Best view of a fight

 

My last Bodog fight finally turned up on youtube this week. It happened August 07, so it’s been a bit of a wait. Really interesting to watch after all this time, not least because it’s not at all how I remembered it. 

Which got me thinking. Is there a best view of a fight? How much does where you watch it from matter? Who has the clearest, least biased view of the action? Does it make a difference what you’re doing while you’re watching it? 

The fighters, of course, are the only ones with first hand experience of the action. Although that doesn’t necessarily give a good impression of the overall fight – there are many of times when I’ve come to the end of a sparring session only to find that my training partner and I are both convinced we lost. Punches you get hit with don’t feel equal to punches you hit the other guy with.  

The referee has the best third party view of the action – but of course he’s busy doing the moment to moment job of ensuring fighters safety and keeping an eye out for rule infringements. It’s difficult to step back and see the overall picture of how the fight plays out. Fortunately, nobody expects him to. 

The same limitations can apply to commentators, though. I discovered this at a fight show recently, where I was doing commentary for the first time. As well as finding out that it’s a much harder job than it looks, I was struck by the contrast between how I was watching these fights, and how the judges were watching them. I’ve judged in the past, and it’s a totally different experience. We might be sat side by side next to the cage, but because of the different jobs we have to do we don’t see the action in the same way. Which perhaps goes some way to explain why commentators often seem to get it wrong when they call which way a round or a fight has gone. 

The live audience gets a view that is different from, and usually less clear than, that of the judges. But at least it’s usually fairly obvious what you can and can’t see. Most deceptive of all though, I think, is the video view. With good filming, it looks like you get to see all the action, from a close up perspective. No wonder so many fans feel they can offer a good judgement about who should have won a fight based on seeing the video. But – here’s the thing – it’s an illusion. The editing and camera work can completely change how a fight looks, especially if it’s close. If you select clips to replay in between rounds it can also create a biased impression of how the round went.  

So – there is no one single definitive view of a fight. No one person can claim to have a perfect unbiased perspective – everyone has gaps in what they get to see, or distractions or biases depending on their job. Judging a fight isn’t, and can never be, a perfect science. With the best guidelines in the world, it still comes down to the perception of those three people sitting at ringside. Maybe when you watch and disagree it could just be that the fight you’re seeing is not the one they saw.