'Fighting Words' - How One Scorecard Ended Judge Lloyd Scaife's Career

by David P. Greisman

The problem, Lloyd Scaife soon recognized, is that he hadn’t initially realized there was a problem. And at that moment, barely minutes after the fight he’d been scoring from ringside was over, so too was the career of the 85-year-old boxing judge.

Scaife had scored fights on occasion for more than 30 years, first for amateur boxers and then with the pros. He worked in Washington, D.C., which rarely got boxing matches of national significance, which meant his name was known locally but otherwise wasn’t recognizable even to those who follow the sport closely.

That all changed on March 5, 2016, at the D.C. Armory, an arena just a short drive from his home in Northeast Washington. For the final bout of that night, a bout that aired on HBO in front of an average of 740,000 viewers, he turned in a scorecard that raised eyebrows and brought allegations of bias and corruption.

The city’s athletic commission conducted an investigation and said earlier this month that it was neither. Instead, the commission described Scaife’s scoring for the heavyweight bout between Luis Ortiz and Tony Thompson as the result of “human error.”

To some, that phrasing may imply incompetence. Yet Scaife’s retirement from judging has come because of what he and a longtime friend believe is the real reason for what happened.

“I’m thinking I might be feeling a little senility or something coming on,” Scaife said last week in an exclusive interview with this writer. He sat in his basement, near a wall that exhibited a variety of boxing memories.

There was a plaque from then-Mayor Marion Barry for the first annual Mayor’s Cup Invitational Amateur Boxing Tournament in 1985. There was an award received from the commission in 2012, recognizing 25 years of service. There were numerous framed certificates received for completing regular training as an official. And there were several credentials granting him access to ringside, including the one he wore the evening of Ortiz-Thompson.

He’d gotten ready for that assignment the same way he always did — by getting into his uniform at home. Except this time it was different. And like the scores he turned in during the main event, he didn’t realize something had gone awry until being informed of it afterward.

“I have a lady who lives with me. I told her what happened [during Ortiz-Thompson], and she told me it took me almost an hour to tie my tie before,” Scaife said. “Hey, I’ve been tying my tie since I was 15, 16 years old and never had no problem.”

Scaife also was assigned the first two fights of the show: light heavyweight prospect Todd Unthank-May’s six-round unanimous decision over Alexander Johnson and lightweight prospect Damon Allen’s unanimous decision over Daniel Perales.

His score for Allen vs. Perales was the same as his two official counterparts at ringside: a 60-54 shutout for Allen. His score for Unthank-May vs. Johnson was 58-55, while the other judges had it 59-55 and 59-53.

There was only one round in which he was in the minority, as the only judge to give Johnson the sixth. Scoring is subjective, based on four criteria but otherwise dependent on what a judge sees — or thinks he sees — from his seat and what that judge thinks about, well, what he thinks he saw. This writer arrived to the venue too late to see Unthank-May vs. Johnson and cannot opine on Scaife’s scoring for that round.

However, it was notable in hindsight to see that Scaife had scored Round 3, in which Unthank-May knocked Johnson down for the second time in the bout, as a 10-9 round for Unthank-May instead of the 10-8 round that judge Wayne Smith had, docking Johnson one point for losing the round and another point for the knockdown. Then again, even that 10-9 from Scaife isn’t as strange on the surface as the even 10-10 score turned it by judge Manuel Vincens.

This scoring otherwise went unnoticed. That wouldn’t be the case after Ortiz-Thompson.

The main event ended in the sixth round with a knockout for Ortiz. The scores didn’t matter. But as copies of the commission’s combined score sheet were passed around press row, writers took notice of a few things.

The two other judges had Ortiz ahead 50-43 after five rounds. Scaife had Ortiz barely in the lead at 48-47. And it wasn’t just that the judge had found two rounds to give to Thompson. In the first round, a round in which Ortiz knocked Thompson down, Scaife had it a 10-9 round for Ortiz while the other two judges had it the customary 10-8. That wasn’t as bad as the third, in which Ortiz knocked Thompson down as the round was coming to a close. The other two judges had it 10-8 for Ortiz. Scaife had it 10-9 — for Thompson. He also was the lone judge to give Thompson the fifth round.

“I would be very confident that in this instance it’s nothing less than corruption,” wrote a commenter on one boxing website.

“If you fight a DC fighter in his hometown, you will get screwed by a corrupt judge like Scaife, a corrupt ref, or both,” wrote a commenter on another boxing website.

It’s understandable why boxing fans and observers would come to that conclusion, or at least have that suspicion. A pile of papers in Scaife’s basement included four articles a friend had printed out for him, all mentioning his name and the controversy over his scoring.

“People are going to think whatever they want to think,” Scaife said. “I was a good judge. I was a bum judge.”

He knows his scores were wrong. He didn’t remember giving Thompson a round, though, until the chief judge pulled him aside afterward.

“She asked me about it, and wow, I didn’t know what to say,” Scaife said. “I don’t know what happened. I know what happened. I know I did it. I know my writing. I know that he [Thompson] did not win a round, but yet I had him winning a round. I was surprised when she showed it to me.”

He soon learned that he’d made other mistakes on the scoring slips, which are provided to the judges ahead of time for them to fill out during the bouts. These were different than the ones he’d worked with in the past, which allowed the judge to write in the color of the corner and the score for that corresponding fighter in empty boxes. These new slips had “Red Corner” and “Blue Corner” printed ahead of time in boxes, and at one point earlier in the night he’d written the scores atop that text instead of in their proper empty box, he said.

He wonders why no one caught that error early on. He wonders why the referee for Ortiz-Thompson didn’t question him after collecting the scorecards for the rounds in question. He wonders why no one from the commission straightened him out. He thinks back to the third round, in which Thompson was doing decently until the knockdown.

“I was going to give him the round until the end,” he said. “I must’ve had that on my mind real strong.”

He also knows that he is the one at fault, even if it wasn’t at all his intention. While the commission’s investigation was underway, Scaife was already drafting a resignation letter.

“I messed up the whole thing,” he said to this writer at one point.

“I got out of it so it would never happen again,” he said later. “If I did it one time, I would do it again, because when I was doing it I didn’t think I was wrong. I couldn’t blame nobody for that. I’m the one who did the whole thing. … I didn’t mean to do it, but I did it.”

Scaife acknowledged that he’d had memory issues before, though there were no incidents that he could recall along the lines of what happened with the scorecards and his tie that day. He’d visited a doctor five or six years ago, he said, and was told he remembered as much as other people do. Still, he’d hoped his forgetfulness wouldn’t affect his judging.

It did.

It’s difficult to review Scaife’s entire judging career. BoxRec.com, an online database of boxing matches, lists 88 bouts that Scaife scored from ringside. That list is incomplete. The bouts it does list don’t always include the judges’ scores, both in fights that went the distance and those that ended early. That’s a level of minutiae impossible to attain so many years after the fact and with so many bouts going on worldwide. And there’s no website currently compiling round-by-round scoring breakdowns, though various score sheets have been posted online for notable fights in recent years.

But even those who closely follow boxing in Washington, D.C., hadn’t noticed anything to give them cause to speak of Scaife in the way that some writers and fans describe other, more famous judges.

“He was usually very consistent as a judge, this one situation notwithstanding,” said Gary “Digital” Williams, the writer for Fightnews.com who chronicles fights in D.C., Maryland and Virginia on his “Boxing Along the Beltway” blog. “That’s why it was kind of surprising having the score he did on March 5.”

Scaife has been friends for about 25 years with Henry “Discombobulating” Jones, a fixture as a ring announcer in the D.C. area. Jones recalled one other instance in which Scaife had a highly questionable scorecard, though even then there were extenuating circumstances.

“He had scored it incorrectly, and I asked him about it later, and it seemed like he might’ve gotten the participants confused,” Jones said. “Now I did point out to him that they both were wearing the same color trunks, which is a major problem, they were the same ethnicity and their body size was similar. He wasn’t really able to differentiate between the two.

“That was the only time I had seen that prior to now,” Jones said. “We’re talking about four years ago. Other than that he’s been quite competent. … I know good and well that he’s not what’d be called a ‘homer’. Over the years he’s scored against hometown fighters, and justifiably so. He’s been above board on everything.”

He had noticed Scaife’s faculties slipping, though.

“I’ve been playing chess with him for 25 years. For the first 18 years or so I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t beat him at all,” Jones said. “The last few years I’ve been kind of dominating. I’ve seen the decline. He’s not as mentally acute as he used to be. I continue to play with him because it still motivates him mentally.”

Scaife still loves the sweet science. He was an amateur heavyweight boxer when he was a teenager in Bakersfield, California, prior to his time serving in the Air Force in Korea in the 1950s. Work wasn’t going well in California and so he came to D.C., where he had relatives. He’s been in the same house since 1962 and points to the improvements he made over the years. He owned a moving company for more than three decades and retired from that in 1996. He continued to judge over the past 20 years.

“I truly loved what I was doing,” he said. “I’ve been crazy about boxing. My love for boxing grew more and more as I got into it.”

Televisions played sports channels simultaneously on two floors of the home. He still looks for the fights. Boxing has come back to D.C. since the night of Ortiz-Thompson. He opted against going to the April 1 show featuring Adrien Broner against Ashley Theophane.

“I don’t like him [Broner] as a boxer, and I didn’t — my coworkers, I didn’t want to be around them,” he said. “They know I wouldn’t do anything like that [score a fight in a certain way due to bias or corruption], but I did not feel right.”

He’s certain he’ll return. But he has other things to think about: his life as it is going to be now, his girlfriend, and the ongoing challenge of how to make ends meet between his bills and his limited income from Social Security.

Despite all that, Scaife wasn’t hesitant in discussing the night that ended his career as a boxing judge. He wanted people to know the truth, even if it’s still something he’s trying to understand.

“He’s come to grips with it,” Jones said. “He’s taken ownership of it. He voluntarily stepped down. That tells a lot about his character. He didn’t want people to have the wrong impression that there was something clandestine going on. He didn’t want to impact negatively on the sport he loved.”

“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com