Referee Jack Reiss was already on the hot seat for what some believe was a long count in the first Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury fight. The temperature was turned up another notch on Saturday.
Reiss worked the welterweight fight between Abel Ramos and Bryant Perrella on the Caleb Plant-Vincent Feigenbutz card in Nashville. Perrella was leading on the cards when he went down twice in the final moments of the scheduled 10-round fight and didn’t respond well to commands, prompting Reiss to stop the fight.
There was only one second remaining.
The result immediately brought back memories of the first Julio Cesar Chavez-Meldrick Taylor fight, which was stopped by Richard Steele with 2 seconds left in a fight Taylor was winning. It also made Reiss the centerpiece in another controversy.
Perrella, hoping to become a 147-pound contender, was ahead comfortably on all three cards when he went down from an uppercut with about 35 seconds left in the fight and then got up shaky legs. He went down again in the final seconds. Again, he got up, but this time Reiss didn’t like what he saw and waved off the fight.
Perrella seemed to accept his fate. His trainer, Michael Nowling, was angry.
“We won every round and they took it from us with 1 second left,” he said moments after the fight ended.
Here’s what Reiss saw at the end:
“Perrella seems to be winning the entire fight. He got caught really good in the 10th round. When he got up, I would say he was only at about 60 percent. He didn’t walk well, he wasn’t stable. I wanted to give him every opportunity so I let it go and watched how he responded.
“I want a fighter to run or hold. The worse thing they can do is stand there and fight back. That’s instinctual. When they run or hold, it’s thoughtful. The second shot was even more devastating. I said, “Walk over there and come back. He couldn’t control his body. He walked straight across the ring and stumbled. That told me he was not able to defend himself.
“Forget the clock. The clock had nothing to do with it. There are no rules in the book that say, ‘If the end of the fight in near, you should stall and let it continue.’”
Of course, the clock is what everyone is focused on. Had Perrella been allowed to continue for just one more tick of the clock, he would’ve been victorious. That’s why some have been critical of Reiss.
The veteran referee, one of the most respected officials in the business, said he ended up in a no-win situation.
“That’s boxing,” he said. “I didn’t knock him down. I’m not the one who let my guard down in the 10th round. I’m the one who had to deal with it. If I stalled and let it go, I would have been crucified the other way. I would’ve robbed Ramos of the TKO he deserved. Everyone would’ve said I’m a cheater. ‘Why didn’t you wave it off?’ I was between a rock and a hard place.
“I’m not happy about the way it was stopped but the only issue is the clock. And that’s not a valid argument.”
