Folks, how could you not love the bloody narrative here? A relatively unknown former Brisbane school teacher and average bloke taking on a man who is generally considered to be one of the greatest boxers of all time – and winning.
Jeff Horn took the WBO welterweight world title from Manny Pacquiao in an extremely high profile match on Sunday at the Brisbane stadium formerly known as Lang Park, thanks to a unanimous ruling from the judges.
While opinion of the outcome of the fight was pretty uniform among the judges, it was not the case with the general public, particularly in the States, where a lot of people (paraphrased, obviously) maligned the event and the ruling as some sort of bloody stitch-up.
Talking to the ‘Daily Telegraph‘, Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, called for the judge who scored it 117-111 (as opposed to the other two judges, who scored it 115-113) to be investigated over the judgement.
“That was hard, sometimes I think people need to be investigated. At least in America where you get odd scores like that with the judges, the head commissioner should ask at some point, ‘Why? Where? Show me how you came up with that score.’”
According to the BBC, however, Horn isn’t letting it get to him:
“There will always be a backlash where people say I got lucky, or whatever.“There will always be the naysayers saying I did not win the fight, but I felt like I won the fight. A lot of Queenslanders think I won the fight and people around the world.”
He also says he’s not seen the Twitter backlash he got from the likes of Kobe Bryant:
“I haven’t seen the Twitter of those guys, but I’ve seen my Facebook and that’s gone gangbusters at the moment.“Manny Pacquiao is an absolute warrior, a legend of the sport. He might have come underdone in this fight, I don’t know.”
I’m no expert on how fights are scored and judged but, for now, I’m just happy to see that the winner was the one who has (to our knowledge) never said that gay people are worse than animals.
Photo: Getty Images / Bradley Kanaris.
