It’s not that you couldn’t score Jose Pedraza vs. Edner Cherry Saturday night on Showtime for Pedraza; you could. It was a close fight. Two judges saw Pedraza winning nine rounds. Nine. Nine? Yeah, somehow, nine.
There were many close rounds, certainly, as the fight shifted to and fro with each man being the aggressor. Cherry came out pretty aggressive, but Pedraza began to match then exceed that aggression in the rest of the early rounds. Then Cherry began to time Pedraza’s incessant head bobbing and drop uppercuts on him at opportune moments, and Cherry was able to dish out enough punishment to give Pedraza pause. Pedraza tried a bunch of different things to get back into the fight, including standing toe-to-toe inside against the shorter man, a huge miscalculation.
It was all Cherry through the middle rounds, until he backed off mysteriously in the 8th. Was he tired? Unclear, but that and Pedraza’s switch to southpaw got him on more solid footing. They traded rounds to the end, when both came out sloppy tired but determined in the 12th and Cherry got the better of the exchanges.
Seven rounds to five either way, or a draw, would’ve worked. One judge had it for Cherry, 8-4. The other two had it 117-111. Sigh. Serial sigh. That’s bad scoring. If there are that many close rounds, how do you give them all to Pedraza? Because he’s the guy with a belt? Because he’s the “house” fighter? Both? Just make it look honest, y’all. It wouldn’t be that hard.
Pedraza said he might give Cherry a rematch someday. If he had something better in mind, he wasn’t saying what it was. Perhaps he felt he needs to take a step back, despite his stated confidence about how he knew he won.
