whitaker needs to land some low blows of his own. Chavez made an absolute meal of it though and I think that swayed the judges. Micky Vann said as much afterwards that he docked Whitaker a point for that even though the referee didn't (according to Wikipedia anyway!), saying 'The referee didn't take off a point, but I thought it had to be done.' So, there's your draw, 114-114.
Having said that, the scores were 115-115 so fuck knows how that happened! I did see an interview clip with Micky Vann saying Chavez had his best round in the 12th which I gave to Whitaker, so maybe this was just good old fashioned incompetence.
