By Cliff Rold
It’s still here.
After whispers and innuendos that seem to come up every four years that boxing will finally get the ax at the Olympics, it remains.
That is as it should be.
Some things should always be at the Olympics. Track, wrestling, boxing…pretty much anything that has an equivalent in the Iliad? Yeah, that stuff belongs in the Olympics.
For those who wait every four years to see Olympic wakeboarding, that’s great. It’s nice to live in a world that can grow and change.
The root Olympic games should always have their place.
Boxing has had its issues, often self-inflicted. Rampant corruption and questionable judging led to all sorts of attempts to clean house. They rarely worked and it cost boxing a lot of audience, at least in the US. It went from one of the big TV Olympic draws in the States to being moved to lesser cable outlets in recent years.
It hasn’t helped that a sport where the US was once a big time player has seen the American contingent recede. Olympic viewers in the US were never unwilling to watch stars of other lands. Teofilo Stevenson had people in the 1970s wondering what would happen if he turned pro and chased Ali (or Ali faced him for just three rounds). Seeing the best of the world is part of the fun of the Olympics.
It’s more fun when your country has a horse in the race.
In 2012, the bright spot was the emergence of the US women’s team and they will again be a bonus, led by a Claressa Shields attempting to become a two-time Gold Medalist. On the men’s side, Shakur Stevenson has garnered buzz as a serious medal candidate.
We’ll see how that goes.
For those who enjoy the sport for more than national boundaries, and those who every four years go full patriot, the 2000s have been a wealth of coverage. We see more of the sport, from preliminaries to finals, than had ever been the case.
That’s a plus.
The minus has been that little of that coverage was on network television and some of it has come at odd hours. In the era of DVR, that’s workable but it pushes the sport to the fringe.
Even with some of the corruption (see: Roy Jones, 1988), one would figure boxing should still be sellable. After all, at least from the US side, it is a sport largely fought by young people hoping to ride a medal to fortune and fame. These aren’t professional athletes already awash in lucrative endorsements.
These are people who have something tangible to gain.
And while corruption is unsettling, few have a problem with embracing other scored sports that seem to aggravate regularly.
Maybe some of the issue has come not from what is wrong with boxing but some of what tried to right it.
Gradually, over the last three decades, too much of Olympic boxing got boring.
Computerized scoring was one culprit. Amateur boxing has always been more pure in its scoring of contact over single heavy blows. You’d see a guy running around the ring landing arm punches and then holding or disengaging to play with a lead.
Boxing, no matter how sweet the science, is still and always a form of fighting. When people tune in, they hope to see a fight break out. Watching someone with fast feet run around and play tag, and then hold and play for a lead, wasn’t fun to watch.
It didn’t mean there still weren’t plenty of knockouts and good fights. It just seemed like the tag contingent had figured out the game and were being rewarded for negative styles. This year, we may see something different.
Button mashing is pushed aside. We’re back to rounds scoring on a ten-point must system. This should, in theory, force fighters to fight more full rounds.
The headgear, at least for men, is off. The claim is that concussions were worse with headgear on, though it inexplicably remains for women due to a lack of research or some such. Headgear, while intended to protect, took away from the visceral quality of the game. The aesthetics of boxing are important. Seeing a punch land on someone’s face, sans headgear, is more compelling than with it.
These changes aren’t so much new as they are old. They are a reversion to what used to work when Olympic boxing was a glamour sport. It’s a fix by way of un-fixing the sport. There will still be controversy and hot debate.
But this time around, there should also be more fights breaking out. It’s a start.
Cliff’s Notes…
Best of luck to our Jake Donovan who will be providing Olympic coverage…So Suicide Squad is getting praised for performances, panned as a movie, and has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than Ghostbusters. OK, but how did Ghostbusters get certified fresh? Take all critics with a grain of salt…One more round of kudos to Carl Frampton and Leo Santa Cruz. What a good, good fight…Don’t expect the same this weekend as HBO gives us Andre Ward-Alexander Brand. Ward always seemed to want a couple layups after a series of hard fights and ultimately got them even if it cost him most of four years of his prime. A fall win over Sergey Kovalev will make that four years seem much shorter than it was…Donnie Nietes arrives at flyweight at a time when the division needs a new talent infusion. He can make some very good fights with the class likely soon to be without Roman Gonzalez for good…Killing Joke is well worth a pick up, especially for fans of the classic comic.
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com
