Kermit Cintron vs. Sergio Martines Aka The Screw Up

The fight between Sergio Martinez and Kermit Cintron was easily one of the biggest screw ups in recent boxing history. All throughout the fight Cintron would fool the referee into thinking that Martinez was landing headbutts on his when it simply wasn’t the case. It got to the point where Sergio would land a big punch that would open a cut on Cintron only for the referee to say the cut was from a headbutt! Throughout the first half of the fight Cintron would take the center of the ring but do little when he was there, this would leave an opening for Martinez to make an impression and start to run away with the fight as he stayed the busier fighter in the early rounds. 

Things would take a turn for the bizarre later on in the fight. By round seven Sergio should have been easily winning on the scorecards as he continually out boxed Cintron. Then with less than ten seconds left in the fight he would crush Kermit with a short right hand straight to the jaw. Kermit was visibly out of it and he wobbled about with his hands low and eventually stumbled towards the ropes and to his knee’s and this is where the weird factor would kick in. While being counted out Cintron was claiming it was a headbutt that had put him down not a punch, while he was busy arguing the knockdown to the referee he could have very well been counted out as Kermit was barely off of his knee’s by the 10 count. If that was any other fight at any other time the fight would have been stopped then and there. You have to be up by the ten count, not on the ten count, the fight should have been stopped and it looked like it had. Referee Frank Santore had seemingly waved the fight off which sent Martinez into a frenzy of happiness and Cintron into a frenzy of anger as he was still claiming that he had been headbutted. At which point Cintron’s corner men would jump into the ring and start working on his swelling and cut. Two minutes would pass before the referee would announce that he had in fact not stopped the fight and that he was resuming it! It was a joke that something like this could happen and that a referee could be so easily manipulated by a boxer. Had Cintron not cried that he had been headbutted over and over the fight would have been over then and there but Santore would cave in and give him what he wanted. Now if you look at it from the fact that the fight was never really over, Cintron should have faced a disqualification. His corner men had jumped into the ring and where inside it for well past their allotted time if this was simply an in between round rest.

Nonetheless the fight would continue and Martinez would continue to dominate the fight but yet again would fall foul to the underhand tactics of Cintron. Kermit would use his body movement and lean into the punches of Sergio so that they would inevitably strike him on the back of the head. He pulled this tactic so much that the referee eventually deducted a point from Martinez for hitting around the back of the head. By the 12th round It seemed that Martinez was coasting to victory despite the hiccups but that wasn’t the case as one judge would score the fight accurately at 116-110 in favor of Martinez while the two other judges would both score the fight 113-113, ending the fight in a majority draw. Proving that if you use enough underhand tactics, you can save yourself from an embarrassing loss.