Kaye Scott Win Majority Decision In Olivia Curry Rematch

Kaye Scott made sure there would be no awkward arithmetic this time, grinding her way to a 10-round majority decision over Olivia Curry at Detroit’s Fox Theatre to lift the vacant WBC and WBA women’s middleweight titles. The scores read 98-92 and 97-93 for Scott, with a third judge somehow seeing it 95-95, a card so out of step with the general drift of the fight that it drew more raised eyebrows than Curry’s battered brow ever could.

It began with Scott doing what she promised to do, stepping forward early and behaving like the fighter who intended to set the terms rather than accept them. She used her jab to find range and impose a rhythm, and she made a point of being first, first to punch, first to land, first to initiate the kind of contact that turns a neat boxing match into something more like a corridor argument. Curry, as in the first bout, tried to answer with pressure of her own, but she was being met, nudged, and crowded before she could build any real momentum.

The first flashpoint came in the second round, when an accidental head clash opened a cut over Curry’s right eye, immediately changing the texture of the contest. Blood has a way of clarifying priorities: Scott stayed on task, keeping Curry working and keeping her turning, while Curry had to manage not only the champion’s pressure but the small distraction of damage that rarely improves with time.

Curry did have pockets where her aggression looked like it might finally bite, notably in the fourth, when she managed to step into range with more certainty and force Scott to trade rather than dictate. But where the first fight had seen Curry’s forward march become a more useful weapon as the rounds wore on, the rematch took a different road. Scott, who is often described as the boxer of the pair, chose instead to persist in the rougher option, fighting inside, tying up, leaning on Curry, and turning clinches into long, draining exchanges where neither woman landed a great deal clean, but where Curry was repeatedly pushed back and made to restart her work.

By the middle rounds, it had become a fight of attrition and small advantages. Scott’s pressure was not always pretty, and it did not always come with sparkling combinations, but it carried a steady authority. Curry’s attacks came in bursts, rushes forward, a flurry, a moment of success, only for Scott to blunt it by smothering the follow-up and forcing Curry into the kind of short-range struggle that drains energy without necessarily producing highlight-reel punches.

The later rounds were hard, gruelling work, and the bout never quite recaptured the drama of their first meeting, which had ended in a majority draw and left both corners claiming the moral victory. Curry had her best spell of the closing stages in the ninth, letting her hands go in combinations and briefly giving the crowd a reason to wonder if momentum might swing late. But even there, Scott’s steady insistence, her willingness to stay chest-to-chest, to impose her size on the inside, to turn every promising Curry surge into something awkward, kept the fight leaning her way.

At the final bell, there was little doubt who had done the more effective work over ten rounds, even if one judge contrived to find a draw. Scott’s forward pressure, her ability to control where the fight was taking place, and her success in stopping Curry from building sustained attacks were enough to earn the decision and the belts. For Curry, it was the cruelest kind of defeat: another close, physical fight with Scott, but this time without the relief of a verdict that keeps the door ajar. For Scott, it was the third attempt at a world title ending, at last, with the prizes in her possession, and with the rivalry settled decisively enough everywhere except, apparently, on one scorecard.