For a brief time Friday, the hours between the elimination of Team USA’s last male boxer and his reinstatement on appeal, the 2012 Men’s Boxing team was, by record, the worst in American history. If welterweight Errol Spence is able to win Tuesday and Friday, assuring himself at least a silver medal, the 2012 Men’s Boxing team will be redeemed: By medal count, it will be the second-worst in American history.
This team is not the aesthetic disaster that 2008 brought. Kids like Spence, Joseph Diaz, Jose Ramirez, Jamel Herring and Terrell Gausha fight in a physical, forward-pressing, ineffective-aggressiveness-is-better-than-inactivity style that makes them easier to cheer than our last Olympiad’s counter-hook specialists were. If that’s a comfort, though, it’s a frigid one.
Americans were furious enough Friday to demand substantive change. Begin the housecleaning Saturday, not Monday! Oscar De La Hoya, in a fit of sincerity CNBC reported without irony, recruited himself and Mark Breland and Sugar Ray Leonard to coach the 2016 squad, on Twitter. The usual calls for professional trainers went out. A call for existing American pros – Dream Team style – got dusted off. None of these is a solution, of course, but they at least represented Americans’ readiness for radical reform.
Put the military in charge, then. An answer to each riddle insiders pose about how to reform USA Boxing lies in Department of Defense’s Armed Forces Sports Council (AFSC), whose directors are culled from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Soldiers, airmen and marines already clean-up at many regional Golden Gloves tourneys round the country, and if they are not our sport’s very best athletes, they’re close enough. The AFSC can then set about resolving reform riddles like:
“There are too many warring factions in USA Boxing.” Anyone who’s ever asked any authority what is wrong with our Olympic team hears this sort of thing early and often. The cited factions usually organize round ethnic and geographic loyalties. The Armed Forces has a pretty good record of razing such loyalties in the name of a cohesive fighting unit.
“USA Boxing does not have enough money.” Setting aside the economic realities of those countries whose boxers routinely best ours and going along with this canard for a second, Americans can now sigh with relief, for once, after a glance at the annual budget over at DoD.
“Our kids do not get enough international experience.” A child to the funding explanation, this point is actually an essential one and worthier than its predecessors. International experience, after all, was the difference in Friday’s match between Team USA’s Errol Spence and Indian welterweight Vikas Krishan – a match Krishan had won until Americans, made rabid by the decision, browbeat the International Amateur Boxing Association into reversing itself on confounding hypothetical grounds. Good for Errol, though; he’s one of ours, and physical too.
How did he lose the initial decision? By corruption! No, actually, Spence lost by driving Krishan to dead spots on the mat – places where few of the five judges, perhaps not even three, could see his punches land cleanly. Once there, Spence taught the judges to see his punches as non-scoring blows, repeatedly assaulting Krishan’s raised guard with all manner of ferocity, such that when an occasional scoring blow did sneak through for Spence the judges were desensitized to it. Behind after two rounds, Spence allowed himself to be held in the third, and then, in the moments after the ref broke the fighters – the very moments the judges’ eyes were best focused – he allowed Krishan to leap in with single, looped blows that were easy to detect. Spence absolutely outfought Krishan, yes, but he did not understand international scoring the way Krishan did, and neither did his coaches.
The next time you’re in a gym that is part of USA Boxing’s network – you do go to the gym, right? – ask any of the kids where the judges were positioned for his last fight. Ask him where the dead spots on the canvas were, where the judges’ viewing was likely obstructed. Ask his coaches. Count the blank looks you get.
That’s because they’re not preparing for international competition! But why not? Every Cuban is. Why don’t we have an American boxing system crafted to please international judges’ eyes the way successful countries do? Because for the last 20 years we’ve been busy teaching “fundamentals” and “preparing them for the pro game”? Well.
American civilians do not like to learn new systems that do not promise quick and vast riches. We’re all ferocious individualists, often in a way inversely proportionate to our talents, and we pass that along to American children. Much of what ails Team USA ails USA in general.
Put AFSC in charge of boxing, then. For the next three Olympiads at least, make only boxers who are on active duty in the Armed Forces eligible for international competition. These kids will represent us proudly; they already box full-time, they pass drug tests, they successfully adjust to what excellent coaches like USMC’s Jesse Revelo teach them, they are uniform in every way – which Team USA, during its Las Vegas appearances in June, was not – they do not bat their lashes at professional promoters, and it is a metaphysical impossibility the Pentagon will run out of money.
For everyone else, here’s an even better option: Promoter-run farm systems. Like they do in baseball and hockey, kids who think they’ve got a chance at making a living in boxing can join a new Golden Boy league or qualify to fight at Top Rank’s Double- or Triple-Gloves levels. These kids will gain valuable experience and insight from knowledgeable professional trainers and matchmakers. They will learn a pro fighting style and skip the inconvenience of international-scoring clinics. They can make professional debuts on their 18th birthdays, enriching their families and managers and advisors.
You were mad enough Friday to demand something radical. There it is.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com