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NIPPY Brock on toes against Rahayan

Don’t let the heading give you the wrong impression about the April 15 show at the Bentleigh Club in Melbourne.. Promoter, Steve Kerr put on a great afternoon of pro-am boxing: thirteen well matched VABA amateur bouts followed by an entertaining trio of professional contests, with a ten round Asia/Pacific title bout to top the bill.

The botch-up was in the scoring in the main bout that saw the hometown boy robbed - yes, that’s right, the local lad was ripped off, not the visitor! The judges came up with a majority draw, this left neither Shane Brock (Australia) nor Romy Rahayan (Indonesia) as champion.

The bout followed pretty much the same pattern throughout, Rahayan stalking the nifty, side to side moving Brock who stopped to counter neatly and cleanly with the right several times a round. For nine rounds the Indonesian southpaw threw wild right hooks, that only fanned the tightly packed audience, and looping lefts to the body which the shaven-skulled Victorian easily blocked with forearm and elbow. Brock, for his part, landed a fair amount of jabs and several of those crisp right counters in each stanza, looking largely unfussed in the process.

Shane outscored the visitor by a small margin in round one, which I gave even, then clearly won the next five on my card. The seventh I carded all square, mainly because Brock seemed to ease off a bit, not because Romy was getting much closer to the target.

The eighth I gave to Rahayan almost as a sympathy round for, by this stage, he didn’t look like he was going to win one round, and he actually grazed the nude-nutted one on two or three occasions. And the ninth was like the seventh; Brock probably landed slightly more but not enough to prevent me levelling it on my card.

..The tenth was actually the only round that you could say Rahayan won clearly - even if not decisively - so, with three rounds in which I was a little on the generous side to him, he still came up clearly short on my ledger, 98-95 in favour of Brock.
If I had scored along the lines of the amateur model, where each punch counts, I would have had the Moorabbin gamecock winning nine rounds to one.

The judges’ scored: 96-94 Brock, and 95-95, 96-96.
A majority draw.

I don’t know how anyone could have come up with a draw, and I’ll go so far as to suggest Romy would have been unlikely to get as good a result had the bout taken place in his own hometown, Jakarta. I suppose at least the judges were reasonably close to each other in their scoring, unlike some other bouts of recent times where the scoring diverges widely.

..An example only has me harking back as far as the Green - Murdoch undercard on January 21. In a six rounder, Parkpoom Jangphonak outpointed Chad Bennett, clearly winning every round. The Thai did not appear to punch very hard but his gloves were rarely out of the Novocastrian’s moosh and the injured Chad hardly landed anything, let alone anything of consequence.

..So, imagine my surprise when the first card returned a 59-56 verdict to the eventual victor; this indicated four rounds to one with one even. Chad’s mum would have been scratching to come up with a card like that, but that’s not the half of it. The second judge had the bout all square at 57-57 giving the boxers three rounds each; I don’t think Chad landed three scoring punches so how could he win three rounds. My own tab had it 60-53 in favour of the visitor, almost in line with the third judge who had it 60-54. A clear winner only gaining a majority nod.

..No harm done you might say but there is something way out of line when you have a six point disparity between judges in a six round fight. I must add, of course, that there has always been the odd bout with widely divergent scoring (I recall some from my own career, the majority of which was completed in the seventies and eighties) but in earlier decades this was a rarity. Since the nineties there appears, on my casual observation at least, to have been a much greater frequency of wide diversity in judges’ viewpoints.

..Just to use my own experience as an example, during my first twenty-eight pro bouts in the ’70s and 80s, I had six bouts that ended in split or majority decisions, and in only one of these was the spread of scores greater than three points. All of these seemed to me to be pretty close encounters.
Conversely, my seven fight comeback in the ’90s yielded six such verdicts with variations of 8 points (in a six-rounder), 9 points (in an eight), 7 points (in an 8) and 6 points in a sixer (another bout had a divergence of only a couple of points while after a further majority outcome no scores were read out). The first two of these, which came out in my favour, I have no doubt I won comfortably, the third, which was close and also to my credit, had one judge giving me a five point buffer! The last of these, a loss over six rounds, saw one judge recording a four point margin my way at the end: this fight was close but I think I lost it.

..As I said, they didn’t always get it right in the ’old days’, and there were plenty of ’home-towners’ .. but it seems like a real raffle these days.

On the Bentleigh professional undercard, the two bouts were close, as was the scoring, thank goodness!
In a solid light-heavyweight four, Matt Kapetanios and Lucky La Ricca fought well, up close, for a split draw 39-37, 38-39 and 38-38. And, over six, cruisers Tim Tiller and Lee Kovacevic battled manfully, taking turns to hold the ascendancy with Kovacevic pulling himself off the floor in the second to take a split verdict 56-57, 58-56 and 58-55.

LUCK’S EVEN. Matthew Kapetanios thumps Lucky La Riccia at Bentleigh

Teller fights it out with Kovacevic. Tim’s brow split, Lee took split

The results of the thirteen amateur bouts will appear in an upcoming issue of "The Amateur Boxer".

AND ANOTHER THING. Readers will note that I placed a question mark alongside the adjective ’Indonesian’ in an early paragraph, this was because the boxer pictured on the fight poster as Romilus Rahayaan was not the same as the chappy who entered the ring, announced as Romy Rahayan. The boxer in the two-dimensional representation bore the light brown skin and smiling countenance of your typical Austronesian, while the much darker gent who tackled Shane Brock in the ring had a distinctly Melanesian air about him.
I assume the photo used was the incorrect one, NOT that there was a bit of ’Fine Cotton’ going on.