Quote Originally Posted by CFH View Post
Let me start by saying that I was a fan of Hatton and I was hoping he would beat Mayweather.

This will probably be an unpopular opinion on here, but so what...

Ricky Hatton's reputation dictated the way that fight was called. Since he beat Tszyu and burst onto the international boxing scene, he was viewed as a fighter who used an excessive amount of holding and other illegal tactics in his fights. He was able to get away with it when he was the hometown fighter or when he was the up-and-coming fighter being showcased by HBO, but once he met a fighter whose stature was equal (or above) his own, in the United States, he was no longer going to get the benefit of the doubt.

I think the Mayweather team recognized this and exploited it in a very successful way. They were campaigning in the media prior to the fight and were almost certainly in Cortez' ear the moment he was announced as the ref. I also think Cortez probably saw Hatton as someone who bent the rules to his advantage and he probably saw himself (or was convinced to see himself) as doing the right thing for the integrity of the sport by trying to call the fight strictly by the rules.

Do I think Cortez did a bad job? Yes, I do. He allowed no inside fighting whatsoever (not that it mattered, because Hatton was getting owned on the inside when Cortez allowed infighting to take place). But, I think it was Hatton's quite justified reputation that was the primary reason Cortez called the fight the way he did.
This.

I think Cortez did a pretty, piss-poor job & the point deduction was an awful call. However, on the moments they were on the inside, Hatton was getting beat up. Mayweather was just better than him in every way. What's amazing I think is that Hatton fought a great fight. People look at him losing & think that he lost his composure, but I think he got his tactics spot on as evidenced by the 2 or 3 rounds he won.

The problem is that imo you had a very good fighter against a great one. That very rarely works out in the very good guy's favour & quite frankly weight (Hatton typically weighs more than PBF on fight night) is a non-issue for me.

Like CFH says, Hatton had the benefits of 'friendly' refs all the way prior to that & I think he'd been allowed to get away with so much that he didn't know how to moderate what he was doing any more. Cortez still annoyed me in that fight, but Hatton didn't lose because of him, he would have got stopped anyway because of the way they matched-up stylistically. Where Cortez really did fuck it up was in the Soto-Lorenzo fight, his refereeing there really was a farce. The weird thing is that now his status has dropped, I've seen him doing a good job of not involving himself in the Arce-Vazquez Jr, Khan-Maidana & Rios-Acosta fights.