Ring In The New

Amateur boxing officials are mostly low-tech guys who don't know from computers and who think that a mouse is something you get under your eye. So there was some culture shock last week when, at the U.S. Olympic Festival in Los Angeles, the computer was introduced to the sport in this country. It was a desperate move for men who thought a laptop was something you took a point deduction for, but desperate times call for desperate actions. The boxing scoring at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul was so, shall we say, whimsical, that something had to be done to prevent a repetition of the soccer-style riots that marred some of the matches there. So after Seoul the International Amateur Boxing Association called in the computer people to devise an automated system to score bouts. As a result, in major amateur fights, all stiff jabs, powerful hooks and nasty uppercuts will be tallied by microprocessor.

Naturally this generated some confusion before the Festival boxing began. Told that the five judges would be recording each punch into a computer, super heavyweight Larry Donald expressed skepticism that the judges, punching hand-held keypads, could possibly match his hand speed. But most folks thought that bringing amateur boxing into the computer age was a good idea.

So did it work? Sort of. Certainly some of the scoring seemed a little weird. For instance, it was hard to believe that a margin of 44-15 indicated in any way the competitiveness of one of the gold medal matches. Even 132-pound champion Oscar De La Hoya, who got the 44, thought his lightweight bout with Patrice Brooks was closer than that.

It wasn't until the heavyweight final that controversy finally reared its head, but at least nobody could blame it on the new technology. What happened in John Bray's brawl with Melvin Foster was strictly human error.

Bray, who does what he calls "spousal work" for Superior Investigations in the Los Angeles area ("It involves being really sneaky, basically," he says of his job tracking unfaithful husbands and wives), was justifying his reputation as a big puncher in the second round, hammering Foster for a standing eight count and a knockdown. Though it looked like an easy win for the U.S. amateur champ, Bray had been down this road before. In the USA- Cuba dual meet earlier this year at Fort Bragg, N.C., he was handily beating the world's top-ranked amateur heavyweight, F�lix Sav�n of Cuba, when, in the second round, Bray began mugging and taunting his opponent. Sav�n nearly took his head off in the final minutes and won 5-0. And so it was at the Olympic Festival. Bray got overconfident in the third round, and Foster, the Golden Gloves champion and no small puncher himself, quickly hammered him for two standing eight counts.

In amateur boxing, three standing eight counts in the same round stops the fight, and referee Gene Reese was moving in to do just that as Foster again pounded Bray against the ropes. But before Reese could start the count, Bray threw a monstrous right hand and floored Foster, who quickly got back up. Reese, no computer, decided to give the count to Foster; he certainly looked like he needed it more. Seconds later, Bray pummeled Foster in a corner, and Reese halted the bout.

Surely you didn't think electronic scoring was going to eradicate the confusion in boxing?

All the same, U.S. boxing officials were generally cheered by what they saw at the Olympic Festival. The 12 winners, who have elected to go to Sydney for the world championships in November (the losers will attend the Pan American Games in Cuba in August) and who will thereafter be vying for berths at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, constitute a formidable array of talent. "This team is stronger than any Olympic team we've ever had," says Dick Pettigrew, the U.S. coach for the world championships.

The lower weights are richest in talent. Starting with Eric Griffin at light flyweight (106 pounds) and going through Tim Austin (112), Sean Fletcher (119), Ivan Robinson (125) and De La Hoya (132), there are five gold medal contenders for the worlds—and, possibly, for Barcelona. "They're more experienced," says Pettigrew, explaining, as diplomatically as he can, the difference between this group and the 1988 U.S. Olympic team that won three gold medals, three silver and two bronze in Seoul. "You look at Griffin, he's a two-time world champion, for goodness sakes."

Although De La Hoya is the rising star of the team—he's undefeated since 1987—the 23-year-old Griffin is the quietly established force on the team's low end. Griffin came within a urine test of upsetting 1988 silver medal winner Michael Carbajal for a spot on the Seoul Olympic team. Carbajal had beaten Griffin in a close decision at the trials, setting up a rematch in the box-off two weeks later, but in the interim Griffin tested positive for marijuana and was disqualified. "I would have beaten him in the box-offs," says Griffin. "In my opinion, I beat him in the trials."