Bradley-Campbell and the Need for Instant Replay

Anticlimactic: lacking climax, disappointing or ironically insignificant following of impressive foreshadowing.

If last night's Bradley-Campbell showdown can't be defined as anticlimactic, then I don't know what we keep that word around for.

There was a decent amount of buzz in the boxing world surrounding this fight. And rightly so. Both fighters are action fighters, eager to prove themselves and looking to achieve a victory that would propel them to bigger and better things.

Bradley is the young champion who has been facing tougher opposition on his journey to the top of the junior welterweight division. He is a high volume, skilled fighter with a statement to make.

Campbell is the veteran, whose consistency can be questioned, but not his will, backed by a high pressure/high action style that tends to make for good drama. The fact that he's an old fighter by boxing standards adds to the pressure he faces every time he gets in the ring these days.

All these elements combined promised fireworks, or at the very least a decent show when they finally faced each other.

But by the time their fight was over, drama of the bad kind is what we got. It read like this: nasty cut on Campbell on the third round which, according to the fighter, didn't allow him to see; the replay shown by the network clearly showed it to be result of a headbutt, not a punch; the referee messes up the call and calls it a punch; fight is ended, and Bradley gets the win by TKO.

In one word, it was anticlimactic.

The fans were left watching a celebrating Bradley, a very irritated Campbell, a referee who wouldn't admit his mistake, a hilariously dressed (so what else is new?) Don King trying to stand by his defeated fighter, and the hint that a rematch was a possibility.

All of these badly staged antics would've been avoided had the sport of professional boxing stayed up to date regarding that most advanced of technological innovations which has done wonders in other professional sports and usually improves the reliability and judgment call ability of whoever is refereeing a particular sporting event: the instant replay.

What is it going to take to incorporate this most convenient of tools into professional boxing? Day after day we hear about the decline of boxing, whether it's due to infamous scorecards, greedy promoters, boxers who look for maximum reward with minimum risk, bad refereeing calls, etc.

And yet, a feature such as the instant replay, which is so readily available and could greatly improve the legitimacy of refereeing, especially in high-caliber matches such as CHAMPIONSHIP FIGHTS, has still not been given a chance.

On a side note, I was surprised by the way Campbell immediately and emphatically declared after suffering the cut that he couldn't see, "hinting" that he wouldn't oppose the decision to have the fight stopped. Of course, he was counting on the referee calling it a headbutt, therefore declaring it a no-contest. It was only after the referee called it a punch that Campbell became furious.

There have been fighters who have suffered much worse cuts and went on fighting, trying to make the best of it. It not always yielded them the best results, but given Campbell's pre-fight attitude of knowing how hard it would be for someone in his situation to get another chance if he happened to lose a high-caliber fight such as last night's, it was certainly appalling and disappointing to see him become discouraged so quickly, without even giving it one more round's worth of trying.

All in all, not the best of nights for boxing.