Issue 025

May 2007

By Grant Waterman

I wonder sometimes about how many referees out there are living with guilt for what they’ve done, or maybe what they haven’t done. I’m not on about when they’ve blatantly stopped a fight too early, or God forbid, too late. No, I’m on about when they’ve refereed a fight and maybe allowed a very minor infringement of the rules to go unpunished and then at the end of the fight they get hounded by the fighter and team that lost because they blame the ref for ‘not doing his job’, or when fans of that particular fighter start posting derogatory comments all over forums like Sherdog. 

After you’ve refereed a few thousand fights you’re going to get some complaints. I mean let’s face it, you can’t please everyone all of the time, and there are some people out there who seem to have a distorted memory of what they just watched. There are always the situations immediately after a fight when people come up to you and think they’ve seen something happen that actually didn’t. I’ve had people argue with me that a fighter received an illegal blow, and this and that, but when these ‘experts’ review the replay on TV or DVD they realise that what they thought they saw didn’t actually occur the way they perceived. Strange how they never come back and admit they were wrong. Oh well, part of being a referee in any sport is that you have to be pretty thick skinned, and you have to understand how emotional people can be on the day of a fight. 

So, you are refereeing a fight and both combatants are really going for it. It’s high-speed action and the crowd are going crazy. During the first round they are moving fast around the Octagon, exchanging strikes and each trying for a takedown. One of them grabs the fence for a split second and this possibly hindered the other fighter from achieving a takedown, but they carry on regardless. One of the corner men shouts out “He grabbed the cage ref, he grabbed the cage.” The fight goes the distance and the fighter who grabbed the cage in that first round gets the decision by the smallest of margins. The losing fighter’s team then approach you and argue that if their fighter had got that all important takedown in the first round then he would have won the fight and it is your fault for not doing your job properly that he lost. 

To add to this there may have been a £20,000 win bonus on the fight, or a shot at a title for the winner. So what should you have done? Stopped the fight the moment the fighter grabbed the cage and warned him? Well imagine, you stop the fight, separate the fighters to warn the cage grabber and then restart the fight with both fighters standing in the centre of the Octagon. The guy who grabbed the fencing then throws a great left hook and KO’s the other fighter. Same outcome, different finish. Now the same corner men come over to you even more irate. “Why didn’t you just let it go, there was no need to stop the fight for that? There was no need to warn him just for that. Our guy was doing fine until you interfered.”

There are even times when trainers complain about things when their fighter wins. You shouldn’t have done this, you shouldn’t have done that. Hang on, you just won! Saying that, I always take constructive criticism onboard, and in fact welcome any feedback about what I do in my job.

I like the attitude of a fighter who realises that he’s in a fight. OK, I know it’s a legitimate sport and there’s rules and so on but at the end of the day it is a fight. Take a fighter like Sami Berik or Paul Jenkins, they’ll never moan about a questionable decision or an outcome, or blame the fact that they had their shorts grabbed halfway through the second round. As long as it isn’t clear cheating or a blatant foul, they’ll tell you, a fight’s a fight, so get on with it.