Boxing Rendered Toothless

BARCELONA â€”  Had Jack Dempsey started out in the Olympics instead of the Wild West bars and barges, we never would have heard of the Manassa Mauler, the Long Count, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, Luis Firpo, Boyle’s Thirty Acres or any of the things that helped make the Twenties Roaring.

Had Joe Louis started out in them, we never would have had a Brown Bomber, Bum of the Month, Friday Night Fights. Madison Square Garden would have been dark.

You see, Dempsey fought out of a crouch--the way a leopard would fight. Louis hooked off the jab.

The operative word here is “fight.� The Olympics frowns on that. The Olympics wants you to stand there like a dummy, head erect, chin out, and exchange straight punches from the shoulder. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have any steam in them. In fact, it might be better if they don’t. You could get a warning from the referee if you tried for a knockout.

You’ll see better fights in a sorority house than in an Olympics. It’s a good thing Mike Tyson never made the team. He would have been disqualified on his way to the ring. The guy who put him out of the Games, Henry Tillman, Mike destroyed as soon as they turned pro and could fight.

Here, they box in headgear and heavy gloves. Rounds are three minutes long and are stopped every nine seconds by the referee, usually a man who does not speak the same language as the contestants, and he makes a series of hand gestures, charades, that neither the fighter nor the audience can understand. Every time a fighter gets a rally going, one of these refs steps in, stops the action, and waggles a finger under the fighter’s nose as if to say, “Here, here, no more of this ruddy violence; you’re gong to hurt this other fellow if you don’t stop that.�

Not only that, but a knockdown counts only one point--the same as a left jab. I don’t know what a knockout counts. I haven’t seen any here. I think you have to knock the referee out first. You really don’t want to get the other fellow in trouble. Otherwise, they might disqualify you. Just ask Evander Holyfield. When he lost to Kevin Barry in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, they had to bring Kevin to before they could tell him he “won.�

You could see where a fight card like this could never make it in the old St. Nick’s Arena in New York. They would have been singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart� by the second round in these bouts--you really can’t call them “fights.� They would have been throwing chickens in the ring at the old Olympic Auditorium. Every fighter has to be a Gentleman Jim. Jake LaMotta couldn’t even get scar tissue.

Scoring one point for a knockdown is a bit like ruling a home run the same as a bunt single, a 70-yard touchdown bomb as a nine-yard gain.

Dempsey-Firpo would have ended in a draw. Max Baer knocked Primo Carnera down 11 times but probably would have been behind on points here.

But that’s not the best of it. The scoring system here is right out of Alice in Wonderland. Or Rube Goldberg.

It’s computerized. And you know right there you’re in trouble.

They have five judges--of varying degrees of incompetence. When they see a punch landed, if they see a punch landed, they have one second to punch it in on the computer. If they don’t make it by one second, or if they don’t see it in the first place, it never happened.

You’ll think I’m making this up but I swear to you, this makes perfect sense to this cast of characters.

It gets worse.

There was a fight Tuesday night between Montell Griffin of the United States and Torsten May of Germany in which the two belabored each other with roundhouse rights throughout the first round. And then, the score came up. 0-0! Nothing happened, in the view of five judges.

Now, it’s true the German was somewhere between seven and nine feet tall, and Montell looked as if he were standing in a hole. Montell didn’t know whether to fight him or climb him.

But the 0-0 didn’t necessarily mean the judges didn’t see or record a punch. It could have meant they didn’t get the finger on the button quick enough. The second round, they scored 1-1. Even though the German suffered such a nasty gash over his right eye and below the headpiece that the doctor had to be consulted before allowing the bout to continue.

But that’s nothing. The other night, America’s best fighter--well, along with Oscar De La Hoya--Eric Griffin, twice a finalist in the voting for the Sullivan Award as America’s best amateur athlete, was administering a sound drubbing to a Spanish fighter named Rafael Lozano.

Lozano spent the night looking for an escape hatch. His face looked like something hanging off a French cathedral. There was probably a buzzing in his ears. He was as overmatched as Angola vs. the Dream Team.

He got the decision.

One of the judges in the fight, a Ghanaian, was suspended earlier for producing two computer scorecards with 0-0 on them. For a whole fight. Either he needed new glasses or new hands.

So, the judges scored the Griffin fight, incredibly, 6-5. For Lozano.

But a recheck of the scoring showed that the judges actually voted overwhelmingly for Griffin. Even the Ghanaian saw it 8-5 for Griffin. Naturally, he didn’t get his fingers down in time. His scoring remained phantom.

One other judge had Griffin’s score 26-17, another for Griffin by 19-10, a third for Griffin by 18-9, and the last judge had Griffin by 10-9.

That’s 81 for Griffin, 50 for Lozano. That’s major league outpointing, right?

Not the way to bet. The judges didn’t get those points in the computer on time. Out of 131 points, they got 11 in the box. Eric Griffin, meet Evander Holyfield.

You can see why I love Olympic boxing. I mean, who needs the Three Stooges? Laurel and Hardy? “Saturday Night Live?� Was Chaplin ever funnier? These guys should sit there throwing pies.

Back to Montell Griffin (no relation). Montell, whose nickname is probably “Stump� back in Chicago or around Westminster, Calif., kept leaping at his German foe. To get to May, the 5-foot-6 Montell almost had to break the high jump record. Montell was in the air more often than Delta.

It wasn’t exactly Schmeling-Louis, but Montell won the fight. The judges, as usual, didn’t see it that way--or at all. After scoring two rounds even, they gave the third round to the German, 5-3, possibly because he bled more.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is, if you want to win in the Olympics, don’t hurt anybody. Better yet, don’t even hit him.

I like the cynical view of the late Long Island fight writer, Bob Waters. After observing the Olympic fights for a while, he was moved to comment: “We had a better way of deciding a fight in my day: The one who got beat up lost.�