General Admission
Nietes robbed but he’ll come back
By Al S. Mendoza
MY good friend Jun Velasco, the eminent poet-cum-columnist, was on the phone on Wednesday night.
“Why do we still have judges in boxing that destroy the beauty of the sport?” he said. “They should all be erased from the face of the earth.”
If he had his way, he wanted to rearrange the faces of the judges, not including the one that saw Donnie Nietes the winner.
“How could those two judges stomach their scores?” he asked. “They ought to be banned for life.”
One judge saw Aston Palicte the winner to cancel out the other judge’s verdict of a Nietes victory.
The third judge’s score was the craziest: a 114-114 draw.
How could that be?
In the 12-round fight, hardly had Palicte scored a decisive win in a single round.
In my scorecard, I had grudgingly given Palicte four rounds as Nietes was the clear winner at 116-112.
That was the same score given to Nietes by one of the judges in the All-Filipino fight for the vacant WBO (World Boxing Organization) 115-pound division.
So ahead was Nietes (41-1-5, win-loss-draw, 23 knockouts) in the world junior bantamweight fight that he just coasted along in the last three rounds.
He fought that way because it appeared obvious that Nietes knew he was way ahead of Palicte (24-2-1, 20 KOs) in the fight held in the US.
If Nietes had shown mercy from the ninth to the 12th and final round, let’s not take that against him.
After all, this was a clash between two Filipinos.
He just played along in the homestretch, confident he was going to win it anyway.
No need for a knockout, to humiliate your foe who, anyway, had looked headed to purgatory.
But it was not to be.
The split draw stunned Nietes. But he took it in stride.
“Talagang ganyan. Wala tayong magawa. Move on na lang tayo,” he said.
(That’s how the cookie crumbles. We can’t do anything about it anymore. Let’s just move on.)
A rematch could be arranged.
But Nietes, the pride of Murcia, Negros Occidental who is nicknamed “Ahas” as he used to have a white python for a pet, shuns it.
“Better to fight someone else,” said Nietes, 36, who missed winning his fourth world crown in a fourth weight division.
Manny Pacquiao and Nonito Donaire are the only other Filipinos to have won that distinction, although Pacquiao had gone on to amass an unprecedented eight world titles in eight different weight classes.
Perhaps, Nietes, his winning streak of 24 since 2014 snapped by that draw verdict, might need to bulk up to go up once more in weight to avoid facing Palicte or another fellow Filipino again.
Jerwin Ancajas, another Filipino with an impressive 30-1-1, holds the same world crown in another boxing association—the IBF (International Boxing Federation).
The 118-pound division beckons for Nietes?
Go for it, Ahas. Your venom’s as potent as ever.
Go, ask Jun V.
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