Bad Left Hook

Gabriel Campillo's promoter Sampson Lewkowicz will be filing an official protest, and is hoping that he can force Texas to suspend the two judges who scored Saturday night's Campillo vs Tavoris Cloud for Cloud.

"The precedent set in the Paul Williams vs Erislandy Lara fight needs to be followed here," said Lewkowicz. "The two judges who scored the fight for Cloud need to be suspended indefinitely. I will be filing an official protest with the IBF today, but I think the Texas Commission needs to do the right thing for the sport and make sure these two judges don't work again. What they did to my fighter should never happen again to another."

Williams vs Lara is largely considered the robbery of the year for 2011, and at best, one of the worst robberies of the year. After the fight, with observers outraged by the decision (which went to Williams by unanimous decision), all three judges were suspended -- but that was by the New Jersey commission, and as we're all quite well aware, Texas is not New Jersey.

But that doesn't mean Lewkowicz, who is steaming mad at the robbery of his fighter (and it's not even the worst robbery against Campillo to date), won't try to raise as big a stink as he possibly can here. And frankly, something has got to be done about the inept Texas commission.

"This is not figure skating," continued Lewkowicz. "You don't just say get them next time when you get a bad decision in boxing. These men are risking their lives. They spend hundreds of hours preparing for a fight and when a fighter like Gabriel comes to a foreign country against a well-respected champion and puts on the kind of performance he did, he deserves to win fairly. These judges need to be removed so that they cannot ruin any more fights and tarnish boxing with their incompetence."

Showtime's Al Bernstein, one of the top analysts in the game today, said after the fight, "How this fight could be scored 116-110 on a judge's scorecard is beyond comprehension. It's one of the most egregious decisions I've ever seen."

Veteran ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr called it, "One of the hardest decisions I've ever had to announce."

The decision was, indeed, a flat-out robbery. The closest I could have possibly seen the fight myself was 114-112 for Campillo, which was the card that Showtime unofficial scorer Chuck Giampa had from ringside. Don King, of course, thinks it's no biggie, but his reasoning was less than sound, as usual.

I do not expect Texas to suspend any judges, or even take this seriously. Why would anyone expect that? Texas is proving to be the worst commission in boxing, bar none. The fact that the state is getting big fights on a more regular basis is not a good thing.