Boxing trials start Tuesday (olympics)

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Boxing trials start Tuesday
Fighters try to earn tickets to Olympics, one punch at a time
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Starting Tuesday at the Tunica Arena and Exposition Center, 87 fighters will begin punching for 11 spots on the U.S. Olympic boxing team.

Round by round, they'll take their best shots. Most will have fallen away by week's end. But for two fighters in each of the 11 weight classes - from 106 pounds to 201 pounds-plus - this week's U.S. Olympic Team Trials will serve as the launching pad to next weekend's U.S. Olympic Box-offs in Cleveland where, finally, the spots on the U.S. team will be determined.


Just to get a spot at the Trials, each of the boxers had to win a national competition, or, depending on the competition, place in earlier national boxing events, including the 2003 National Golden Gloves, 2003 Armed Forces, and 2004 Everlast U.S. championships.

"Everybody's earned their way," said U.S. Olympic Boxing coach Basheer Abdullah.

So it will continue to be from this point forward. Bouts, which begin with Tuesday morning's session and continue through the losers' bracket championship Saturday night, will consist of four two-minute rounds.

Five judges will sit ringside for each fight, employing a computerized scoring system to determine the bout's winner. For a boxer to score a point, three judges must see the boxer land a punch and push a button within one second of each other.

"In computerized scoring, a punch is a punch," said Eric Parthen, executive director of USA Boxing. "There's no weight put on knocking a guy down.

"In pro boxing, you could land heavy shots, and that'd be enough to knock a guy down (and that would greatly help your score). This is different. It puts a heavier emphasis on defense.

"If your opponent can't hit you, he can't score."

The Trials work like this: One boxer from each class will finish the week undefeated, after winning his last bout Friday night. Those boxers advance to next weekend's Box-offs in Cleveland.

On Saturday night in each weight class, the last two fighters with one loss meet in the finals of the so-called challengers' bracket. The winner of that fight advances to Cleveland too.

Next Friday in Cleveland, the fighters who advanced out of the losers' brackets at the Trials must beat their bracket's winner to earn a second chance at that man on Saturday night. If the fighter who advanced through the losers' bracket can win both the Friday and Saturday matches, he earns the Olympic team berth.

"It doesn't happen a lot," Parthen said, "but it does happen."

If the fighter coming out of the winners' bracket wins Friday in Cleveland, or loses Friday but then wins on Saturday, he earns the Olympic team berth.

However, in most instances, that fighter still will not have qualified for the Olympics. For that, he would have to place first or second in one of the three Americas Qualifiers. The Pan American Games, which already have been held, was the first qualifier. The second qualifier will be in March and the last in April, with U.S athletes competing against athletes from about 30 countries in North, South and Central America.

In 2000, all athletes who made the U.S. Olympic team also qualified for the Games. The U.S. team won four medals - two silver and two bronze. Four years earlier, when Al Mitchell was the Olympic coach, they won six - one gold and five bronze.

This year, Mitchell is serving as a technical adviser on the team.

"It's more steps to go through than in '96," Mitchell said. "It's tougher because there's more boxing. We beat on each other more. It's a long process. We need to pick the U.S. team earlier."

To be sure, no one in boxing will say this system is perfect. But then, no one will say that there's such a thing as a perfect system, anyway.

"I've been coaching 27 years," said Tom Moraetes, trainer of 106-pound contender Rayonta Whitfield. "It's a lot less political.

"There will always be an element of politics in the sport - objective judging or subjective judging - but the system we've got now goes a long way toward making sure we get the best boxer in the Olympics."