BEIJING – What USA Boxing needs is more medaling and less meddling.
Personal coaches retain too much influence, national coach Dan Campbell said yesterday, and that continuing conflict has created a mutinous climate and contributed to what is now sure to be America's worst Olympic boxing showing in at least 60 years.
“If you look at what happened, a lot of the guys who lost reverted to what they did domestically,” Campbell said at the end of a dispiriting evening at the Workers' Gymnasium. “You can't win doing that. You absolutely cannot win here boxing the way you do domestically.
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U.S. heavyweight Deontay Wilder (left) was the lone American to advance to the medal round at Beijing. He defeated Morocco's Mohammed Arjaoui in the quarterfinals.
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“(But) a lot of guys would talk to their personal coaches prior to going into the ring and whatever they said to them superseded anything we said.”
Campbell's characterization errs on the side of euphemism. What we have here is much closer to anarchy than argument: boxers slipping away from the national team for clandestine meetings with their hometown mentors; unscheduled absences; threatened boycotts; desperate discipline.
Chaos.
The net effect finds USA Boxing at its lowest competitive ebb since the Truman administration.
Heavyweight Deontay Wilder was the only American boxer to advance to the medal round in Beijing, and Wilder wouldn't have made it were he not the beneficiary of a last-minute, two-point head-butt penalty and a judging tiebreaker yesterday (San Diego time) against Morocco's Mohammed Arjaoui.
“I thought they were going to raise (Arjaoui's) hand,” Wilder said. “I really did. You can see it for yourself. The judges are not on our side. Over and over you can see it.
“I hate to put it that way, but you know the truth is the truth. It is that way. I don't want the world to remember the USA team as being failures 'cause . . . I can't express how much hard work we've put in, dedication, sacrifice. You know what I'm saying?”
Wilder's strange and narrow escape is all that separates American boxing from the first medals shutout in any Olympics it has entered. The same program that produced Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya is now a proverbial punching bag.
“I don't blame anybody,” Campbell said. “I think there is a maturity process in that the majority of (personal) coaches have never even been to an international bout and they're advising guys how to box in the Olympics and it causes problems.
“You have the kid caught in between his allegiances to his personal coach. We all understand that. And so it becomes, can they trust me enough to not listen to what somebody else is telling them who has never been to an international bout?”
Answer: Not likely. Campbell may have the right idea, but he's getting the wrong results to build an effective power base. Not all personal coaches are leeches looking for a meal ticket, but even the most altruistic among them is going to want facts to justify his faith.
We're still at the stage where American boxers are blaming judges rather than recognizing the need to change their approach. Conditioned to throw punches that deliver damage, Team USA has been slow to embrace the strategic model necessitated by amateur boxing's move to electronic scoring.
Olympic boxing is based on scoring points rather than inflicting pain, an approach that holds little appeal to an aspiring professional and even less when those points are not readily recognized.
“I threw a lot of punches, but the judges (weren't) giving me my points,” said American welterweight Demetrius Andrade, a 2007 world champion who was eliminated by Korea's Jungjoo Kim.
“There's nothing I can do about it. I tried to go to the body, slow him down, (and) it was working, but I wasn't getting (any) points for it. . . . It was just pointless for me to be in there.”
Campbell's challenge is to restore confidence to a U.S. boxing team that won eight medals as recently as 1988. To that end, he is considering inviting personal coaches for a seminar on the international scoring system. He also is considering recruiting a lower tier of talent on the theory that such boxers might be more willing to listen.
“You have to go back to the beginnings of computer scoring,” Campbell said. “The reason we are not doing well is nobody wanted to accept it. None of the coaches accepted it, including myself. We didn't take the approach of how to beat a guy with (computer scoring). We continued to train our guys the same way, and you can't win like that.”
So we have seen.
Tim Sullivan: (619) 293-1033; tim.sullivan@uniontrib.com
