Knowing the rules of the ring is of utmost importance. But for boxing referees, it’s just as pivotal to be ready to apply those rules in the many situations that can occur.
That’s why four experienced officials – , , and – offer , an intensive training program.
“I don’t think there’s ever been four world-class referees who sat down together and decided what the best practices were,” Reiss said in a recent interview with Randy Gordon and Gerry Cooney, the hosts of “At the Fights” on SiriusXM. “We’re trying to put out best practices that everyone across the board is gonna do, so we won’t have the situations where there’s a low blow debacle, where half the people say it’s a low blow and half the people say it’s not, and boxing gets a black eye.”
Collantes, Reiss and Taylor remain active referees. , with his final assignment putting him as the third man in the ring for the third bout between Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin. Mora is now the “officials chairman” for the WBO.
“There’s about 3,000 professional fights worth of experience between the four of us. Over 300 world title bouts and a lot of perspective from a lot of mistakes, a lot of corrections,” Reiss said. “It [the training program] came out of a demand. We have people calling us. They got into situations in fights and they really don’t have senior officials in their area, or senior officials that want to share with them, because they’re afraid those guys will take the work from them. But I’ve always been taught if I light somebody else’s candle, it doesn’t diminish my candle. You help each other grow. We wanted to leave boxing better.”
The Sole Arbiter program has been offered . The most recent three-day seminar just wrapped up in Las Vegas, with participants paying $1,250 for a pair of extended days, each lasting more than 10 hours, spent watching and learning from fight footage, and then a third day in a boxing gym.
“We show videos of situations where we could’ve done better as referees,” Mora told Gordon and Cooney. “And it’s not so that we can criticize the other officials, but we have to learn from the mistakes. If not, we’re doomed to repeat them.”
“We had 400 videos in two days that we went through, little snippets of situations,” Reiss added. “We start out by saying anything you see today is not about the referee. It’s about the situation. So if a guy gets hit and he goes down and he gets hit while he’s on the ground, if we show what the ref did, we then put the Sole Arbiter litmus test to it. What could we have done different or better? We’re trying to teach referees the best choices to make in boxing. Critical thinking. Good judgment. The only way to do it is to show them sometimes bad judgment.”
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