A small majority, including two of the three people whose opinions actually matter, saw Holloway taking the first two rounds cleanly, while Volkanovski edged the final three. The rules say that’s a win, but it intuitively feels wrong. How is a round won by a few extra leg kicks the same as a round won by inflicting real damage? A basketball team wins because of its cumulative score, not by outscoring the other team in more quarters. This is the inherent tension of trying to wrangle the chaos of a fight into the necessary bureaucracy of athletic contest.
This scoring system and the unending cycles of conversation it engenders sucks for everyone, no matter how you scored the Holloway-Volkanovski fight. It sucked for Holloway for obvious reasons, but it also marred Volkanovski’s first defense with an imaginary asterisk. All the robbery talk has undermined the incredible work he did to reverse a vintage Holloway onslaught in the middle of the fight. He stopped a boulder barreling down on him and pushed it all the way back up the mountain, an incredible feat of toughness and intelligence that got completely lost in persnickety hairsplitting…
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