Boxing judge Tom Schreck’s debut column: the scoring criteria and the concept of doing damage

In the first installment of his new series for BoxingScene, boxing judge Tom Schreck explains how he officially scores fights, including what he looks for during a round.

I’m betting that regular readers of BoxingScene don’t need to be told what the four scoring criteria are for professional boxing: clean punching, effective aggression, ring generalship and defense. In fact, I would bet just about everyone reading that could hear the beloved Harold Lederman recite them in their head.

The four criteria are supposed to act as a guide for how a round is scored. The problem is defining each one into something that is objective, consistent, and easy to understand among those doing the scoring.

Saying you know it when you see it, like Justice Potter Stewart’s statement on obscenity, isn’t really scientific. Nor does it really help to make scoring concrete and measurable.

Professional boxing is, at its essence, about doing damage. In today’s world that phrase would not be lauded by the politically correct and, honestly, there is something a bit distasteful about the terminology in a world where CTE robs so many combat sport competitors of their quality of life as they age.

Still, professional boxing is about assessing damage. Let’s work that notion into our existing criteria, starting our way at the bottom and moving to the top.

Defense is, of course, central to competitive boxing. If you’re getting hit more often and harder than your opponent, chances are you will not win the round. Legend has it that Willie Pep once told boxing writers that he was going to win a round without throwing a punch and then proceeded to do it on two of the three scorecards. 

That may or may not be true, but I believe it would be exceedingly hard to win a round by merely employing the better defense.

Broken down, this criterion would probably be most accurately described as “defense that leads to clean punching that causes damage.” 

The goal of professional boxing is to strike your opponent, and employing good defense will set you up to do just that. Think of Pernell Whitaker or a young Hector Camacho. Both fighters had great defense, but that defense didn’t win them rounds if it didn’t lead to offense. You can’t win at boxing without a solid defense, but you can’t win at boxing with only a solid defense. 

Ring generalship may be the hardest criterion to define. It means controlling the ring and the action, and that can take myriad forms. 

It may be who is moving forward more often, but not necessarily. 

It might mean who is cutting off the ring effectively, but not necessarily.

And it might mean who is positioning themselves to be able to score. 

However – and this is a big however – if that generalship doesn’t lead to scoring blows, what does it actually mean? Is your ring generalship worthy of note if it didn’t lead to a damaging scoring blow?

Probably not.

Effective aggression is a criterion that carries a modifier. “Effective” is the key term here. Aggression in the scoring sense means getting punches off, pushing the exchanges, engaging in the fight and physically demonstrating the willingness to box. 

What is ineffective aggression? You’ve seen it and you recognize it even if, in the moment, you don’t describe it by its official name.

Think of the fighters that chase their opponent around the ring, missing their haymakers and getting tagged by a backpedaling counter-puncher. Think of the boxer who huffs and puffs and growls, who gets tied up and spun around and countered by their opponent. And think of the fighters that throw with damaging intention, only to have their shots blocked and countered.

Aggression needs to be effective.

It is effective when it leads to scoring blows, right? Any other type of aggression would be tough to describe as effective, wouldn’t it?

Which leads me to the first criterion: clean punching. 

A clean punch is one that lands with proper form and body mechanics with the knuckle part of the boxing glove. Some purists and martial artists might even argue that it should be the first two knuckles of the fist because that would mean that the fist, back of the hand and arm would all be in alignment. That might just be minutia, but it helps to conceptualize the proper form of the punch.

There’s a reason there are a limited number of punches in the sport. There are the jab, the cross, the uppercut, the hook and some derivations like the overhand, the bolo and others. Since the times of John L. Sullivan, fighters have learned that creating new punches often lead to disastrous results. 

Power and defense come from body mechanics and proper form, and deviating from that reduces the efficiency of your attack. 

There are no doubt obvious exceptions to this. Muhammad Ali kept his hands low and often punched without the weight of his body behind his shots. Roy Jones Jnr did many fundamentally unsound things in the ring but compensated for it with Herculean conditioning and strength.

Exceptions aside, a good clean punch looks like a good clean punch because it comes with the proper form and body weight behind it. 

A boxer’s weight should be moving behind the punch for maximum effect, so when you see a boxer throwing but keeping their weight on their back leg, they are executing a punch without maximum efficiency and power.

It is easier and faster to throw punches without the weight of your body behind it. You can also get out of danger faster when your feet aren’t firmly planted. Old-timers will tell you that punches come from the ground up and with a strong foundation based in the legs. 

No one will ever cite Rocky Marciano as the sweetest in this sweet science, but watch him throw his hooks and see the power in his legs.

It is the clean, properly executed punches that cause damage. 

Some boxers bring more power with their body mechanics, and that can be seen in what the punches do to the opponent. Moving a fighter off their stance, snapping their head to the side and back, and buckling their knees are all observable and should be part of what goes into scoring a round.

So when you think about it, all the criteria — effective aggression, ring generalship and defense — should result in clean punching. Clean punching leads to damage. The fighter that does the most damage wins the round.

Just a word or two about my contributions to BoxingScene: I am an active judge, so it won’t be appropriate for me to cover current fighters, bouts, officials, commissions or sanctioning bodies. My articles will be focused on the principles of judging, for the most part, and hopefully they may help readers better understand what they are watching. 

And it is totally OK if you’ve disagreed with my scorecards in the past. You learn to have thick skin in this business, and I know criticizing the officials is part of sports. Honestly, when I’m watching a game from the last row of the end zone at Notre Dame Stadium, I don’t hesitate to yell at the refs from 95 yards away for missing a holding call.

Future articles will look at the anatomy of controversial decisions, the hardest rounds to score, how TV differs from live fights, analysts and their work, and judging different styles. If you’d like me to cover something in particular, drop me a note.

Tom Schreck has been a professional boxing judge for 26 years and has judged Hall of Famers such as Manny Pacquiao, Miguel Cotto, Bernard Hopkins, James Toney, Dmitry Bivol, Gennady Golovkin and Vasiliy Lomachenko. He writes The Duffy Dombrowski Series )mysteries featuring a pro boxer) and is the founder of The Undisputed Champions, an all-abilities boxing program.