Mosley vs Mora: An Embarrassing Night for HBO

Jeff Pryor takes a look at how the HBO commentary team performed in this past Saturday night's Mosley vs Mora pay-per-view broadcast.

When Shane Mosley and Sergio Mora stepped into the ring with each other not long ago, they completed twelve rounds of on-again off-again combat, officially at a draw. Three men at ringside were seeing a totally different fight then the one that unfolded over those intermittently dull and explosive stanzas. Those three men, were not the judges who each saw a close, but debatable outcome.

Those three men were HBO's broadcast crew of Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant and Harold Lederman.

If Mosley and Mora failed to entertain us for stretches of the bout, no one did a bigger disservice to themselves or the boxing match, than did our three hosts for the pay per view show. According to their call of the fight, Mosley was the clear winner, Mosley made the fight, Mosley was blameless in any of the holding, Mora didn't land more than two or three significant punches, and Mosley is deserving of another big fight.

In the words of the emotionally overwrought and disingenuous Jim Lampley... "This... Sucks!"  Though HBO's longtime call-guy, was protesting the judges decision with that outburst, it's a more fitting charge against his sycophantic flattery of the eminently likable Mosley.

The fight itself was not a rousing affair for much of it's duration. The early rounds were marred by Sergio Mora's unwillingness to stand and trade in front of the amped crowd that had packed into the Staples Center. The elusive "Latin Snake" managed to elude Mosley's energetic, but ineffective pressure for most of the early rounds. Though the early exchanges were few and far between, after four rounds neither man had done much damage to the other and the HBO crew was already getting restless.

At this point Harold Lederman and two of the official judges had given Mosley three of the four rounds, one of the judges had given Mora three of the rounds, Doug Fischer of The Ring Magazine had Mora up four rounds to none... I had the men splitting those first four. Close rounds, not much going on, you could score them either way. The only certainties were that up to that point, the fight had not caught fire, little had happened and Mosley already looked tired.

The rest of the night, that kind of round parity would continue with everyone scoring the fight ending up with significant and wild variations on what the outcome could be. During this early period, the HBO crew went from having an open mind about Mora's chances in the fight, to foisting all the blame for the lackluster bout upon him. Lampley scoffed at Lederman's ability to find a round for Mora out of the first three. For Lederman's part, he harped on the frequent holding, but narrowed his criticism to Mora who more often than not, (and certainly more often than Mosley) was finding ways to punch with his free arm when they were in a clinch. Aping the the piquant word-smithing we'd normally expect from Larry Merchant, Lederman finished, comparing Mora to an octopus whenever Mosley got close. Their imaginative analogizing didn't stretch so far as to paint Mosley as the plodding bear hugger that he so certainly was if we are finding animals to enliven our descriptions of the fighters.

Truth be told, to anyone who was watching with an unbiased eye, Mosley was getting his arms behind Mora, much of the time. Over the last several years, this has been a part of Mosley's boxing modus operandi. He doesn't fight on the inside, but instead grapples and holds. Call it a symptom of his aging body and conditioning, or a slowing of his ability to get off shots in close, it's been on display and noticeable for some time. Why the HBO crew chose not to acknowledge his complicity and for the most part instigation of the holding that night in the ring with Mora is an interesting question.

As the fight progressed, so too did the bouts action quotient. Mora began peppering Mosley with sharp head snapping uppercuts, and ripping short hooks on the inside. Mosley swung away with body shots, and landed the occasional clipping blow to Mora's ever ducking head.

Curiously, as the fight started to entertain, the announcing crews hatred for the bout amped up. When Mosley landed a modest blow, it was emphasized out of all proportion. When Mora strung together a series of head snapping shots, there was silence at the mics, until which time Mosley found another minor shot to land, which was immediately called out as another sign of Mosley's control and dominance of the round.

In an even more disturbing example, thirty seconds into round four Mora cracked Mosley with a solid right hand that twisted Shane's head around catching him flat footed, and sending a wave of oohh's and aahh's around the arena. Merchant was in the middle of a laborious story about Margarito and his wrap scandal, oblivious to action inside the ring. Mosley responded to the punch, by chasing after Mora, throwing a wild right of his own that narrowly missed and then falling into Mora along the ropes until the ref separated them. Lampley, noting that something of interest might be happening in the fight, interrupted Larry to say "Incidentally, Mosley landed a right hand in there" before Larry continued to give his take on a matter that occurred nearly two years ago.

Similarly in the second Bernard Hopkins- Jermain Taylor bout, I can vividly recall Taylor, around the eleventh round, lumbering forward throwing a flurry of three or four punches. Hopkins evading each, ducking, bobbing, weaving. Nothing landed. Lampley then exclaimed that the flurry of punches probably gave him the round. I checked the tape. I slowed it down. Nothing landed.

Selective sight at it's Lampley best, then and now.

Later in round four of Mosley-Mora, and shortly after Mora's big righthand, Lampley opined with a smirk in his voice "Meanwhile if we find something interesting to talk about relating to the prize fight that is taking place in front of you, we will certainly report it." He then went on to tell us that instead of fighting, Mora had resorted to holding more. Exactly three seconds later, Mora smacked Mosley in the face with a whistling left hook and followed up to the body. Cleaner punches than Mosley had yet landed in the round.

Shortly after, Lampley emphasized again "Mostly Mora is just scratching and holding." Moments later Mora landed yet another clean overhand right, and finally forced Lampley into acknowledging one of his blows. This, after an accidental headbutt occured slicing open Mora's eye. An event described by Lampley as "the most interesting occurence in the fight so far."

During a replay of the head butt, a clean, head jarring uppercut is shown thrusting Mosley's head back again, in agonizing slow motion. Lampley and team plead the fifth.

Also overlooked by the HBO crew; the fourth round was a pretty good round of fighting. One that was not nearly so boring as they had apparently hoped.

Starting the fifth, all Merchant could think to say was that hopefully the cut would make Mora fight. Two minutes in to that stanza, Lamply complains "This is pathetic. This is a pathetic performance, in a big opportunity fight for Sergio Mora."

While the round was sporadic in it's action, there was a fair amount of trading along the ropes by both fighters. As the round wound down, Mosley had been pushing to make something happen. There was a back and forth flurry of punches thrown and Mora was jawing at him. The crowd was enlivened and engaged by the interaction. Our aloof commentators seemed befuddled by the occurrence.

Merchant : "I'm trying to figure out why the crowd is excited?"

Lampley: "They stood up for some reason... and if Mora's performance was embarrassing before now, I think it was even worse in this round."

A slow 5th stanza with pockets of action, but the stink of HBO's commentary was steady the whole round through.

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What made the manic bout perhaps more difficult to sit through at times, as Merchant rightly pointed out, was that everyone had just seen three spectacular knockouts leading up to the main event. Then a protracted wait for the main event, during which time Lampley and Merchant struggled to fill as everything ramped up for the final bout. They seemed a bit off their game as they fumbled at times with conversation.

They also showed a bit of the attitude to come with their shoddy treatment of Vivian Harris during his fight with Victor Ortiz earlier, in which Lampley lambasted Harris for not coming to win, even while the veteran fighter pulled himself off the deck several times and launched big shots in a last ditch effort, though it was clear his time was all but up.

In a night when they seemed hard pressed to come up with meaningful commentary, particularly during the dry spells within the main event, they could have brought up Mora's long exodus from the ring, having fought just seven rounds in the last two years. Or the fact that Mora had trouble making weight the day before, and though he wasn't obligated to do it after paying a 20% fine to Mosley, still dropped the additional weight in an honorable attempt to conduct himself as a professional and competitor. Could that have affected his unwillingness to trade early in the fight, perhaps saving up for later rounds? Could there have been rust affecting his output? Nary a mention was made of either.

Incidentally, the bout reminded me of two other fights. The first, Hopkins vs. Calzaghe, had a simliar dynamic in that it too had a defensive minded fighter who was landing clean blows, with a low output, while the other man was throwing everything but the kitchen sink, and often landing little of significance. Like that fight where compubox seemed to show it's limitations as Calzaghe was credited for much of the slop thrown that may have scraped across, but not connected solidly, conversely, the subtle interior fighting by Hopkins seemed to be lost on the button pushers. This bout saw much the same treatment, with compubox seemingly blind to much of the clean inside punching that Mora was putting in.

The other bout brought to mind was ironically the eyesore that occured when Mora turned down a fight with Jermain Taylor in the champs hometown. The fight that was then made, pitted pugilist technician Cory Spinks versus the middleweight champ. That fight was ten fold worse than the worst rounds of Mosley vs. Mora. Similarly in that fight, Lampley and compatriots were firmly in the corner of one of the fighters. In almost an exact replica of the treatment they would later give Mora, they blamed the horridness of that fight entirely on Spinks. They chastised him for not "taking advantage" of the opportunity. They ignored Spinks' punches that landed. They glorified missed punches by Taylor. As the bigger, stronger, younger, more dynamic puncher that Taylor was, they still for some reason thought Spinks should have fought out of character and went after Taylor. They didn't comment on Taylor's unwillingness to engage with the feather punching junior middleweight, or lay any blame at his feet for the lack of punching between them.

On this parallel night, it was Shane Mosley who was blameless.

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The second half of the fight brought out more sustained action. Mora still eluding Mosley's slowing advances, but also stopping and exchanging whether in the center of the ring, or along the ropes, and generally getting the better of the flurries. The clean punches were all coming from Mora, while Mosley seemingly willed himself forward, lacking crisp or effective punching, but unwilling to stop trying to get at Mora.

Between the end of round six and the start of seven, Lampley was mocking Mora during a replay of an uppercut that caught Mosley clean and made him step back. Jim smugly summed up his perception of Mora's output for the previous six rounds...

"He's landed one left. And one right... They were both very good."

Midway through round seven, Sergio Mora is clocking Mosley consistently, a lead right hand, a left hook inside, he follows up with a body shot. Lampley takes note of Sergio's blows "He's coming alive." but turns it into a backhander "Doesn't necessarily mean he wants to fight more. He's just doing better when Shane forces him to".

Merchant seemed to be looking for some positive Mosley banter after he and his partner waited silently through several clean Mora blows, and quietly intoned "...well... Mosley got a body shot in..." Lampley jumped in " A good one! Left hook to the body." And then went back to ignoring several Mora connects.

Between rounds Mora's corner sounded positive and calm, Mosley's corner more intense with a lot of instruction. I guess Mosley trainer Nazim Richardson hadn't been able to hear how easy the fight had been going for his fighter, or how all the clean blows Mora was peppering Mosley with didn't happen.

Another round went by, with much the same pattern. Before round eight Richardson became more severe with his fighter, telling Mosley that he wasn't doing what they had worked on, and that he knew Shane was in shape; he'd watched him put in the work.

Over the next several rounds, as had become standard, the crew was mostly quiet as Mora landed blows, stepping in only to point out obvious blocked blows by Mosley and over emphasizing his work.

Round ten was a great action round, with Mosley looking a little desperate and a fair bit exhausted. Mora strung together a number of clean, sharp blows that twisted Mosley's head every which way. Mosley for his part, landed a few clean punches along the ropes, and showed what in football would be called a great motor. He just didn't stop. Mosley put in a truckload of effort, but got picked apart by Mora's variety of punching and awkward (and extremely well timed) inside fighting. If Mora was a puncher, or if Mosley was lacking in chin, those shots may have thrust the bout into dramatic circumstances.

That the blows were not immediately damaging, does not mean that Shane Mosley will not be affected down the line by them. Throughout this and many of his fights, he took clean, hard, jarring blows to the head. That he seemed unfazed here is a tribute to his will, and chin. Hopefully, he fares as well in the coming years, once he steps out of the ring for good.

At the end of ten, Dean Campos, Sergio's trainer says he has gotten word that on television they say Sergio is losing seven rounds to three. Campos asks him to win the fight on the outside. Use his jab.

Mora responds "So no inside? I thought I won easy..." Mora shakes his head, exasperated, bitterly smiling. "I don't get it."

Campos "I'm not saying you lost it... but what are they looking at? I don't know."

Sergio sits and thinks about what his trainer has said as the last few seconds tick away in the corner. He shrugs, "Alright, there is no way he wins these two rounds. I promise you."

As the eleventh began Mora and Mosley traded jabs, but as the end of the first minute neared Mora drove a series of hard hooks and uppercuts into Mosley, putting the aging legend momentarily on his heels. None of that garnered a mention, in fact Merchant was busy talking about Mora's lack of knockouts over his career. They finally got back to commenting on present action, choosing to note a Mosley right hand, in lieu of all the Mora blows.

With one minute remaining in the eleventh round, Merchant observes "Mosley, hanging on a little bit here." For the first time in the fight suggesting that anyone other than Mora is responsible for a clinch. By the end of the round, the men are exchanging all out. Clean bombs for both. After giving a little credit to Mora for fighting harder in the last couple rounds, Lampley couches those final exchanges "Hard to say which man got the better of it, but Shane lands the heavier punches for sure."

The twelfth round was another good one. Mosley showed his world class heart and will to win. Mora showed grit and will of his own. While each landed a share of clean blows, in the surprising slugfest, Mosley edged the round on his sheer unwillingness to stop throwing punches.

Meanwhile, Jim Lampley had thrown aside all pretense of being a professional, unbiased commentator. He let the curtain slip fully down from the monument he'd erected to Shane Mosley, presumably as a fan and friend over the course of "Sugar" Shane's twenty six appearances on HBO.

He openly cheered for his guy.

"Go Shane! Keep it up!" Lampley shouted into the microphone.

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As the fight ended, and the HBO crew told us that this would and should be Mosley's forty seventh win, the cards were being tabulated and Larry was crawling into the ring to interview our two fighters.

After the draw was announced and Jim Lampley had a passionate outburst described by one fan, as though Lampley's own kid were in the ring and had some injustice done to him... Merchant set to the task of getting the prizefighters thoughts on the bout.

Mosley ever the gentleman, gave Mora credit for the hard fight, and looked both tired and accepting of the draw that he had been awarded. When Merchant tried to goad him into saying he deserved more, Mosley remained the class act and honest competitor he has always been. He refused to stoop to the commentators level.

This, Lampley had to say about the draw...

"Atrocious. Absolutely Atrocious. A joke. A travesty. An injustice... horrible."

...this I have to say about Lampley and friend's commentating of the fight.

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Over the course of those twelve rounds, and in their closing comments the crew showed a tremendous bias for one competitor and against another. They openly mocked Sergio Mora, a man in there, whether to their satisfaction or not, giving and receiving real blows for our amusement. They didn't even have the decency to call the fight correctly, or for the most part honestly.

The power of a commentator is such that his opinion often frames and informs everything that a spectator thinks about the match. Even the cagiest of fight fans can fall prey to the same message delivered over and over during a fight.

Do you believe your own eyes, or the comments of "the experts" the guys you've been listening to for years, who've done these shows hundreds of times?

Given Shane Mosley's long career, there has been a lot of talk about whether he should continue on. Whether he will know when he is past his "sell by date".

Likewise, given a commentators decades long career, when do they get too close to the fighters they've been covering. When do they stop being objective? When is their "sell by date"?

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Towards the end of the bout, Lampley had some final cutting words for Mora, the fight long target of his derision "Shane Mosley has accomplished something very noteworthy in the last five or six rounds of this fight. He forced Sergio Mora to fight honorably. He shamed him into a real fight."

Mr. Lampley finally called something right... there was indeed shame present at ringside. You needed only to look down through the ropes and past the microphone.

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I sent word to Sergio Mora asking if he wished to comment on Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant and Harold Lederman's comments during the bout. He offered this response.

"I feel the commentating was cruel and they never gave me a chance. It seemed personal...I'm very hurt by the comments. I fought my fight and did not get credit."

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