FAR FROM TAMPERING with a judge’s scorecard like Amir Khan’s camp have suggested, Mustafa Ameen – the so called ‘mystery man’ at the centre of Khan’s defeat to Lamont Peterson – has said he was merely ‘correcting’ the scores. Glad that’s cleared up, then.
Ameen has claimed that his reason for leaning over judge, Michael Welsh, was to help with some basic maths as Welsh complained of feeling unwell.
“I happened to look down, I believe at the end of the third round, I looked down and I saw Mr Welsh’s score,” Ameen told the BBC, adding; “I saw, I believe, it could have been nine, nine and nine – which is 27 all day long. There was an error. It might have been 26 or 28 but he was off by a point or two. I happened to look down and I said ‘Michael, nine times three is 27′. He said ‘oh my God’ and corrected himself. And he said ‘I’m not feeling well this evening, thank you very much’.”
Welsh is the now the only central party who has not spoken publicly about the sequence of events and it will be interesting to see when he is next called upon to judge a major contest.
The break in silence from Ameen comes less than 24 hours after Khan’s promoter decided to drop their case to appeal the result:
“We’ve been reviewing everything, including the latest paperwork which we received from the IBF, and I sat down with Team Khan and we realized that based on the makeup of that hearing that it would have been a very one-sided story,” Golden Boy promoter Richard Schaefer told ESPN, ”You don’t go to hear a partial side of the story, so we decided to withdraw the appeal and focus our time on Amir’s next fight.”
The WBA have ordered Peterson to fight a rematch against the Bolton fighter within 180 days, however they cannot threaten any serious sanction against Peterson as he could still fight on in the IBF. Khan is said to be so desperate to get a date set that he has offered Peterson a 50-50 split of the purse.
Such an agreement would have been unthinkable before the bout on 10 December, and beyond Peterson’s wildest dreams when he was growing up, homeless, on the streets of Washington.
