Kill The American Amateur Athletic System
With the recent news that the 2016 Olympics may finally allow professional boxers to compete, I wrote a short piece expressing my support for this change and my distaste for the U.S. Amateur Boxing system. After a brief Twitter conversation with former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, in which I pointed out the experience advantage Cuban boxers often bring to the Olympics, I wanted to further explain my perspective.
Lennox Lewis, who won the Olympics in his second try, brushes aside the experience of the Cuban’s after telling us to fear professional experience. Lewis forgot to mention that Cuba boycotted the 1988 Summer Olympics in which he won Gold. He did not have to worry about Cuban legends Teofilo Stevenson or Felix Savon on his road to the Gold — and somehow I doubt that the 1988 Lennox Lewis would have any objections to facing a pro 1988 Mike Tyson in The Games either (the two had sparred just a few years earlier).
Lennox Lewis is one of my favorite fighters of all time. But he isn’t the only person of clout and esteem who is against the change. Veteran sportswriter Tim Dahlberg and, another of my favorite fighters, Roy Jones, Jr. have also argued against adding professional boxers to the Olympics. The common argument from all detractors is that mature professionals will critically hurt the teen amateurs in the tournament.
On the surface, this argument makes sense. But upon deeper examination, it is clear that Olympic boxing has never offered a level playing field [2][3].
Talent vs. Experience
Twitter user @anderswarner pointed out that the Cuban heavyweight Erislandy Savón Cotilla was actually younger than Anthony Joshua when the two fought in the 2012 Olympics. Upon deeper inspection, the Cuban had much more experience in competition, having won a 2008 Heavyweight Championship before Joshua even started his boxing career. It is wonderful that Joshua was able to defeat Savon, despite being the underdog, but it does not resolve the argument — and Joshua’s victory over Savon is disputed.
As with all debates in sports (and all facets of life), the truth is always in the complicated gray areas. So while I appreciate the ever gracious @LennoxLewis response, and respect his wisdom, I cannot agree that professional destroyers will simply lay waste to the world’s 19-year-olds.
Disputed decision victory over Savon aside, if talents like Joshua are able to overcome amateur experience deficits as Lewis says, it stands to reason they could overcome professional experience deficits. 20-year-old Mike Tyson had the experience of 27 professional and 54 amateur bouts when he KO’d professional champion Trevor Berbick. The 32-year-old Berbick brought the experience of 37 pro, but only 11 amateur, bouts into the fight. Berbick’s greatest boxing accomplishment, before facing Tyson, was surviving to a decision loss against Larry Holmes in 1981.
Professional boxers — and their records — are not created equally. You could argue that the overall differences between Tyson and Berbick, on paper, were negligible. In the reality of the ring, however, Tyson’s specific training and talent combined to make Berbick look like a crash test dummy. Tyson’s talent served him again when he blasted Michael Spinks (32 pro, 100 amateur bouts) out of consciousness and into retirement 91 seconds into their 1988 fight.
There are flagrant mismatches in boxing, and they occur most often in a surprising situation: when decorated amateur boxers make that leap to the fearsome professional ranks. There are pro fighters with very few professional bouts on their record and no amateur experience… Aren’t they outgunned against an amateur with 100 matches?
A History of Violence (against tomato cans)
Lennox Lewis and Roy Jones, Jr.’s first professional opponents appeared woefully over-matched. Was it talent alone that beat them? Roy Jones, Jr. finished his amateur career with 121 wins against 12 losses. Lennox Lewis graduated to the pros after 85 wins and 9 losses in the amateurs. Talent is real, but amateur experience counts for something. Many of the first dozen pros these two Olympians fought could be defined as career “opponents”, based on their professional records alone.
It is unlikely that Lewis or Jones had any ill intent while running over these “tomato cans” [1]. Matching hot prospects against weak opposition is an ancient tradition in professional boxing, used to very slowly bring a prospect along while padding his record with spectacular knockout victories.
When you know a dozen of their fights were gimmes, it kind of devalues the eye-popping records of professional champions. It’s more about creating a flashy highlight reel and generating promotional hype than it is about easing an amateur into the pro game. Ali did it, Ray Leonard did it, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. did it. You have to wonder if the “opponents” felt they were being matched fairly?
Boxing has always allowed for a class of haphazardly trained “professional losers”. It isn’t that they are “taking a dive”, they’re just being paid to step into the ring against men they have virtually no chance of beating. It would be one thing if we were just talking about exhibition matches (like those of “Butterbean” Eric Esch), but we are not.
These opponents are being used to pad the official professional records of prospects, on their way up the rankings toward championships. The modern NFL, NBA, MLB, and UFC have no place for this kind of rigged carnival act. Boxing should take note if it wants to return to mainstream acceptance. Viewed in light of a debate about “fairness” in Olympic boxing, the practice of beating up overmatched “journeymen” (or were they a form of “novice”?) seems incredibly archaic.
Olympics are for Kids?
So even if experience is the most tangible rule by which all fighters should be matched, where is the line? Do we bar amateurs with over 100 fights from Olympic competition that the wide-eyed teens may flourish?
Olympic boxing already has different rules from pro boxing. The jab wins the day and fighters are often separated from each other within uppercut range, even before a clinch can be initiated. These rules favor the young, by design.
It is possible that the current Olympic boxing rules would be great obstacles for the clinch-heavy styles of Wladimir Klitschko and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (just as the zone defense has troubled NBA players in Olympic Basketball competition). Youth and energy could lead a teen to victory over a slow-starting veteran, by way of activity alone; amateur bouts are comprised of only four, two-minute, rounds. How many professionals are really willing to risk the embarrassment of losing a decision to a quicksilver kid?
The Olympics are the realm of World Records, legends, torch-bearers, and “the greatest”. The Olympic boxing rules, which are by no means perfect, were not simply designed to favor “young people.” They were designed to encourage activity and athleticism while avoiding the boring hug-fests that plague professional boxing. Never has it been stated that the Olympics exist to showcase teenagers, which is why the world falls in love with the few teens who do conquer veteran rivals.
The Hurt Game
The aforementioned Tim Dahlberg, a sports writer for over twenty-five years, is concerned about injuries resulting from the changes to Olympic boxing. He fears that without headgear, and against professionals, teenage boxers will be bleeding profusely and brutally knocked out in every match (ok he didn’t go that far- but close). Research has determined that boxing headgear is effective at reducing the impact of blows, but many boxers argue that they are hit more often because they cannot see well enough to defend against incoming punches.
As for fears about cuts? Even in the professionals, where you can see nuclear-strength punchers like Roy Jones, Jr. smacking around part-time fighters like Glen Kelly (Hey, look that was another one of those huge mismatches!), cuts do not occur in every fight. Thousands of professional-grade punches are landed on the human face and yet cuts are a rare occurrence in the ring. I believe we’ll see a return of the headgear, but I don’t think it’s a catastrophic factor in the pros vs. amateurs debate.
Boxing is known as the “hurt game”, so it should be no surprise that danger looms in the sport, and not even an entry-level novice can claim ignorance to the inherent risks of participation. American Football, on the other hand, is in the midst of a pop-culture re-definition. For generations we have encouraged our children to take up the sport while they are still learning to read. The occasional injury to a celebrity player will be sensationalized as national news, ensuring that even the kids see it, but the marketing of the sport as “America’s Game” has dominated airwaves (even with recent traumatic brain injury coverage).
The American Football conversation is relevant to boxing (and all contact sports) for many reasons. As with the headgear studies in boxing, studies of the helmets and pads in football have revealed them to have a mixed bag of effects. NFL player Hines Ward believes the extra cushion encourages players to take greater risks, and hit opposing players with more force than they might without the pads on. Boxing gloves have often been noted for having a similar effect on their sport.
Because the human hand is more fragile than the human skull, bare-knuckle fighters must be cautious of punching the head with damaging force [4]. Gloves were introduced to boxing to protect the human hand, not the opponent, and to encourage harder punches and crowd-pleasing knockouts. I’m not arguing for bare-knuckle boxing in the amateurs, instead, I argue that our pretenses of safety in contact sports are often uninformed and shallow.
The Hungry Fighter
Beyond the realm of physical health, boxing and football share similar financial problems. As I mentioned in my previous article about Olympic boxing, U.S. Track athletes fought the amateur system for years to get to the professional-friendly Olympics of today.
The NCAA has often faced criticism for their financial structure and their lack of support for student-athletes [5]. While boxing has languished as the troubled older brother of all sports, openly regarded as corrupt and unsafe, football has been sold to the children as a heroic road to the American Dream.
Are there any kids playing at the peewee level who don’t dream of being their NFL idol? The same idol whom their father worships every Sunday? Are there any 15-year-old players who don’t hold on to the dream that they can become the next version of that NFL idol? Are there any collegiate players who can’t say the same?
American football has been allowed to consume our nation’s children for decades on the basis of these storybook-styled delusions of grandeur. The fantasy is like mass hysteria, with even older men encouraged to live vicariously through their football heroes. God forbid anything shatter the fantasy. It doesn’t take much consideration to realize that the people in charge of both collegiate and professional football are virtually printing money, while many athletes struggle to support themselves beyond “the game”. But the feel-good show must go on, so don’t peel back the curtain!
Let us take this moment to dispel the myth of the noble amateur athlete competing only for sport, honor, and glory. We compete for sport, sure, and maybe some honor. But in the United States “glory” and “money” are often one and the same. The power of money can corrupt, but money is also a necessity for our individual survival.
How many times have we heard the story of the kid who saw professional sports as their “only way out” of poverty? What percentage of those kids actually “makes it out”? If there is money being made in these sports it should be used to assure the people we are actually paying to see and who bleed for our entertainment live healthy lives. It is easy for the well-fed people controlling these sports to preach “competition for financial gain is evil” while collecting healthy paychecks of their own.
For boxing, that “seedy underworld” sport, there is no mass hallucination to hide the nonsensical dysfunctions. Instead, it is simply the lack of attention which allows the details to go unnoticed. Boxing was written off by the general public so long ago that no one even cares to investigate the how and why of the sport’s faults.
The United States Amateur boxing program is every bit as ridiculous as any other amateur system in the country. While it is unlikely that anyone at USA Boxing is “printing money” like the NCAA; this is another organization failing to spread any existing wealth to support the novices at the base of the pyramid (or to those pro fighters who get throttled by the incoming amateur darlings every few years).
In my previous article I noted that boxing, in the United States, has become one of the least financially accessible sports to young people. Football, meanwhile, retains its position on a pedestal with government subsidized athletic leagues tied to schools. Is boxing truly so much more dangerous than the sport regularly marketed as “war” that it deserves to be relegated to the dark corners of our society? I guess the common perception of “boxing bad, football good” is strong enough to allow football such metaphors. “Hey that guy just got hurt! I wonder what happened?” [smooth-jazz theme music and a commercial break] “Maybe they’ll tell us after the break? Hey, the game must go on!”
Call Me a Communist
Because boxing does not have the cache of football, I do not believe there is any hope of virtuous and powerful people swooping in and fixing the amateur system. In fact, I don’t believe there has ever been a truly fair and constructive amateur sports system in the United States to begin with. It is for these reasons and more that I suggest we kill the U.S.A. Boxing amateur system and focus our energies on creating an orderly professional system.
Remember how I mentioned the Cuban boxers in the beginning? The Cuban amateur system is, in fact, a professional system. Cuban boxers are performing a job for the government and are taken care of while they train full-time for international competition. The Ukraine, home of the World Champion Klitschko brothers, has a similar amateur system that encourages athletes to focus on their sport as if it were a professional Trade. These two countries are regularly dominating the U.S. (and all other) boxing teams. U.S. boxing teams comprised of fighters treating their amateur careers like an NFL combine tryout for decent professional contracts.
The American amateur boxer’s dream goes something like this: win the Olympic Gold, meet Bob Arum, then receive major promotion and paychecks while crushing your first dozen easy opponents. Never mind that this is a pipe-dream under the best of circumstances, and a preposterous dream for a fighter at the mercy of the USA Boxing program. In reality, sport is always a professional trade, a business with money changing hands somewhere.
A League of Justice
The UFC has already demonstrated the possibilities of applying a real “league” structure to combat sports, even providing health insurance to all fighters. It is not perfect, but it beats the hell out of what we’re seeing in boxing now. The UFC, by the way, has generally built a brand on not matching highly-touted rising stars against “professional losers”. Boxing needs a universal system that financially enables novices to enter and develop their skills while gradually moving up the ranks against fairly-matched opponents. This precedes boxing in the Olympics, as most countries don’t care about sending “kids”, instead sending their “best”.
I might believe USA Boxing could be fixed if there were a truly fair, unpaid, amateur system in the world. There is not one. Fortunately, the gap between amateur champions and professional champions is not an ocean when placed against each other in the Olympic format. Throw them all into the same qualifying tournaments together and I guarantee you will see some fleet-footed youths upset professionals with curiously inflated records. There will also be some crafty professional veterans who adjust to the format and stave off the next generation. All of this is fine, iron sharpens iron, the cream rises to the top, and the best in the world will meet at the Olympics.
I cannot help but think those who still question my arguments, having read this far, are either short-sighted or self-serving. Are you refusing to see the self-defeating web of lies that amateur sports have become? Or are you sitting atop the pyramid, somehow benefiting from the unpaid labors of the masses below?
Footnotes:
- Lennox Lewis’ first 12 opponents had a combined record of 186 wins, 121 losses. Roy Jones, Jr.’s first dozen had a combined record of 189 wins, 121 losses. It is also worth noting that most of the young stars’ early fights were staged close to home (Pensacola, FL for Jones, the adopted London, England for Lewis). Regular home-field advantage is a luxury afforded only those boxers with the power to dictate such terms, and is another tactic used to safely build a public following.
- Zachary Alapi offers a thorough breakdown of USA Boxing’s failures in the 2012 London Olympics, and insights into the problems with international amateur boxing.
- Justin Peters argues that the outcomes of the 2012 Olympic games were fixed through bribes.
- Nick Wong provides a thorough piece on the differences between bare-knuckle and gloved boxing.
- Patrick Hruby’s excellent criticism of the entire concept of amateurism was linked in my text, but is worth pointing out again in case you missed it.
- In 2011, ESPN’s Michael Wilbon came around to the idea of paying college athletes.
Bonus Points:
- Lewis, Bowe and Stevenson or Savon? Boxing fans are the real losers of the 1988 Olympics! Now imagine that Tyson was in the hunt as well- Suddenly Olympic Boxing is bigger than the SuperBowl! You can’t deny that these big amateurs had the tools to keep Tyson at the end of a jab and win the Gold! Tyson may not have even made The Games if Bowe happened to use his reach properly in the qualifiers. Styles make fights!
- The younger crowd can tell you that no boxing or MMA videogame allows you to spend the first 12 matches of “career mode” notching victories over opponents with half of your qualifications and stats. The game may ease you along with some forgiving opponent A.I., but you will have similar power, speed, etc. ratings in all categories. Videogames thrive on moderately competitive gameplay, not easy mismatches. While a real-life boxer may enjoy the safety of a “soft-touch” opponent (or 20), the home audience that is inspiring ad revenue has no patience for it. Truly fair competition, across the board, may be the only thing that can reignite and grow public excitement for boxing.
