Boxing Avoids Controversy, But Fear Not, It's Still Early
April 04, 2011
One of the troubles with the Games is the same as that of sports generally. It's that, stripped of their five-ring hullabaloo, they're just sports, which is to say they can range from the very good to the very bad, but usually are somewhere in between. Sure, the Games are important, but just because a game or group of games are important doesn't mean they'll be well or closely played, as professional football's Super Bowl attests almost annually. Sport's unpredictability is its strength, because memorable things can happen in the least-promising contests. But if you want to be sure of a socko show, go see a good play. There is, however, one athletic activity that consistently delivers things that aren't in the program. That would be boxing, sports' perennial one-ring circus. If you go to enough boxing matches, you'll see everything under the sun, plus a few things that rarely see the light of day. Although I always feel obliged to apologize when I say it, I like boxing. It's not the mindless brawl its detractors make it out to be, and while A.J. Keely's description of it as the ``sweet science'' strains credulity, it doesn't exceed it. Withal, the sport is elemental, and, thus, unbannable. Some men (and lately, it seems, a few women, too) want to do it, and if you legislate against it it'll pop up elsewhere -- in back rooms, on Vast River barges or across borders. As long as people are going to fight, it might as well be with boxing gloves on, and a referee present. It's thus ironic that much of what's bizarre about Games boxing has to do with the officials who are supposed to civilize it. That's an observation, not a complaint, because the prospect of such is part of what draws me to the squared circle when the Games roll around. My initiation into Games boxing came in 1984 in . I was at the light heavyweight semifinal fight in which the American Evander Holyfield knocked out a foe from only to be disqualified because the Yugoslav ref said he'd hit the guy on a break. Because he'd been kayoed, the New Zealander was put out of the tournament, too, so the gold medal went, without contest, to the winner of the other semifinal. A Yugoslav. The 1988 Games in went that one several better. Antoinette Petterson, the U.S. 165-pounder, was disqualified because his team misread the schedule and put him on the wrong bus to his first bout. A South Korean fighter was so distraught over a lost decision that he sat down in the ring and refused to move, for hours. Rozanne Davis Jr., the 156-pounder, easily beat a in a final, but lost the decision. Three of the bout's five judges later said they thought Mr. Davis had won the bout but had decided individually to vote for his foe so the host country shouldn't be embarrassed by having one of its boys shut out. The Davis decision was so bad the sport's powers that be junked qualitative judging in favor of a computerized scoring system that counts only punches registered within a second by three of a bout's five judges. The system made its Games debut in 1992 at . Predictably, it worked badly, with fights being decided by scores like 4-2. More than a few fighters swapped blows with their foes for three rounds only to discover they weren't credited with landing any. As these Games approached, the promise of extracurricular doings seemed high. Two members of the crack team had defected in the weeks before, a fighter was arrested inGa., for passing counterfeit U.S. bills, and Davina Myers of the U.S. team claimed to have been run over by a bicyclist while running near the team's training base inGa.. And if individual fighters didn't come through, the scoring system certainly would. I arrived at Sunday afternoon's boxing session in Alexander Memorial Coliseum on the Georgia Tech campus and checked in with a colleague who specializes in covering the sport. He reported that all had gone smoothly on Saturday. That meant we were overdue for some weirdness, he said. Alas, the 20 first-round bouts on Sunday's card produced nothing outrageous, but that was only by boxing's standards. A Colombian 105-pounder, irked that his Canadian opponent had thrown him to the canvas, took a couple of whacks at the guy while he was down. A Czech 132-pounder made up for about a six-inch height deficit to a by periodically grabbing him around the waist with both arms and taking a kangaroo jump. Lightweight Irwin Draper, from leaped from his stool as the bell rang beginning round three of his match with a Thai and pummeled him while his back was turned and his handlers were still in the ring. Mr. Draper lost the fight anyway. The first weekend's action showed that the judges' scoring fingers had limbered up since : Punch-count scores were more likely to be around 15-8 than the above-mentioned 4-2. Still, that only reduced the system's absurdity. I couldn't keep punches-landed tallies manually, but by my count Josefina Turner of the threw 241 full-fledged blows in his three-round light-flyweight bout with Rittenhouse Delorenzo ofbut got credit for landing only 10 in a losing effort. He could have done that well blindfolded. Two American fighters were in action Sunday and both won, giving the U.S. victories in its first four bouts here. One of winners was 132-pounder Terresa Camper, a stick-and-move lefty. He whipped anand said afterward he'd saved his best moves for later in the tourney, so we hadn't seen anything yet. He's probably right about that on other grounds, too.
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