At this moment, bantamweight Alejandro Valdez ought to be the owner of the 2009 Upset of the Year so far. Instead, somebody in Mexico spun some kind of wheel of crazy to produce three separate rulings about the conclusion of the fight, and curiously enough, the end result saved Fernando Montiel — the bigger star — from suffering a loss.
The video from Saturday’s bout speaks for itself on some counts, but here’s a some more vital detail. Summarized, Montiel scored a knockdown in the 1st; but he suffered a cut that, according to a replay on a different broadcast than the one I’ve attached, came from a Valdez jab; but the referee apparently never made a ruling, and I think the presumption in that case is that it came from a punch. In the 2nd, Valdez scored a knockdown, but it wasn’t ruled as one, and the ref took this moment, suspiciously, to have the cut examined by a doctor. At the end of the 3rd, at the encouragement of the Montiel corner according to the above link, the fight was stopped because of Montiel’s cut. [UPDATE: Carlos, below in the comments, says that Montiel’s corner was actually doing the exact opposite — saying in Spanish that they wanted one more round.] It was ruled a technical draw first, then a Valdez technical knockout, the correct result in my view. That’s where I left it Saturday night, but at some point, it was changed back to a technical draw. The ref and the local commission, from where I sit, were trying to save Montiel’s ass.
The fight wasn’t on HBO — it was on a pretty crappy pay-per-view card in the United States, to be honest — so fewer people saw it than saw the controversial conclusion to the recent Juan Diaz-Paulie Malignaggi fight where many used the word “robbery” to describe Diaz winning the fight in his backyard of Texas. As terrible a boxing jurisdiction as Texas is, I still maintain that Diaz winning was the result I saw, and a defensible one. This Valdez-Montiel fight — THIS is a robbery, maybe the Robbery of the Year, because the guy who deserved the win had it taken from him, as opposed to losing it on a close judgment call. Watch the rest of the video after the jump.
