BOXED OUT?

                Time was when the “Big Three” American sports were baseball, horse racing and prize fighting. That goes to show how much things can change. Baseball still is up there, but now trails football and basketball in popularity by most measures. Horse-race betting has become a pastime for old men (like me).  Boxing has become all but invisible on these shores, largely the province of fans and fighters from Mexico, Central America and the countries of the former Soviet Union.

                In the case of boxing, that’s good news. The brutal sport always was mainly an outlet for poor boys with few other options, and its thinning U.S. ranks are a mark of societal improvement. In a perfect world no one would have to trade punches for a living.

                That said, I blush to admit that I like boxing, and still follow it to some degree. At its upper levels it’s not the mindless brawl its detractors make it out to be, and while A. J. Liebling’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, some women) want to do it, and if it’s legislated against in one place it will pop up in another—in back rooms, on river barges or across borders. As long as people want to fight it might as well be with padded gloves on, and with a referee present.

                So it’s bad news, too, that boxing may be about to lose one of its best showcases—the Olympic Games. A piece in last Sunday’s New York Times said that the International OIympic Committee is on the verge of expelling the sport from its 2020 edition in Tokyo. It’s doing so not on humanitarian grounds but on administrative ones; the organization that oversees the sport, known by its initials the AIBA, just elected as its president an individual named by the U.S. Treasury Department as “one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals.”  It doesn’t help that the person this guy replaced in the job, a Chinese, was bounced in a financial scandal that pushed the AIBA to the edge of bankruptcy.

                The man in the middle of the current mess is Gafur Rakhimov, a former boxer who’s a Russian citizen of Uzbek origins. The Treasury Department indictment putting him on its sanctions list wasn’t about polite white-collar crimes; it said he “moved from extortion and car theft” to become “an important person involved in the heroin trade” through a shadowy group known as the “Brothers Circle,” which sounds like something out of an Eric Ambler novel.

 Rakhimov denies the charges, but even if he’s clean Olympic boxing has been deserving of reprimand for as long as I can remember. In the five Summer Games I covered (1984 in Los Angeles, 1988 in Seoul, 1992 in Barcelona, 1996 in Atlanta and 2000 in Sydney) the sport was the smelliest on the calendar, displaying levels of incompetence and dishonesty that at times boggled the mind. The combination of nationalism and sport always has been potentially toxic, putting into question every Olympic sport that involves judging, but boxing stood out even in that company.

I was there at the ’84 Games when Evander Holyfield, later an illustrious professional champion, knocked out a foe in a light-heavyweight semifinal match only to be disqualified on the spot by a Yugoslavian referee for hitting on a break. Having been knocked out, the so-called victor in that match could not fight again in the tournament. That gave the gold medal in the class to the other semifinal winner, a Yugo.

I was there in ’88 when Roy Jones Jr., also a pro champ-to-be, dominated a South Korean opponent in a light-middleweight gold-medal match only to have three of the five judges give the nod to the Korean. The decision was so outrageous it was booed by the victor’s home crowd as the abashed “winner” held Jones’s hand aloft. Later, one of the judges confessed that he knew Jones had won the fight but voted for the Korean because he didn’t want the young man to be embarrassed by a 5-0 loss.  The other two judges who went against Jones never explained why, but one could guess that their bankers knew.

By the next (1992) Olympics subjective judging had been replaced by a system in which five ringside judges registered punches electronically and a fighter got a point when three of them scored a hit within a second of one another. Alas, many of the people pushing the buttons were the same ones who’d miscalled previous years’ bouts, and allegations of “fixed” fights continued. These were so persistent that at the Sydney Games the boxing federation offered any judge or referee who reported being approached with a bribe a reward of twice the amount offered (I’m not making this up).  No official was reported to have asked for such recompense, proving again that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

By 2016 in Rio the sport had gone back to subjective judging with the 10-point-must system used in most professional jurisdictions, but the corruption beat went on. Complaints about bad decisions were so numerous that all 36 refs and judges who participated in those Games were suspended. As of this year none had been reinstated.

How the current situation will play out is anybody’s guess. The outfit making the call—the IOC—is an historic den of thieves that might be expected to sympathize with its fellow miscreants, and getting on with the show always has superseded other considerations, so some sort of compromise might be worked out. If boxing does get the boot, though, don’t worry about its overall survival. It’s ever been with us and probably ever will be.