Robson Conceicao and O’Shaquie Foster really shouldn’t be doing this a second time. Their first fight, July 6 at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, just wasn’t engaging enough to warrant a rematch.
It was similar in entertainment value to the main event that night, Shakur Stevenson’s unanimous points win over Artem Harutyunyan — and there’s no way in hell boxing’s power brokers are going to make us sit through Stevenson-Harutyunyan II.
But Conceicao-Foster II is happening. It has to, unfortunately. Because whereas the boxer who won Stevenson-Harutyunyan, ya know, won, the same was not true of Conceicao-Foster.
O’Shaquie Foster won that damned fight. But Robson Conceicao got his hand raised.
At least, that was the way I felt on July 6, watching from my couch, not scoring carefully round by round, casually agreeing with the commentary of ESPN’s Timothy Bradley and the unofficial scorecard of his broadcast mate Mark Kriegel. It appeared Foster had convincingly outboxed his relatively one-dimensional opponent, but two of the three judges held him up at pencil-point and stole his 130-pound belt from him by split decision.
The couch-and-chill method, however, is no way to render a verdict on a boxing match. You have to score it round by round and you have to do your best to ignore external influences such as broadcast commentary, or else you don’t really have a right to weigh in on whether the scorecards are fair. So before Conceicao and Foster run it back this Saturday at Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York, I decided to run it back myself.
It was time to form my own opinion. I had to know: Was this a robbery? Or was it just another of those countless close fights where the eye of the beholder decides the name of the beltholder?
I’ll spare you the suspense and cut straight to the answer (then I’ll double back for the details): Yes, this was a robbery.
Foster won that fight. Two of the judges flat out got it wrong (and got a couple of rounds blatantly wrong along the way) and consistently made the error of giving credit for ineffective aggression. If you only watched the directions the fighters’ feet were moving, you might have thought Conceicao won. If you paid proper attention to what their fists did and didn’t do, you knew this was Foster’s fight.
One important caveat, though: As someone who has sat directly along the ring apron to score bouts for a broadcast, I’ll note that a fight can look different from ringside than it does through the TV cameras. Specifically, watching on a big-screen TV at home tends to be more accurate in revealing exactly which punches land and which punches don’t. So if the judges at ringside failed to properly appreciate how many shots Foster blocked with his gloves or rolled with, it may not necessarily be their fault.
TV commentary can inject bias into an observer’s scoring, too. So you have to pick a poison: Either you watch on mute and miss out on the sounds of the punches, or you watch with the volume on and do your best not to let the on-air analysts influence you. I personally prefer to leave the sound on, and I trust myself not to let the broadcasters influence me—especially when I’m watching after the fact and can easily remove the emotion of the moment from my thought process.
So now you know my rewatch situation: HDTV, sound on, fully rested and caffeinated on a Sunday morning, no distractions, pausing playback between rounds to take notes but never during the round.
And I scored the fight 117-111, nine rounds to three, for Foster. (It’s hard to type a sentence like that without throwing in a “Jim, I gotta tell ya.”) There were seven rounds that I felt clearly belonged to Foster (even if some of them were close and competitive), two rounds that Conceicao definitely won (again, not necessarily lopsided rounds), and three that were close enough to reasonably score for either man (of which I gave two to Foster and one to Conceicao). So to my eyes, the range of acceptable scores was from 118-110 Foster to 115-113 Foster.
A 114-114 draw? Not acceptable. A Conceicao win? Even more unacceptable. Therefore, I do consider the decision that added a win to Conceicao’s record and a loss to Foster’s worthy of the “R” word.
Some noteworthy rounds along the way:
Round 2: I gave this round to Foster, but it was one of the two in his favor that could have gone either way. With about 30 seconds left on the clock, Conceicao appeared to land a clean right hand during an exchange—the best punch, seemingly, of the fight to that point. But Foster outboxed him for most of the round, so I gave it to him, as did judges Tony Lundy and Ron McNair, while Paul Wallace went for the Brazilian. Here’s the twist: On the replay shown at the start of the next round, we saw that Conceicao’s one forceful right hand was in fact a forearm/elbow follow-through on a punch that missed. Of course, judges score without the benefit of replay, as should viewers at home, so I take no issue with Wallace making it 10-9 in Conceicao’s favor.
Rounds 3 and 5: These were both rounds that I felt Foster won in a clear-cut manner … but both were scored for Conceicao by all three judges. In both rounds, Foster landed the better shots, outboxed his opponent, utilized sharp defense, and in the fifth, even landed his best punch of the fight to that point, a clever right uppercut early in the round. Conceicao outworked him in both rounds, yes. So if a judge ignored Foster’s defense (or couldn’t tell which punches were being blocked), and also ignored his superior offense, and was only interested in which man was coming forward, then, fine, these were Conceicao rounds. That requires a whole lotta ignoring, however. Or at least a lot of misperception, along with a decent helping of improperly applying the recommended scoring criteria.
Round 6: I gave this close round to Conceicao—the only stanza among the first 11 in which I disagreed with Kriegel’s unofficial ESPN scorecard—and it was the lone example I saw in which the punching was essentially even and thus I considered it correct to break the tie by giving it to the guy moving forward. Two of the judges, however, gave this one to Foster.
Round 8: In what had been a close round to that point, Foster landed a jab-jab-right combination in the final minute that backed Conceicao off and seemed to clinch the round. It was competitive, but not quite close enough to give to the man from Brazil — unless you couldn’t tell that Foster, who according to CompuBox threw half as many punches and landed twice as many, was rolling with and blocking shots. Still, two of the judges did favor Conceicao, with only McNair getting it right.
Rounds 10 and 11: These were both Foster rounds that I felt were not quite close enough to mistake for Conceicao rounds, unless a judge was fooled by good ol’ ineffective marching forward. In the 10th, only Wallace was fooled. In the 11th, only Wallace wasn’t fooled.
Round 12: Foster fought this round with no urgency, like he was certain he could lose the round and still comfortably retain his title, a perfectly logical thought given his success in the previous 11 stanzas. Conceicao didn’t land anything notable, but won the round without much doubt—though McNair and ESPN’s Kriegel both, perhaps locked into a pattern from previous rounds, awarded it to Foster.
In the end, McNair favored Foster 116-112, a perfectly fine tally, even if I thought he was off-base on a few rounds along the way. Wallace carded 115-113 for Conceicao. And Lundy had it 116-112 for Conceicao, incredibly giving Foster only four rounds. The judges only agreed unanimously on four of the 12 rounds — and as noted, I vehemently disagreed with them on two of those.
It is worth noting that this was not an experienced judging crew. McNair was the most established of the trio, with 26 previous alphabet title fights. Wallace had judged 10 title fights. Lundy had worked just two. Of course, every judge has to start somewhere, and the only way to become an experienced judge is to work fights of some significance while still inexperienced. So, I am inclined not to excoriate the New Jersey Athletic Control Board or the WBC for its judge selection. It’s simply worth pointing out that, on this night, the less experienced the judge was, the more disconnected from reality his final score was.
Two things we can all agree on: CompuBox stats don’t determine who won a fight, and commentary crews don’t determine who won a fight. So if you’re playing the backlash-to-the-backlash game, as promoter Bob Arum did shortly after the fight in arguing that it was a close fight and not a robbery, it’s natural to make those two points.
According to CompuBox, Foster decisively outlanded Conceicao, 109 to 76, while Conceicao threw far more punches, 698 to 435. The connect percentages were thus severely lopsided, 25% for Foster and a paltry 11% for Conceicao. But the judges don’t have access to the stats, and they may have been at the wrong angles at times to appreciate just how few Conceicao punches were actually getting through. (CompuBox happened to be working this fight off TV rather than live.)
As for the commentary, yes, Bradley was painting a one-sided picture. But he was justified in doing so because this just wasn’t all that close of a fight. He declared it a “boxing clinic” from Foster at the midway point, said during the ninth round that Conceicao is “not in this fight, he needs a knockout to win,” and in the 10th professed, “This is easy. This is easy for the champion.”
I’ve seen some commentator-made controversies over the years—Vernon Forrest vs. Ike Quartey always springs to mind, a fight I scored closely for Forrest while the HBO crew insisted from start to finish that Quartey was dominating—but this wasn’t one of them. The fight Bradley saw is the same fight I saw. Two of the judges just didn’t appreciate the “boxing clinic.”
So what does any of this mean for Saturday’s rematch? Specifically, will Foster fight differently than he did the first time because the way he fought in July didn’t get him the result he desired?
“We ain’t giving away no game plans, but I know what I need to do,” Foster told Dan Rafael last week on the “Big Fight Weekend” podcast. “That fight was easy, no matter how the judges seen it, they should’ve seen it as a unanimous decision. So I shouldn’t have to go in there and change anything up, but I will turn it up.”
When asked on “The Brian Campbell Experience” whether he would throw more punches in the rematch, Foster replied, “We gonna be more active. I’m looking to come in and put on a show.”
It’s a tricky spot for Foster. He would be foolish to turn more aggressive in the rematch, because Conceicao’s best moments almost all came in the rare spots where Foster stood and traded; when Foster was boxing and counterpunching, he was in total control. However, he would also be foolish not to turn more aggressive in the rematch because, well, he learned in the first fight what can happen if you trust the judges to appreciate your style and its subtleties.
If the judges had appreciated the way Foster fought, there wouldn’t even be a rematch. But there is one, and Foster has to determine how stubborn he wants to be.
Rob me once, shame on you. Here’s hoping we don’t have to decide what shame-ascribing phrase comes after “rob me twice.”
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].
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