The Woman Who KO’d Manny Pacquiao

Judge CJ Ross looks on as Timothy Bradley battles Manny Pacquiao during their WBO welterweight title fight at MGM Grand Garden Arena on June 9, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Manny Pacquiao buoyantly marched into the arena. He raised a gloved fist in acknowledgment of the crowd, which included actors Jack Nicholson and Jake Gyllenhall, NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, and rapper 50 Cent. As the music died down, the faithful started up chants of “Manny! Manny! Manny!”

Then everyone waited for the real champion.

A red-hatted rapper heralded the arrival of Timothy Bradley: “And for the record I never lost,” intoned Fashawn. The song — pitched as an anthem for Bradley, the World Boxing Organization’s reigning welterweight titlist — was titled “Champion.”

The silence that greeted the end of the song was the sound of skepticism. By the time Bradley stepped into the ring, a cascade of boos rained down on him.

Bradley defiantly raised his dark green gloves to the roof and basked in the ridicule. He was the champion and owned the title belt, even if few people wanted to accept it. In June 2012, he had won it from the man in the other corner: Pacquiao (pronounced Pack-EE-ow), the only fighter in the sport’s history to win world titles in eight divisions and a heavy favorite according to Las Vegas sports books.

This was a rematch of that fight, and most of the spectators wanted vindication — for Pacquiao, sure, but also against the judges whom they felt had robbed their man of the title: Duane Ford and one of the only women ever to serve in that role, Cynthia Jo “CJ” Ross. It was their scorecards that clinched a split decision victory, and thus the title belt, for Bradley.

Almost no one agreed with them. Harold Lederman, HBO’s erstwhile — and rarely uncertain — on-camera judge, scored that fight 119-109 for Pacquiao. That sounds close, but in boxing’s scoring system it means he thought Manny won 11 of 12 rounds. “Pacquiao beat the shit out of him,” Lederman later told BuzzFeed.

CompuBox, which tallies the number of punches thrown and landed, showed an even more lopsided score: Pacquiao landed 253 of 751 punches (34 percent) while Bradley connected on 111 of 839 punches (13 percent).

Even the new champ had seemed confused: “I’ll have to look at the tape to see if I won,” Bradley said in a post-fight interview.

What resulted was public outrage, most of it focused on Ford and Ross. "I've never been as ashamed of the sport of boxing as I am tonight," said promoter Bob Arum, who got his start in the business nearly 50 years ago. “These people don’t know how to score, they really don’t. What the hell were these people watching?” The WBO soon assembled a panel to review the fight, and it too decided Pacquiao had prevailed by a wide margin.

Pacquiao decided not to file a protest, and Bradley retained the title belt. Ford, who maintained Bradley had given Pacquiao “a boxing lesson,” was subsequently named president of the North American Boxing Federation (NABF).

And Ross? She returned to the ringside: She judged 37 more fights over the next 15 months, 10 of them with a championship at stake, and all but three of them on the Vegas Strip.

Ross might have kept her reputation and career intact if not for an assignment last fall: a championship bout between Floyd “Money” Mayweather — boxing’s biggest draw and the highest-paid athlete in the world, according to Forbes magazine — and undefeated challenger Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on Sept. 14, 2013.

Her scorecard would diverge even more sharply from the other judges and boxing insiders. In a fight virtually everyone else thought Mayweather won decisively, Ross scored it a draw.

This time, she was entirely on her own. And the vitriol unleashed against her was surprising even for boxing, where judging controversies are as common as concussions.

ESPN analyst and longtime boxing trainer Teddy Atlas made perhaps the most damning remarks during a post-fight rant on SportsCenter: “That criminal, that corrupt ... incompetent, whatever you want to call her,” he said. “This is the second time she’s done this.”

It would be her last fight. Two days later, Ross sent an email to the Nevada Athletic Commission saying she planned to step away from the sport she had judged for more than 30 years. "I will be taking some time off from boxing but will keep in touch," Ross wrote.

If she was hoping for redemption last month in the Pacquiao-Bradley rematch, she didn’t get it. Pacquiao won — unanimously.

Cynthia Ross, in Pahrump, Nevada in April of 2014.

Photograph by Alex Federowicz for BuzzFeed

This is a story about how a thrice-divorced, 65-year-old grandmother made her way into that ringside seat, perched on the edge for the best view, her eyes straight ahead.

This very ordinary woman has led an extraordinary life. With no particular expertise or network, Ross worked her way up from the very bottom rungs of the sport to its glamorous pinnacle. In an ultra-macho sport, this woman helped control the fates of some of the wealthiest athletes in the world.

And then she fell, fast and hard.

“I’m not sure where I stand with boxing at the moment,” she said recently while sitting in her living room, where many of her belongings were already packed and awaiting a move to Dayton, Ohio.

“I think they wanted to take me out of the limelight.”

“They” is the Nevada Athletic Commission, which regulates unarmed combat sports — including amateur and professional boxing — within the state. Among its duties is licensing and assigning judges. Ross’ offer to take time off was clearly an effort to beat the commission to the punch; she hasn’t yet submitted an application to be licensed again and it’s doubtful it would be approved, given her notoriety.

The conventional wisdom is: Good riddance. She rose above her competence and made terrible decisions.

The reality is far more complex. The venom she suffered was unusually intense and contained an element of sexism, as hard to pin down as it is to dismiss. But there is something more fundamental, something that exposes a secret about boxing: Except in the most lopsided of fights, it's often hard to tell who won. And in at least one of the fights that brought her down, C.J. Ross might well have gotten it right.

Gerry Cooney, right, begins to fall to the canvas during the 13th round of the World Heavyweight Championship bout against Larry Holmes, June 12, 1982, in Las Vegas.

AP Photo

Ross didn’t think much of “The Great White Hope” and wasn’t afraid to tell her friends so.

It was June 1982, and Ross and her third husband Melvin Ross were watching a heavyweight title fight between champion Larry Holmes and undefeated challenger Gerry Cooney at the Caesar’s Palace Hotel & Casino in Lake Tahoe. Her husband hosted a fight party at the casino, which was about 30 miles from their home in Gardnerville, Nevada.

This was before pay-per-view became the standard viewing option in boxing. Instead, people would pay a cover charge to watch big fights at a movie theater, community center, or gymnasium.

The hype that preceded this bout was stoked by racial tension: There hadn’t been a white world heavyweight champion in 22 years, and many white boxing fans looked to Cooney to reclaim the title. Cooney studiously avoided questions about race, but members of Cooney’s camp wore shirts that read “Not the White Man, but the Right Man.”

Cooney was the huge favorite among boxing fans in Gardnerville, the Ross’ hometown of about 3,000 where 90 percent of the population was white. It also once had a reputation for being a “sundown town,” a place where people of color had to be out of town by nightfall.

But as the fight unfolded, the 5-foot-tall, blue-eyed blonde wasn’t swayed by the bias of her friends. “They were all cheering for Cooney and making noise every time he landed a punch. But I didn’t see it.” In that room of mostly men, she looked especially smart in the 13th round, when Cooney’s trainer threw in the towel as his fighter reeled under Holmes’ blows.

By the night of the Holmes-Cooney fight, Ross had lived in Gardnerville for about two years. She moved there from San Diego with her 3-year-old son Kristopher, looking for work in draft and design after divorcing her second husband. Fifteen-year-old daughter Denise stayed in California with her father, Ross’ first husband.

Ross often attended Gardnerville’s annual Cow Pasture Boxing Festival, which ran from 1973-1991 and was held outdoors behind an old hotel.The last three fight cards were broadcast on an emerging all-sports cable power called ESPN.

She also met Melvin, who worked as head of security at the former Caesar’s Palace casino in Reno (now Harrah’s Reno). On the nights when he’d work fights at the casino, Ross would tag along and help him issue credentials to boxing officials and media members. It was there that she saw upcoming stars like Evander Holyfield, Tommy Morrison, and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.

“It wasn’t that I was a fan of any particular boxer,” Ross said. “I was curious about what judges looked at and what made them decide who was winning a fight. Because visually, I could see things a little differently.”

Soon enough, because boxing is in perpetual need of officials to work fights around the country — especially in less-traveled locales like northern Nevada — Ross was recruited into the tight-knit fraternity of boxing officials. Yes, fraternity.

At the highest levels of professional boxing, women are rarely in any positions of influence or power. There are no licensed female promoters in Nevada, none who run the major boxing organizations that award titles and rank fighters, and only one (Pat Lundvall, a partner in a Las Vegas-based law firm) sits on the five-member Nevada State Athletic Commission.

The numbers aren’t much better among the ranks of referees or judges, though things have certainly come a long way since October 1984. It was then when the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission announced plans to name three female judges to the “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler-Mustafa Hamsho middleweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden. One of Hagler’s handlers complained that “it’s a man’s game” and “there’s going to be a lot of blood and I don’t want the three judges throwing up.” Only Eva Shain, the first woman to serve as a judge at a heavyweight championship match, ended up working the fight.

Nearly 30 years later, it remains very much a man’s world: BoxRec.com, an online wiki-based boxing encyclopedia, counts only 12 women, Ross included, among its list of 473 current and former judges.

Women are most conspicuous in the sport as objects of the male gaze. From press conferences to photo events arranged by beer companies to breaks in between rounds, teams of scantily clad models move among crowds in halter tops and hot pants.

“Eye candy” is what Caitlin O’Connor, a 24-year-old from West Hollywood, calls herself and the legions of other models who work boxing events. In one of her more awkward assignments, O’Connor was told to stand behind Arum during the post-fight press conference for the Pacquiao-Bradley rematch. She was there mostly to smile and occasionally whisper questions from the press corps into the left ear of the hard-of-hearing 82-year-old promoter. “They wanted girls behind Bob so people would listen. I guess I was the girl to draw attention with my red hair.”

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There is no easy way into one of the three judges’ seats at a prizefight. Anyone interested must start first with Nevada’s amateur boxing program, which is run by the Barry family from a sooty white-block building in a warehouse district in the shadow of the Strip. There, surprisingly, women do hold sway.

The head of the program is Dawn Sanchez. She’s married to Augie “Kid Vegas” Sanchez, who handed Mayweather one of his last defeats in the ring, as an amateur. She’s also the only child of a pair of Las Vegas police officers who turned their love of boxing into a family-owned business.

The pugilistic partnership got its start in the late 1970s, when her father Pat Barry was a middling prizefighter from New York in need of a manager. Her mother, Dawn Barry, figured she couldn’t do much worse than his current agent. Then — much more than today — boxing wasn’t particularly welcoming of female intrusion. But over the years, Dawn Barry and Dawn Sanchez started teaching the sport to men.

Dawn Sanchez makes no qualms about the commitment needed to climb through the amateur ranks. “It takes a lot of consistency and dedication,” she said. Candidates must first attend a certification clinic, which is usually held once or twice a year and is where the rules of the sport are taught. Then comes an extended period of shadowing officials at amateur boxing events, where people learn to work a number of roles including judge, referee, and timekeeper. If someone shows enough proficiency and interest, they can eventually start working at the events.

That’s pretty much the route Ross took. She had never been an athlete herself, but she liked fights and attended boxing matches. Her first husband was a college wrestler, and she often worked matches, clocking which wrestler spent more time on top of his opponent.

As she learned boxing, Ross recited the rulebook into a tape recorder and then played it back on the way to and from work and whenever she could catch a spare moment. In northern Nevada, where there were so many more fights than people willing to work as a judge, “I was doing all the fights,” she said. She judged bouts in shopping center parking lots, at truck stops, and outside the Bucket of Blood Saloon near Reno. For one fight, she took her judge’s seat by a ring that had just been used for a wrestling match between a man and a pig.

Under state rules, it takes two years in the amateurs before the state athletic commission will accept an application to work as a professional judge. Ross, working as a drafter and raising a young son through much of the ‘80s, waited nearly a decade before submitting her application in August 1991.

“Her grasp was immediate and her performance exemplary,” wrote Michael A. Musso, chief of officials for the USA Amateur Boxing Federation’s Northern Nevada region, supporting Ross’ application. “I give Ms. Ross my highest recommendation.”

Ross worked her first professional fight on May 5, 1992, at the Bally’s Hotel and Casino in Reno. It was a four-round fight between lightweights Abel Pedroza and John Avila. Pedroza prevailed in an unanimous decision.

Not long after, her husband got transferred to a position at the Bally’s on the Strip and she reluctantly followed. “It wasn’t my idea,” she said. She loved the mountain landscape near Reno.

But one perk of moving to Vegas was the opportunity to work more fights with better fighters.

She worked a Mayweather fight in her 11th assignment, at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas in April 1997. It was only the sixth professional bout for Mayweather, then a promising former Olympic medalist known as “Pretty Boy Floyd” instead of the more obnoxious “Money” persona he adopted later in his career. Mayweather won in a first-round knockout.

Ross was assigned to her first title fight two years later, a 12-round flyweight bout in San Marcos, Texas. She and the judges scored a unanimous decision for hometown favorite Mike Trejo, who was making his first title defense.

Slowly but surely, Ross was working her way into that echelon of officials who get the best and biggest fights. “I took my time going through the ranks,” she said. “I was never one to push or to ask for anything.”

Timothy Bradley and Manny Pacquiao fight during their WBO World Welterweight Championship title match at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 12, 2014.

JOE KLAMAR/AFP / Getty Images