Josesito Lopez was dragging Keith Thurman through a seventh round of hell, punctuated by a vicious left hook that absolutely rocked the WBA welterweight champion.
Seconds after Lopez landed the shot, “PBC Fight Night on FOX” cameras caught referee Steve Willis bent at the waist with his hands on his knees and eyes bulging, absolutely locked into the action. As the underdog continued to unload on the champion, putting Thurman into survival mode on his bike around the ring, Willis was seen in the background grinding his teeth and clenching his fists as if he was sitting behind the wheel of a high-speed racing arcade game.
Within seconds, Willis’ animated reactions flooded Twitter timelines, serving as the latest occurrence of the veteran ref going viral for being excited about doing his job.
Referee Steve Willis though 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 @premierboxing @PBConFOX #PBConFOX #ThurmanLopez pic.twitter.com/HysYBGldH5
— Will Blackmon (@WillBlackmon) January 27, 2019
There are people who wear their expressions all over their face, unable to hide them even if they made a concerned effort to suppress them. Consider the 53-year-old Queens, New York native one of those people.
Join DAZN and watch more than 100 fight nights a year
“Contrary to popular belief, I try real hard not to do it,” Willis tells Sporting News about letting loose on one of his priceless in-fight facial expressions that seem to make him viral bout after bout. “But when the heat is on, it just comes out. I’m more mortified than anybody.
“If I was standing outside — me looking at another official — I’d be like ‘What is this guy doing?’” he continues. “But fans and people that know me, they’re just like, ‘That’s you.’ I came to the conclusion that I’m a bad poker player. Some referees have the ability to referee without their face functions kicking in — they just make their move. Tony Weeks can do that. Me … my brain process comes through.”
Willis says the first time he remembers people talking about his energetic in-ring reactions was back in December 2014, while overseeing the David Lemieux-Gabriel Rosado bout at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. There, cameras caught Willis balling up his fists, grinding his teeth and smiling during several spots of the action-packed fight.
"I got home and my sister was calling me and saying, ‘You always gotta be an idiot,’” he remembers. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Willis turned on his computer and sure enough, he saw videos of his colorful facial expressions plastered all over social media.
MORE: Anthony Joshua willing to sling mud with Big Baby Miller
That started a trend of fans honing in on Willis’ countenance, looking to pinpoint his best facial expressions from fight to fight over the course of his professional refereeing career. The feedback from fight fans has been overwhelmingly supportive, as there’s a relatable factor to Willis that they might not find in other referees. Think about all the times Willis smiled or clenched his fists as the third man in the ring, while you let loose with as colorful responses watching the same fight on your couch. It’s part of the joys of fight night.
Plus, people can quickly see that Willis is a good ref who genuinely loves what he does, with many using his passionately-intense refereeing to implore each other to “love your job like Steve Willis” — even turning the quote into a popular meme .
“I find it fascinating … like why wouldn’t you love what you do?” Willis says about fight fans fixating over his mannerisms and overall passion on the job.
Yet, fight after fight, whether it’s Terence Crawford’s win over Henry Lundy in February 2016 or Lopez-Thurman just last month, social media can’t get enough of Willis' refereeing reactions to the prize bouts he oversees.
When WorldStarHipHop.com posted Willis’ reaction to Thurman eating that left hook from Lopez, entitling the clip “Boxing referee has a priceless reaction to a brutal punch,” the video garnered nearly 400,000 views. The same clip tallied thousands of more views on Twitter.
And while the Twitter banter around Willis has been mostly positive, with people saluting him for his passion on the job or making clean jokes in good fun, there also are trolls who think the veteran ref is now playing up to cameras. Willis scoffs at any such assertions, insisting his reactions are all “organic” and on the fly.
“So, I sit up at night thinking, ‘When can I make my eyeballs pop out?’” he says.
“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not an attention whore. I don’t look for the camera,” Willis adds. "As long as when I walk away, you say, ‘The fight was officiated correctly,’ that’s my goal — not to get on camera. If all you could do is talk about a facial expression, as opposed to me making a technical mistake, I’ve learned to accept that. I could live with that.”
In many ways, referees experience the same bundle of nerves, highs and lows and pressure-cooker stress that boxers themselves feel in the ring. Willis wants fans to understand how those real-time in-fight situations can lead him to involuntarily lose control of his motor functions, scribbling his priceless expressions all over his face.
“Your heart rate is moving at a certain pace, your brain speed is moving at a certain pace,” he explains, “so your natural things kick in."
He adds: “I happen to be a person that reacts.”
MORE: Smart phones on fight night — more than just for selfies
Those entrenched in the boxing community happen to think that Willis does a solid overall job.
Derrick James, trainer to boxing stars such as Errol Spence Jr. and Jermell Charlo, tells Sporting News that the job of a ref "really is to be there to not be there," referring to an official letting fighters fight, ideally.
"He does a great job [refereeing]," James says. "His expressions afterwards — you don't see them when the fights are going on — it's always the replays after and people enjoy them. If you think about it, he's as close as you can get without being a fighter. He's got the funny facial expressions, so I think it's pretty cool."
Whether it’s a casual boxing fan or hardcore supporter, Willis doesn’t know if boxing fans truly understand the difficulty of being a referee and having to make judgment calls in real-time. Lopez pummeling Thurman in that seventh round of their bout last month triggered Willis, eliciting the reactions that went viral.
“What you saw from my face was, ‘Um, are you going to have to stop this fight?’” he says.
Willis zeroed in on Thurman’s motor functions, and the champion moving his legs around the ring was the tell-all sign that he needed to see to allow the fight to continue.
“You could see the gerbil in his brain running on the wheel,” Willis said of Thurman continuously backpedaling around the ring, while absorbing punishment throughout the round. “He moved.”
Allowing the fight to continue was the right call, as Thurman re-asserted himself and didn’t lose a round over the remainder of the fight, counter-punching effectively en route to the majority-decision win.
Willis knows refs are easy targets when the paying public doesn’t get the results they desire, but wonders if fight fans realize that officials are privy to things in the ring that they aren’t watching on television at home — especially when it comes to interpreting the live data that causes a stoppage.
“There’s things that you just don’t see on TV,” Willis says. “Until you seen GGG (Gennady Golovkin) throw a straight jab between somebody’s eyes and the person’s eyes literally go dead for about seven seconds — they’re moving, but they’re completely out on their toes … people don’t see that. People just say, ‘He’s moving.’”
Willis adds that referees shouldering the responsibility of having to protect fighters weighs as heavy on them as boxers having to protect themselves. Willis told Sporting News that his friend and fellow ref, Michael Griffin, lost 10 pounds in the aftermath of the stress of officiating the Adonis Stevenson-Oleksandr Gvozdyk fight last December that put Stevenson in a medically-induced coma.
The complexity of the job is difficult for other reasons as well.
“Every referee you see is a working guy,” says Willis, a fire safety director/director of security at a New York City hotel. “You can’t sustain a lifestyle on refereeing.”
That being said, Willis maintains that “it’s probably the best part-time job you’ll ever have.”
Willis trudged up a long road to be in the position of being called upon for prize fights. Serving as an umpire for baseball games throughout New York City for a decade, Willis remembers making the switch to boxing referee in 1996. He began working the amateur ranks, starting from the bottom, handing out gloves and wraps, before working his way up to becoming a chief official. Pretty soon, Willis was refereeing tournaments all across the country, including the famed Golden Gloves.
Willis got his referee license to oversee professional boxing bouts in 2000, but had to wait until September 2003 to officiate his first pro fight. It was former middleweight John Duddy’s U.S. debut.
“My very first professional show, I was given the main event,” Willis says. “I had approached (former New York State Athletic Commission chairperson) Ron Stevens, and I thought maybe it was a typo. I said, ‘Ron, this is the main event.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you gotta problem?’ It was, ‘OK, I’m doing the main event.’”
Duddy was fighting Tarek Rached at Jimmy’s Bronx Café, a former seminal NYC hotspot that was a go-to for the likes of Derek Jeter, Jennifer Lopez and rapper Fat Joe before its shuttering.
In less than two years, Willis was refereeing at the Madison Square Garden theater, overseeing the March 2005 fight between fellow Queens native Kevin Kelley and Felix St. Kitts. With about 16 years of experience refereeing pro boxing matches, Willis has been the third man for GGG-Lemieux, Vasyl Lomachenko-Guillermo Rigondeaux and Danny Garcia-Shawn Porter, but the veteran official can’t name one fight he worked that stands out over the others.
“I don’t think about it that way. Every fight is a big fight — even the ones that people don’t see,” he says.
Join DAZN and watch archived Canelo Alvarez, Anthony Joshua fights
To this day, Willis gets the same thrill refereeing fights, regardless of their magnitude.
“I don’t care if it’s an amateur nightclub in Queens,” he says, “they all are big to me.”
And that feeling speaks to his overall passion for the job. After all, if you love what you do as much as Steve Willis loves refereeing, you'd never work a day in your life.
