This year, the Olympic year of 1988, marks the this country`s 100th anniversary of amateur boxing, a sport that trails a tradition highlighted by triumph.
It spawned Floyd Patterson, the middleweight champion at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, then in the `60s other gold medalists named Cassius Clay
(Muhammad Ali), Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Michael Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard were among the five gold medalists it produced in Montreal in 1976. Finally, after the boycott of 1980, it trotted out a team in Los Angeles that won 9 of the 12 weight classes contested.
Those last triumphs were among the many celebrated in the national orgy that surrounded those Games, but a singular fact was conveniently forgotten in that fit of self congratulation: The Cubans were not there, nor were the the Soviets or East Germans. Three years would pass before their absence was remembered and the meaning of it all was revealed.
When that revelation finally came at last summer`s Pan American Games in Indianapolis, any vestiges of this country`s pugilistic invincibility were destroyed. Twelve times U.S. boxers faced off against Cubans; 10 times U.S. boxers were defeated. The Cubans walked away with 10 gold medals to one each for the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Angel Espinosa, Cuba`s 165-pound champion, was named the Games` outstanding boxer and won the Col. Don Hull Award that is named after the president of the U.S. Amateur Boxing Federation.
Those results were more than enough to jolt U.S. boxing officials from their stupor, an awakening made even ruder by the circumstances surrounding it. Their boxers appeared slow and lethargic, while the Cubans fought with vigor. Their boxers often tired in the last round, but the Cubans never seemed to weary. Their boxers looked weak and scrawny; the Cubans exhibited supernatural upper-body strength.
”Look at Espinosa,” U.S. Pan Am coach Roosevelt Sanders marveled soon afterward. ”He looks like a light-heavyweight. A heavyweight. He`s a big young man, very strong. He`s been doing something to get that strength and upper-body situation.”
No one, of course, is quite sure what it is the Cubans do while training, but their dominance in Indianapolis most certainly influenced the preparation of U.S. boxers for this week`s trials in California and this summer`s Games in Seoul.
The resultant changes have met with resistance, especially from hometown coaches who are wedded to tradition. And they have prompted quizzical stares, especially from fighters who have been asked to undertake an unfamiliar training regimen. But assistant Olympic coach Tom Coulter says, ”They`re going to have to accept what we`re doing. Too long we`ve had to fight with
(hometown) coaches, but now we`re just going to go ahead and educate our boxers. It`s about time we did this. It`s only 20 years too late.”
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Tony Robinson of St. Louis is a young welterweight who will be at the trials. For years he trained as boxers always have. He awoke at 4:30 in the morning, went for a long run in the park and then, after school, dropped by his neighborhood gym to work with professional fighters. ”It was,” he says, ”the same pattern over and over.”
Then he traveled to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and came under the direction of Coulter and other national coaches. He began to hear about nutrition and the value of weight training and the need for anaerobic conditioning. He was suddenly doing interval training and wind sprints instead of just simply jogging around a lake. Finally, he called Winston Shaw, his coach back home. ”How`s your training going?” Shaw asked. It`s like this, said Robinson, who went on to explain the new procedures he was experiencing. ”You think you`re getting enough running in?” Shaw wondered.
”I think so,” Robinson said. ”I think so-but you may not.”
”But you do the same amount of distance; you just don`t know you`re doing it,” Coulter explains. ”You do your four, five miles more quickly than you would running around some lake. Hey, anyone can run the lake. Anyone can run four miles. But it`s the intensity of the workout that counts.
”You have to understand that boxing`s been controlled by old-timers who, for example, dreaded weight training. They believed it would make you muscle- bound. What we`re trying to do now is introduce them to a whole package of weightlifting, interval training, nutrition. We think the whole trend of training is changing.”
The traditional trend, the one that has been in place since the Marquess of Queensberry, is as familiar now as the grunting and groaning of Rocky Balboa:
– Long and leisurely runs before the sun is up. ”I don`t know where in the world anyone got the idea you have to run at 5 in the morning,” Coulter says.
– In the afternoon, gym work that features situps and rope jumping, sparring and sessions with the speed bag or heavy bag. ”It`s just repetition, repetition, repetition, and you can get mentally stale real quick,” Coulter says.
– Weights are not to be touched, for they injure a fighter`s flexibility, but steaks (not necessarily raw) are to be consumed in quantity and up until three hours before a bout.
This routine has been repeated as religiously as a personal mantra, and its practioners are reluctant to change. The Amateur Boxing Federation has held seminars for them and sent them literature explaining the logic behind the training it now espouses. But even those efforts have, for the most part, failed.
This is not surprising because boxing, like all of sports, is conservative by nature, and the new methods are both unfamiliar and in their own way radical. They include ”climbing the ladder,” a series of sprints from 10 to 100 yards, and on an alternate day a track workout that might be done by an accomplished middle-distance runner. For example, the boxer runs an easy half-mile, followed by two hard half-miles, followed by four easy quarter-miles, followed by two hard half-miles.
They have weight training every other day, and for diversion, sprint relays, relays while bounding on two legs and relays while bounding on a single leg. They do a dozen stretching exercises before running and a dozen more afterward. They do eight medicine-ball drills with stringent diets to follow. They have heavy boxing only every other day and, most
unconventionally, even some days off.
This regimen, as a whole, reflects a scientific approach to a sport long enraptured by individualism (”Yo, Rocky!”). More important, it recognizes the reality of what happens inside the Olympic rings. There, bouts unfold in a series of spurts, and that is the reason for sprinting. Those spurts, in turn, sap a fighter`s stamina; hence the strenuous interval workouts. And although the Cubans may boycott Seoul, the Soviets, East Germans, Kenyans and Nigerians are not. U.S. boxers must overcome the strength of those challengers.
”They don`t beat us on skills but on strength,” Coulter says. ”Our skills match up to anyone`s, so they try to push us around.”
”The Pan Ams made that very vivid to me,” adds Sanders, who was deposed as the national coach after the debacle in Indianapolis. ”I believe very strongly in this program, but you still run into a number of people who don`t. Talk to them about weightlifting, and they say it builds bulk and decreases speed. But it`s very evident Ben Johnson`s on a weight-conditioning program, and if he can break the 100-meter record, it certainly hasn`t hurt his speed. ”Take food. When I was competing, the thing to do was eat steak. Its value has been disproved now. Now you eat fish, chicken, carbohydrates. I know it`s not the tradition people are accustomed to, but at the same time they have to realize they`re living in 1988, not 1928. So I respect them for their opinions. But at the same time, you have to look out for your boxers.”
On Monday, 96 of those boxers gather in Concord, Calif. A day later, they begin the trials that will end with a dozen of them ticketed for Seoul. There, they will try to carry on a century-old tradition, one that peaked in 1984 and has delivered their country a record 42 boxing gold medals. Some of them will, most certainly, add to that collection, but Coulter concludes, ”Please don`t look for 12 gold medals.
”How many will we win? That`s the only question I get, but who the hell knows? I just think the American public was spoiled by the last two teams. Those were unusual situations. This one, this coming one, will be the toughest one of them all.”
