I always thought that if you had a great idea, brought personal passion to developing it, and executed it flawlessly, all the rewards of success would follow. Build it and they they will come. The world will beat a path to your door. Blah blah blah.
About a year ago, Corey Shelton, an amateur boxing judge in Atlanta and former IBM computer guy, worked with two partners to launch FightJudge.com. It's a free web site that allows everyone who is watching a boxing match to score the rounds and text-chat live with one another other as the punches fly. I've covered and been involved with online ventures for about as long as online ventures have existed (since the 1980s), and apart from Amazon.com and Google, I have rarely seen a site that did what it set out to do so well.
The site's design is elegant and enticing. The interactive scoring system is fast and works without a glitch. A few seconds after a round ends, you get a pull-down menu that lets you assign a score for the round to each boxer. Then it automatically tabulates your running overall score for the fight and ultimately determines a consensus score for all the fan-judges. Official judging should be done this way. And FightJudge keeps adding features that make it more functional and easier to use. One can imagine Jim Lampley, after complaining about a questionable decision, emphasizing his point by saying, “And here's what the fans watching the fight on HBO thought...” (FightJudge users gave Jose Santa Cruz a 118-109 victory over Joel Casamayor last month, while official judges awarded Casamayor a controversial split decision.)
“That's really our ultimate goal, to align ourselves with a network,” says Shelton. “From from a technology and accuracy standpoint, we could do it. From a sheer volume standpoint, no. I would love to go out and say 'FightJudge scored De La Hoya-Mayweather a draw.' Because we did. But the reality is that it was less than 20 people [on FightJudge] who scored that fight.”
Twenty people, out of more than two million pay per view buys for that fight. It makes no sense! (Of course, if the announcers were to mention the service on the air, it would get a lot more than 20 people.) Why aren't more people as fascinated by FightJudge as I am?
Yeah, you need to be in front of your computer to score a fight while you're watching it on TV. It's a bit of a hassle, though a wireless laptop can work just fine when you're sitting on the couch. Boxing writers could easily fire up the site from ringside (a new feature creates a custom graphic of a user's score -- see above -- that a writer can keep and publish). There's even a stripped-down version of the site for use on mobile phones. Shelton dreams of crowds at big fights scoringkeeping en masse between rounds.
I was stuck at home for the Miguel Cotto-Shane Mosley bout. I went online to score the fight and landed in the FightJudge chat room, where about 20 guys were firing off wisecracks about the action. It was almost like having friends at home to watch with.
But the site, which launched at the start of 2007, hasn't been able to get much traction.
"I don't know how to interpret the reaction by boxing fans," he says. "If you look at boxing on the web, it's pretty pervasive. There is a fan base online."
The Versus network has its own live fan scorecard online that the TV commentators on its Fight Night telecasts refer to. It averages the fan scores and shows results with decimal points -- someone might win a round 9.7 to 9.2. It looks like the scores a girl named Shannon would get in gymnastics. Still, it's a step forward as an interactive, sorta Web 2.0 tool for of boxing. HBO has tried interactive scoring at least once: in 2000 it offered fan scoring of the Bernard Hopkins-Antwun Echols fight through the slow AOLTV and WebTV services, which were used about as much as Ricardo Mayorga's defense. The experiment has not been repeated.
Shelton -- who at IBM led development of sports sites like Wimbledon.org and Masters.org and now works at a healthcare company -- has campaigned to enlist boxing web sites as parners. Secondsout.com recently came on and offers a customized version of the FightJudge scorecard on its site. Still, the big break hasn't come yet.
“It's been disappointing, but not to the point where it's discouraging us from continuing," Shelton says. "We know we have a good product. Some folks say we are way ahead of our time. I don't think it's true. We're right on time. It's just a matter of adoption."
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