Judge responds to bias charges

Longtime MMA judge Douglas Crosby scored Al Iaquinta vs. Jorge Masvidal at UFN 63 last month for Masvidal. The other two judges scored it for Iaquinta. Most figures in the media agreed with Crosby, and scored it for Masvidal, although not generally by 30-27.

Iaquinta’s coach Ray Longo appeared on the MMA Hour and alleged that Crosby had “inappropriate relationships” with more than one figure associated with the gym, including a woman who, Longo alleges, got a “court order of protection” against Crosby. Longo also said that Crosby had sent him a number of letters, including one dropped off at his academy by a figure identified as Crosby’s nephew. In sum, Longo felt that Crosby was not a suitable individual to judge a Serra/Longo fighter.

Marc Raimondi recently did a detailed article on the issue that included a number of interviews, and police reports.

Crosby did not respond to Raimondi, but appeared recently on Chael Sonnen’s You’re Welcome podcast, and flatly denied many of the charges.

“I’ve never written Ray Longo a letter and I don’t have any nephews,” said Crosby as transcribed by Raimondi. “So I’m not sure — unless I call my brother and he tells me he has a phantom son, I’m not really sure how to address that. All I can tell you is I don’t have any nephews and if I did have a nephew I would be playing golf with him right now. And I never wrote him anything, so if he presented something to a state agency claiming that I wrote it and then created a phantom nephew that delivered it to him, then I would venture to guess that my attorney is gonna to have to discuss that with the athletic commission at some point in the near future.”

Crosby also took issue with the idea of a fighter’s camp trying to get a judge removed from a fight.

“I think it points to a bigger problem,” he said. “And the bigger problem is, if you put yourself as an athletic commission and you put yourself in a disadvantageous position and you allow any cornerman or whatever to automatically request that a judge be recused because you’ve got a beef with them. Ray’s a fine example. If you’re going to recuse everyone that Ray Longo’s got a beef with, Ray’s got more beef than the Chicago stockyard. It would be basically Ray judging the fights by himself because I’ve been places where he’s got a beef with every judge and every cornerman and everyone in the stands and the guy selling popcorn and the valet.

“The situation you run into is if an athletic commission is automatically going to entertain the notion of recusing judges because of a cornerman waving a piece of paper that might be from a Chinese restaurant for all we know, delivered by a phantom, then you’re giving cornermen the power to decide who judges fights.”