Ten Seconds Under the Lights: Vietnam's Combat Sports Referees and the War Between the Whistle and the Replay Screen

That July night, the arena in District 7 was hot as a bread oven. I stood less than two meters from the edge of the metal cage — exactly the distance at which a referee is allowed to exist during a fight. Behind me were more than four thousand spectators, their screams crashing against my back like ocean waves. In front of me were two fighters in round three, sweat running down to the mat and evaporating into a thin haze. In the twenty-third second of the final minute, a roundhouse kick connected with the left temple; the young fighter staggered back two steps, braced against the cage, eyes still open but no longer seeing his opponent.

The first whistle was blown by the camera, and I heard it as if the whole world were holding its breath.

The lead referee raised his hand, not to stop the fight but to signal a pause. I saw his finger tremble slightly. In that moment, I understood that I was witnessing something no television angle could fully convey: the hesitation of a human being facing a decision that cannot be undone. He had four seconds to decide whether to stop the fight, to award a technical victory, or to let it continue. Four seconds. No panel, no consultation, no one raising a hand to vote. Just one man and a vast empty space behind his choice.

I have spent nine years sitting beside moments like that. Born in Japan, I grew up with images of martial arts referees bowing to the mat before beginning anything. But I came to Vietnam at seventeen and relearned this craft from scratch — in Vietnamese, through sleepless nights in Saigon, through a Facebook group I founded when the whole world was shutting down because of a pandemic. This article tells that journey from the perspective of someone standing inside the ring, someone who must be responsible for what he sees, and sometimes responsible even for what he does not see.

In combat sports there is something television can never buy: the sound of a fighter's breathing just before the referee signals the start of a round. The arena lights in Vietnam's professional events are designed to highlight the human body, casting shadows from above so that sweat glistens like shattered glass. But that same light also creates zones of darkness that no main camera captures. When a strike lands near the back of the neck, behind the ear, or below the waist, viewers watching on a screen may or may not see it, depending on the angle. A referee, standing within three meters, sees every small detail — an irregular breath, a loosely clenched fist, a knee buckling slightly.

In combat sports, the line between victory and defeat is not about who hits harder. That line is about who has the right to call the name. And in Vietnam, those granted that right are still relearning how to hold the whistle in an era when every strike can be replayed, frame-cut, measured in frames per second, and dissected on social media before a fighter can even step out of the cage.

The incident in District 7 that night, seen from the stands, would be told in an entirely different way. Spectators saw the kick more clearly than the referee did, because the main camera was set high, looking down, while the referee's line of sight was blocked by the fighter's own arm at the exact moment of impact. Viewers saw a complete kick. The referee saw only part of it. Yet the person who decided was the one who saw less.

I saw what no one else saw, and I have to live with it.

That is why I chose to analyze refereeing rather than work as a pure tactical commentator. A commentator can talk about technique, speed, and class. A referee analyst must talk about something far harder: why a human being makes the wrong call while trying his best to be right. And why the system sometimes has to protect a wrong decision, because reversing it would set a precedent even more dangerous than the error itself.

Where does Vietnamese martial arts stand in that picture?

To answer, I have to tell a story much longer than a single night of competition.

Context: a martial arts scene opening its eyes

Over the past decade, Vietnamese combat sports have changed so fast that people forget the starting point. In the early 2010s, a professional combat sports event in Vietnam was largely organized as a showcase — there were fighters, spectators, ceremonies, but it lacked the most important thing that gives a sport its legitimacy: a consistently applied rule system and a traceable competitive record.

Today the picture is far broader. Traditional martial arts events still play the role of cultural symbols, tied to heritage and festivals. But alongside them, a new class of events has emerged with entirely different logic: fighter rankings, contracts, broadcast rights, and — most importantly to me — the professionalization of officiating crews.

The arrival of professional mixed martial arts events in Vietnam in recent years has created something this country never had at the level of annual organization: a stage where fight results affect not only honor, but contracts, prize money, rankings, and even the chance to be invited abroad. When money appears, pressure on referees appears in a different form.

At the international level, professional MMA operates under a relatively clear unified rule set. The ten-point must system divides a fight into rounds, each with a winner and a loser, the winner receiving ten points and the loser nine or fewer if heavily dominated. But dig into the criteria and everything becomes far murkier than its surface suggests.

The main criteria are ranked in order of priority. First is effective striking — including damage dealing and grappling. Second is effective grappling. Third is cage control. Fourth is aggression. Fifth is resilience and recovery. This order matters so much that simply swapping the top two categories would change the outcomes of hundreds of fights. But referees and judges in Vietnam — as elsewhere in the world — do not always remember that order precisely, especially when a fight moves fast and collisions are dense.

I once sat in a technical meeting before an event where the organizers presented the criteria table to judges. One of them, with fifteen years of experience across many countries, asked a question that silenced the room: 'If a fighter controls the cage all round without causing damage, while his opponent throws few strikes but each one makes the other retreat, who wins the round?'

No one answered immediately. And that silence is the essence of the problem.

The official answer is: the one who deals more effective damage wins the round. But in practice, a fighter who controls his opponent on the ground for four minutes is often remembered more than one who lands a stunning strike in three seconds. Human memory favors prolonged control over flash damage. That is the first blind spot I want to address.

In Vietnam, this is more complicated because of the intersection of different martial arts cultures. A referee raised in a traditional martial arts environment may carry the notion that decisive attack is always valued highly, because in traditional martial arts, ending a fight quickly is a symbol of strength. Meanwhile, a referee trained in modern MMA understands that positional control and accumulating grappling points is a fully legal tactic and sometimes more effective. These two views cannot coexist in a single decision without creating conflict.

I recall an event years ago in Hanoi where a fight ended without the judging panel agreeing on a result. Three judges produced three different scorecards, including a draw. That happens. What mattered was that afterward none of them changed their view, and the organizers decided not to publish the detailed scorecards to avoid controversy. That concealment turned a forgettable fight into a small scar on the audience's trust.

Five thousand members, one old screen, and trust split into five thousand pieces.

I said that line as a student, and I still believe it is true at the deepest level of this craft.

So what makes the difference between a decision that is accepted and one that is spat upon? The answer does not lie in whether that decision is technically right or wrong. It lies in the viewer's sense that they have been shown the same evidence as the decision-maker. When information is asymmetric, a sense of injustice is born, no matter how correct the outcome.

Core: reading a fight through four camera angles and two eyes

In professional MMA, video replay was born with a beautiful promise: when there is controversy, we will look again to find the truth. But after years of observation, I have realized that replay does not seek truth — it seeks consensus. And those two things are very different.

Take a specific situation. A fighter throws a knee to the body. The knee makes contact around the chest, but the defender's arm is crossed and inserts a small gap between knee and torso. Did the knee land to the body? The main camera set at a forty-five-degree angle sees the contact. The slow camera near the floor is blocked by the defender's sleeve. The high camera sees nothing because the attacker's shoulder blocks it. The camera from the crowd sees best but is blurred by shake.

Four angles, four different answers. The closest referee may or may not have seen it depending on how far he stood behind the attacker. In most cases, the referee stands in front, which offers the clearest view of the attacker's face and the defender's back. That is a good position to detect head contact or unsafe conditions, but a bad position to determine whether a body strike landed.

This is what I call the position paradox. The person with decision-making power is often not standing where the best information is. This cannot be solved simply by placing the referee elsewhere, because every position has its cost. A referee standing behind loses sight of the attacker's face and head, where the most dangerous strikes tend to arrive. Fighters who have suffered serious injury from strikes thrown while they were defenseless understand better than anyone that the referee needs to be there.

So each time a referee makes a wrong call, my first question is not 'why didn't he see?' but 'where was he standing, and what should he have seen from there?' That distinction completely changes how I evaluate a decision.

Now let us talk about criteria. In a standard MMA fight, each round is scored on four groups of factors. The first is effective striking — frequency, accuracy, severity. The second is effective grappling — takedowns, ground control, dominant positions. The third is cage control and overall positioning. The fourth is aggression and defense.

Of these four, only the first two are relatively objectively measurable. Strike frequency can be counted. Accuracy can be recorded. Severity can be observed through the receiver's reaction. But even here, human limits appear: in a five-minute round a fighter may throw thirty to sixty strikes on average. A good judge remembers most of them. A tired judge, after four prior rounds, may remember only half. And in a fight lasting three or five rounds near thirty minutes, accurately recalling every collision is nearly impossible.

That is why major international promotions use multiple judges rather than one, and why results are usually decided by majority. Three judges, each with a separate vantage, sit at three positions around the fighting area. The idea is that if three independent views reach the same conclusion, that conclusion is more likely to reflect reality. But reality does not always work that way.

The phenomenon of three judges producing three different results is not rare. In some cases it reflects legitimate differences of evaluation — three people seeing three different aspects of the same round. In others it reflects indeterminacy in the criteria — meaning the scoring rules are not clear enough to arbitrate between two valid readings. And in some cases it reflects external pressure: crowd noise, a fighter's fame, or memory of a previous fight.

Crowd pressure is a factor rarely discussed but hugely influential. In a closed arena, shouting bounces off the walls and creates an uneven sound field. When a crowd-favored fighter throws, spectators scream before the strike lands. When the other throws, the cheer may be smaller or later. Memory of a round forms not only from what the eye sees but from what the ear hears. International studies have shown that judges tend to score more favorably for home fighters, and the effect grows as the crowd gets larger and louder. In Vietnam, where fans are intensely passionate and chants can be very strong, this factor cannot be dismissed.

But here is the point I want to stress. A judge being influenced by the crowd is not necessarily a moral failing. It is a feature of human cognition. The responsibility lies not in eliminating that influence entirely — impossible — but in designing a system to minimize it. That is why top promotions require judges to sit at fixed positions, not see each other's scorecards, and not communicate during breaks. But even those measures cannot solve the core problem: a human being still has to decide.

And that is where video replay enters as a solution.

In MMA, video replay is used for certain purposes. The most common is verifying a situation that could lead to an unintended ending — for example, a strike to a prohibited area, an accidental head clash, or an injury-causing blow. Another purpose is verifying a rules dispute — for example, a strike alleged to have landed below the waist, or a situation involving grabbing the cage for position. In some promotions, replay is also used to consider result protests, but its scope and authority are very limited.

Importantly, video replay is not used to re-score an entire fight. This is a deliberately designed limit, not an oversight. If replay were used to review every strike, fights would never end definitively, and power would shift from referees to screen operators — a result no one wants.

But this limit also creates a gap. Replay can correct clear rules errors but cannot correct judgment errors. A distracted referee may stop a fight too early, and replay will not save that fighter, because replay is not designed to review stoppage decisions. A judge may score a round wrongly, and replay will not fix it, because scorecards are outside the scope of review. In other words, the most controversial decisions often lie beyond technology's reach.

In the international combat sports world, people call this gap the problem of the 'clear and obvious' standard. For a decision to be overturned, the error must be clear and obvious enough to be beyond argument. But this standard is itself ambiguous. What is clear to one person may not be clear to another. In a situation where four cameras give four different answers, what counts as clear? In a situation where two leading experts can argue for hours, what counts as obvious?

Over years of analyzing controversial decisions, I have realized that this standard works as a conservative filter. It is not designed to find the truth. It is designed to protect the stability of the system. If only errors everyone agrees are errors can be overturned, reversals will be few, and the authority of the original decision-maker will be preserved. That is a deliberate choice, and it has its own logic. But it also means a fighter can lose a fight because of an error not clear and obvious enough to be corrected.

In Vietnam, this problem has an added layer: how to balance international standards with domestic realities. Vietnam's professional combat sports are integrating with international norms, but budgets, facilities, and the number of trained personnel remain limited compared with major global centers. We cannot impose wholesale the system of places with dozens of intensively trained judges and automated multi-angle replay on a martial arts scene building its foundations from scratch.

Yet this is not a reason to excuse delay. There are cheap and effective improvements that can be made immediately. Publishing detailed scorecards right after a fight is one example. Training judges regularly with recorded simulation scenarios is another. Requiring referees to write brief reports on major decisions and publish those reports to the public is a third. These steps do not cost much, but they create transparency — and transparency is the foundation of trust.

Speaking of trust, I must speak of something I learned from Vietnam's fan community itself: fan anger does not target results. It targets the feeling of being excluded from the process. In many debates I have followed, what angers fans most is not that their fighter lost, but that they were not shown why. When scorecards are published and can be checked, anger drops significantly, even if the outcome does not change. When scorecards are withheld, anger multiplies, regardless of whether the outcome is right or wrong.

This is a finding contrary to common intuition in sports administration. Many believe publishing information increases controversy, so they choose concealment to keep order. Reality shows the opposite: concealment creates controversy in a more dangerous form, because a debate without data becomes a debate about motives. People stop saying 'this decision is wrong.' They say 'this decision is wrong because there is something hidden.' Once a debate shifts from technique to motive, it can no longer be resolved with evidence.

Throughout my time writing about combat sports, I have tried many approaches. At first I wrote like a textbook, citing statutes, analyzing frames. My first article about a replay decision at a major international event got only a few dozen views, and my friends said I wrote as dry as administrative paperwork. I was sad, but I understood they were right. The problem was not the content but the language. I was talking to fans in the language of a law library.

Since then I changed how I write. I start with a controversial question, not a definition. I invite readers to choose the option they think is right, then present my analysis, then compare it with their choice. This works far better, because it turns readers from recipients of information into participants in decision-making. And when people participate, they understand that decisions are never as simple as they appear from outside.

That is also how I built a community group in my sophomore year, when the pandemic brought every event in the world to a halt. I picked one controversial situation a week, cut clips from TV, posted them, and invited people to vote on whether to penalize. After three months the group had several thousand members. What I learned from that experience was not how to run an online community. It was how to read crowd reaction. I realized that the majority is often not wrong in feeling but often wrong in cause. They correctly sense that something is unjust, but they usually attribute it to the wrong cause.

Here is a specific example. In a fight where a fighter keeps retreating and evading, fans usually assume that fighter is 'running' and deserves a point deduction. But under the rules, evasion is a fully legal skill and carries no deduction, unless it comes with continuously avoiding engagement without intent to counter. The boundary between the two is very blurred. In fans' eyes, both are 'running.' In the law's eyes, one is a tactic, the other a violation. This distinction is where the biggest controversies are born.

Another example involves strikes. In some martial arts, a kick to the leg is a basic attack. In others, it is considered low-value. When a fighter from one art faces a fighter from another, evaluating the worth of leg kicks becomes a matter of culture, not merely technique. A judge raised in one environment will automatically value one type of strike over another. This is an unconscious bias, and it affects results more than anyone wants to admit.

When I analyze a controversial fight, I usually start by identifying who threw what and how effective it was, not who won. I divide the fight into rounds, each round into thirty-second segments, and in each I record the most significant event. I count effective strikes, not strikes thrown. I record the receiver's reaction — did they retreat, lose orientation, change defensive posture. I record control positions and whether control duration led to damage. Then I add it up and compare with the official scorecard.

This process led me to something interesting. In many controversial fights, my official and analytical results match in one round, differ in another, and the remaining round is the deciding round — one where both sides have valid reasons to claim victory. In such cases there is no single right answer. There is only a choice among several valid possibilities.

This is what I always repeat to anyone who will listen: most controversial decisions are not wrong decisions. They are difficult decisions. The difference matters, because how we respond to the two is entirely different. With a wrong decision, the question is how to fix it. With a difficult decision, the question is how to accept that there is no perfect answer.

But even recognizing that, I cannot avoid a sense of helplessness whenever I see a fighter standing in the cage, arms down, waiting for the announcement. In that moment, people forget that the fighter spent months in the gym preparing. They only remember that three people at a desk decided their fate. And sometimes the decider is the person who understood the least about what actually happened in the ring.

That semifinal night, I betrayed my own belief to embrace my heart.

I tell this story because it is the biggest lesson of my career, and it does not concern a fight in Vietnam, yet it shaped how I have written about Vietnamese combat sports ever since.

It was a semifinal night of a major European tournament. A player fell in the penalty box, and the referee pointed to the spot. I reviewed the footage many times and concluded the contact was very light, insufficient for a penalty. I wrote an article with that conclusion. But only twenty minutes later, hundreds of opposing comments poured in. I panicked and revised my view to 'it could be a penalty.' When the governing body confirmed the original decision was correct, some members of my community mocked me, saying I had the eye of technology but was really just chasing trends.

It was the biggest shock of my student years, and it taught me something I will never forget: community pressure can break a person's stance faster than anything. I betrayed my own analysis not because I believed I was wrong, but because I feared isolation. And in this craft, the fear of isolation is an enemy more dangerous than any technical error.

Since that night, I have split my writing into two clear parts. The first covers what the rules stipulate, based on international federation statutes. The second records fans' feelings, based on social media reactions. I never mix the two, and I commit never to change my view only because of community pressure.

That decision had its price. There were times I received angry messages from people who had supported me. There were times I was called arrogant, unwilling to listen. But I held firm, because I understood that an analyst's value lies in whether he can stand firm under pressure. If I changed my view every time I was opposed, my analysis would no longer be analysis — it would be a reflection of the majority.

When I applied this lesson to writing about Vietnamese combat sports, I realized there is a special form of pressure here. In Vietnam, the combat sports fan community is tightly bound to fighters, gyms, and localities. A fighter from a province may have a loyal following, and they track every word about that fighter. When I analyze a fight in which that fighter loses, I must be very careful not to create the impression that I am against them. But I also cannot lie just to keep the peace.

The referee blows the whistle, but the fans are the final judges.

I said that about football, but it holds for any sport with referees, including combat sports. Fans cannot change official results. But they can decide the memory of a fight. A fighter can lose on the record but win in the fans' hearts. And in the long run, fans' memory affects a fighter's career more than any official scorecard.

This raises an interesting question: if fans are the final judges, does the official referee system still matter? My answer is yes, but for a different reason than people usually think. The referee system does not exist to produce perfect justice. It exists to create an anchor point for collective memory. Without the system, everyone would remember a different version of the fight, and eventually no shared truth would remain. The system may be wrong, but at least it is wrong consistently. And consistency, even when wrong, is more valuable than chaos.

This is a controversial statement, and I am aware of it. But after years of observation, I believe it is true.

The contrarian angle: the blind spot of transparency

There is a widespread belief in sports that transparency will resolve all controversy. If we publish everything — scorecards, referee reports, minutes of technical meetings — everyone will understand and accept. I once believed this. Now I believe it is only half true.

Transparency resolves controversy about motive. It eliminates the hypothesis that there is a conspiracy behind a decision, that someone took money, that the result was fixed in advance. This matters greatly, because motive-based controversy is the most toxic kind — it destroys trust in the entire system, not just one decision.

But transparency does not resolve controversy about evaluation. When three judges produce three different results and all explain their reasoning reasonably, transparency makes clear that there is no single answer — and that often increases rather than decreases the sense of injustice. Fans do not want to know there are multiple valid readings. They want to know there is one truth. Transparency forces them to face the opposite.

This is the blind spot few mention. We demand transparency because we believe the truth will set us free. But in the field of decision-making, the truth is often uncertainty. And uncertainty is what humans find hardest to accept.

There is a way to address this that major global promotions are testing, and I think Vietnam should watch: rather than trying to produce a single answer, they publicly acknowledge that multiple valid answers exist and explain why. They educate fans about scoring criteria, explaining why two people can see the same event and reach two different conclusions. They turn fan education into part of the product, not merely a side activity.

This is what I have tried to do for years. Not to tell fans they are wrong. But to show them why a decision they consider absurd can be reasonable within the framework of the rules. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I fail. But I believe this effort matters more than any specific analysis, because it builds a shared cognitive foundation for the community.

Another blind spot concerns the relationship between referees and fighters. In Vietnamese combat sports, the community is small enough that most people in the industry know each other. A referee may have trained at this coach's gym. A judge may have fought against this fighter in the past. This creates a complex web of relationships that no rule can fully control.

In major international promotions, this problem is handled by rotating referees and judges across countries and by requiring declaration of conflicts of interest. In Vietnam, the scale is still too small to rotate internationally on a regular basis. That means the conflict-of-interest problem exists to some degree, and the best we can do is manage it transparently rather than pretend it does not exist.

I once witnessed a situation where I believe a decision was influenced by a personal relationship. I cannot prove it, and I never publicly accuse anyone. But I recorded it in my notebook as a reminder of the system's limits. And I mention it here because I believe fans have a right to know that such things can happen. Not to sow baseless suspicion, but to understand that every system has weaknesses, and weaknesses must be acknowledged before they can be improved.

A third blind spot concerns training. In many countries, combat sports referees and judges are people with professional fighting experience before moving into officiating roles. They understand a fighter's feelings because they have lived them. In Vietnam this is also true in many cases, but not all. Some referees come from traditional martial arts backgrounds with deep cultural knowledge of martial ethics but little experience with the pressures of professional competition. Conversely, some former professional fighters have not been rigorously trained in modern rules and scoring criteria.

The ideal combination is someone with both fighting experience and intensive rules training. But such people are scarce, not only in Vietnam but worldwide. That is why continuous training and a clear career path for referees is essential if Vietnamese combat sports are to advance.

On the invisible pressure of the lights

There is an aspect of officiating that outsiders rarely consider: the psychological pressure of being seen. A referee does not just stand between two fighters. He stands between thousands of eyes and millions of lenses. Every movement — how he walks, raises a hand, separates two fighters — is recorded and analyzed.

In a big fight, a referee may be filmed continuously for hours. If he makes a decision deemed wrong, that footage will exist forever online, shared, commented on, attached to his name. To some degree, a referee must live with the consequences of one moment of decision for the rest of his career.

I once spoke with a referee after a fight in which he was heavily criticized. He did not defend himself. He told me he had rewatched that footage hundreds of times, that he knew he was wrong, and that what hurt most was not the criticism but the feeling that he had taken away a person's opportunity. That was one of the moments that made me understand this craft demands more than skill. It demands endurance.

In Vietnam, this pressure has its own flavor. Vietnamese fans follow combat sports with fierce enthusiasm and very long memory. They remember controversial decisions from years ago, and they bring them up whenever that decision-maker appears. This creates an environment where correction is very difficult, because every mistake becomes a permanent part of a person's identity.

From an analyst's view, this is both obstacle and opportunity. An obstacle, because it makes referees overly cautious, sometimes unwilling to make correct but controversial decisions. An opportunity, because it creates strong motivation for organizations to improve the system to protect their people.

On the lesson from Japanese martial ethics

Born in Japan, I grew up with images of the solemnity of martial arts. In traditional dojos, the referee is not merely a fight administrator. They represent order and respect. A referee who errs in Japanese martial arts will bow in apology, and sometimes withdraw from their position to protect the dojo's honor. That is a very strong culture of responsibility.

But I must be careful not to impose the Japanese model on Vietnam. This is a mistake I once made in my early years writing here. I compared, concluded the Japanese system was better, and inadvertently offended people working very hard under far more difficult conditions. I learned that comparison has value only when it illuminates a problem, not when it builds a ranking.

What can truly be learned from Japanese martial ethics is not a specific rule system but an attitude: respect for the role of the adjudicator, and respect for admitting error. In both cultures, a referee who dares to admit fault is valued more highly than one who stubbornly defends his decision. That is the common ground, and that is worth building on.

On the future: signals to track

Looking ahead, I see several trends that will shape how Vietnamese combat sports handle referee decisions in the coming years.

The first is the professionalization of officiating crews. Major promotions are gradually realizing that refereeing cannot be a part-time job for people with other careers. To meet international standards, referees need continuous training, periodic evaluation, and compensation matching their responsibility. This is an investment many consider unnecessary, but it actually determines the credibility of an entire promotion.

The second is applying technology at an appropriate level. Not every promotion needs automated multi-angle replay like top international events. But using cameras at strategic angles and a clear review process is achievable on a reasonable budget. The key is that the process must be published in advance, not decided arbitrarily case by case.

The third is fan education. This is the trend I care about most, because I believe it has the longest-lasting impact. If fans understand the rules and criteria clearly, they will evaluate decisions more fairly. And if they evaluate more fairly, pressure on referees will drop, and decision quality will rise. This is a virtuous circle that anyone can begin contributing to.

The fourth is the appearance of Vietnamese fighters on the international stage. As more Vietnamese fighters compete abroad, they will bring back new understanding of international rules and criteria. This will create positive pressure for domestic promotions to raise their standards. At the same time, it will create new controversies, because the gap between international standards and domestic practice will become clearer.

Conclusion: a question without a full answer

If there is one thing I want you to carry away after reading this, it is this: every referee decision in combat sports is an act of balancing fairness and decisiveness. These two values sometimes conflict. We want fairness, meaning the true winner should win. We also want decisiveness, meaning the fight ends with a clear result, not with a question mark that lingers forever.

No system achieves both perfectly. And that does not mean we should stop trying. It means we should approach this with a bit of humility — understanding that the people at the judging table and the people standing in the cage are doing the hardest job in sports, and that our role as viewers is to demand improvement while maintaining respect for the humans behind those decisions.

In a recent conversation, a young Vietnamese fighter told me he does not care about referee decisions because he will try to end the fight before they are needed. That is a beautiful spirit, and I respect it. But I wonder whether that is what we should expect from fighters. Requiring fighters to always win in an indisputable way is a way of unconsciously shifting the system's responsibility onto the least powerful people.

The question I leave you with tonight, when the arena lights are off and the scorecards have been signed: if you had to choose between a decisive result you do not believe in and an ambiguous result you do believe in, which would you forgive?

Because that is exactly the question the whistle-holders must answer every night, many times, with no preparation, no consultation, and no chance to revise.