No time for links or anything right now, but I saw the Semmy Schilt vs Choi Hong-Man fight this evening and two of the judges decided that it was Christmas time for Choi.
I have heard that the judging for K-1 events is often suspect, giving away fights to the hometown heroes. I guess they are bringing that tradition to Korea.
BTW, Schilt was a pretty good sport about the whole thing despite getting ripped off. Perhaps his agent got to him.
6 Comments
didn’t see the fight, but i would have bet top dollar that semi would bury choi. they’re in totally different leagues. the only way for him to lose would have been if he got choi’s knee to the face and was knocked out.
I saw the fight, and it was a rip off. Semmy landed many more punches and constantly kept Choi off balance with low kicks to his legs. One kick even sent Choi to the ground by knocking his feet out from under him. When Choi’s eye started bleeding, a time out was called and the person treating Choi seemed to be giving Choi time to catch his breath by slowly dabbing beads of sweat and blood off other parts of his face with a cotton ball.
Choi charged two or three times swinging swinging wildly, but few of his punches connected I only saw two or three punches that caught Semmy on the face and none of them had much power behind them. On the other hand, Semmy hit Choi hard in the face eight to ten times.
At the end of the fight Choi looked bruised and exhausted while Semmy did not seem to have a mark on him and looked ready to go three more rounds.
This fight was another example of a foreign fighter getting screwed by judges here in Korea.
it was quite laughable. One guy I was watching with called it and I stated that there was no way it could happen due to the nature of the fight. Heh.
I thought Choi had improved and landed a good combination at one point in the fight, but I was still shocked by the judges’ decision, especially as he scored no downs, and Schilt put Choi down with a low and bloodied his face enough to stop the fight. Echoes of Roy Jones Jr. ‘88. Don’t expect the Korean netizen community to go apeshit ala Ohno any time soon.
And this from the Korea Times:
The thing is, I think that Choi might be able to beat Schilt once he gets 5-10 more fights under his belt. He clearly can take a punch.
He even seemed to be learning to counter low kicks (which were there for Schilt all through the fight). Once he learns how to counter low kicks and throw strong strait jabs, he will be a first-tier fighter despite his evident slowness.