For a few seconds, Nina Hughes won the WBA bantamweight world title.
Her arm was in the air.
She was one celebrating her team in the Australia ring.
But then Dan Hennessey, the ring announcer, realized he made a mistake — misreading the cards, according to Yahoo! Sports — and called Hughes and Cherneka Johnson back to their original spots.
This time, Johnson was announced as the winner, and that led to plenty of criticism directed toward Hennessey — a United States Marine Corps veteran and “International Ring MC,” according to his Instagram bio.
“Is this guy for real?” one of the broadcasters asked after the correction was made. “Is this guy, Lt. Dan Hennessey, for real?”
It was a gaffe similar to what Steve Harvey made at the Miss Universe contest in 2015, when the host incorrectly announced that Colombia’s Ariadna Gutierrez Arevalo was the winner instead of Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach from the Philippines.
“Nobody feels worse about this than me,” Harvey said at the time, according to the Associated Press, and he later opened up about the “damage of social media” and the death threats his family received.
Nine years later, Hennessey started by reading the judges’ scores and announcing Hughes — who was defending her WBA bantamweight title — as the winner, with the 41-year-old jumping into someone’s arms and pumping her left arm in celebration.
Just over 20 seconds later, though, Johnson was celebrating, and Hughes stretched her arms out in confusion.
She later wrote in a post on X — while adding a broken heart emoji — that it’s “the dirty side of the sport I love.”
Hennessey was criticized by ESPN’s Joe Tessitore, who called it an “absolute clown show garbage amateur hour” on the “Top Rank Boxing” show before asking their analyst, Bernardo Osuna, to clarify what had happened.
Osuna confirmed that Hennessey read the scorecards incorrectly, and that Johnson was, in fact, the winner.
“I just don’t get it,” Hughes said, according to Sky Sports. “How can they announce I had won and then change the scores? I thought I’d dominated early. I thought she won a few of the later rounds but I felt like I won it comfortably. I don’t get how you can announce the winner and then change the scores.
“It’s a joke. I feel like I’ve been robbed big time. There’s got to be a rematch. I didn’t lose that fight.”
