Did Richard Steele make the right call in Chavez-Taylor I?

I dunno, but it certainly didn't help Taylor that the rematch was four and a half years later, should've had it at 145 or something like that during the time when Taylor outpointed Superman Davis

 

No

was a bad call

chavez was without a doubt the moral victor, but the fight shouldn't have been stopped.

Imo, in a championship fight, you give the fighter the benefit of the doubt. that's why I think that call such as this one and tzyu-judah are bad calls

 

Judah got up and fell down again. That's cause for calling a fight right there, Nady made the right move.

 

Chavez has a right to throw punches all round long with the view to winning the fight, so who is anyone to tell him the last several seconds wont count when they would at any other time?

Absolutely, Steele was justified (at least in theory).

 

steele made the right call for himself, don king, julio chavez, jose sulaiman, mexico.

 

Correct call. The fight was still on and Taylor was not able to defend himself, that means a TKO.

 

Always thought it was BS

 

ya

 

The part that always annoyed me the most was the stupid fucking look Steele had on his face when he decided to stop the fight.

 

I hear you. That is a solid counter argument and because of that I was on the other side of this debate for long

 

He just looks like such a spaz.

 

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The best actual counter argument is that surely steele must have heard the ten second warning like everyone else did. Of course it can be argued that in the heat of refereeing a person can miss this.

 

at that point in the fight - the only possible way on the planet that Taylor couldn't win the fight is if the referee stopped it. also taking into account that the rules back then state you can be saved by the bell in the last round. chavez had zero chance to win, literally zero, unless Steal intervened.

 

He might not have heard the ten second warning, but there was also a big fucking flashing red light also indicating the round was about to expire about 2 feet from Steele's face in the corner behind Taylor.

 

I think Steele made the right call. BTW. Had Taylor done ANYTHING to show he could continue I would say it was a horrible stoppage, but he just stood there. He didn't put his hands up, he didn't nod, he didn't say a word.

 

and the big flashing red light is important to note considering you could be saved by the bell in the final round back then. there was literally no possible way for Taylor to lose the fight, except for the referee stopping it himself

 

I don't think Steele was in on any fix or anything like that. He just made a split second call that will be debated until the end of time.

 

This has already been hashed and rehashed to death by cdogg & myself in the Marquez vs Pac thread, so I'll just go ahead and say I think it was a bullshit call and leave it at that.

 

Completely disagree on Tszyu-Judah, but not really interested in debating that one.

I go back and forth on this one. There are several reasons why the fight could've been stopped at the moment it was. Funny that all actually contributed into the one reason Steele did stop it - Taylor's attention was elsewhere and he didn't properly respond to the command.

I certainly have far more sympathy for Taylor than I do for lying ass Duva, who deserves a lot of the blame for the way it went down.

In a vacuum, Steele's decision makes sense, and if he didn't stop it he leaves himself open to bias. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Most other officials would've let the fight play out to 0:00 so that hurts him.

 

Either way, props to Chavez for closing strong and dropping Taylor hard instead of giving up. That's how you protect an unbeaten record. I'm glad Chavez won.

 

1.5 years earlier, Steele let Hearns continue after he'd been pasted to the canvas by Barkley and repeatedly wobbled just trying to stand up. Steele said he liked to "give a champion the benefit of the doubt."

Steele is a dirty, incompetent fuck.

 

Taylor tried to close strong as well. Didn't just run away the whole round, as I think he could have done.

 

I think it was the right call, because Steele wasn't looking at the clock, he's not supposed to , he's just supposed to ref the fight and let the timekeeper take care of the clock. Taylor got up, and at the end of the count he had both hands on the ropes, clearly out of it, unable to walk to the ref, so he called it a KO, because that's is exactly what it was. That's the whole point of boxing.

 

So maybe he learned from his mistake then and judged this situation correctly? Or maybe he just made a mistake in that fight, believe it or not it happens to people sometimes. Or maybe he noticed that unlike Hearns, Taylor had taken severe punishment for half an hour.

Whatever Steele did before or after is NO kind of argument here. At the time of the fight he was generally recognized as the best active ref. He made his call in a difficult situation and thought about the fighter's health instead of his own reputation. To me, that's pretty cool

 

I need to watch the fight again...but if we were to judge by the faces of both men at the end of the fight, it would have been a wide unanimous decision in favour of Chavez!

Perhaps we were ALL had/conned/hoodwinked/run-a-mock/led-a-stray by Taylor's flashy flurries and slick movement...when in fact it was Chavez that was connecting more and with harder punches consistently.

 

Flashy flurries and slick movement often win rounds and rightfully so. Chavez did the more damage overall and was winning 'the war' but I can't see him taking most of the rounds. No way.