19.08.04 – By Bert Randolph Sugar, Sr. Boxing Analyst at-large for www.CMXsports.com: Going all the way back to the time when spectators wore grape leaves in their hair and lions ate the losers, boxing and the Olympics have gone hand and glove–or hand in cestus, if you will. And when the ancient games were revived, boxing and the Olympics once again became an item, the sport taking center ring in the Olympic five ring circus.
Following the breadcrumbs back through the fogbanks of the Olympic history, those who were able to spin their Olympic gold into professional gold through the first XV Olympiads (or through 1972, if you’re counting) numbered just 10, seven of whom were Americans.
However, starting at the 1976 Games what had once been a trickle of Olympic champions able to climb to the top of the professional mountain turned into a Niagara as four Americans–Sugar Ray Leonard, Michael and Leon Spinks and Leo Randolph–turned their Olympic medals into championship belts. And the winner of the Val Barker Award for the boxer who “displayed the best style and technique,” Howard Davis, barely missed in his attempt to make it five.
And then there were the ’84 L.A. Games when the U. S. cornered the market, winning nine golds with, in alphabetical order, Tyrell Biggs, Mark Breland, Paul Gonzalez, Steve McCrory, Jerry Page, Frank Tate, Meldrick Taylor, Henry Tillman and Pernell Whitaker all capturing gold; Virgil Hill a silver; and Evander Holyfield, on a disputed DQ, a bronze.
From those two high-water marks it was all downhill as Americans won but three golds during ’88, one during both ’92 and ’96 and, for the first time, none for 2000.
But it hasn’t been just the American boxing team that has gone downhill; television coverage of Olympic boxing has gone downhill as well. From the wall-to-wall primetime coverage of the ’76 Montreal and ’84 L. A. Games, we have been “treated,” if that’s the right word, to Oscar De La Hoya, and nothing but Oscar De La Hoya, as he won America’s only gold medal at Barcelona during ’92 and an after-midnight clip of David Reid’s sensational last-round knockout of Cuban Alfredo Duvergal at the ’96 light middleweight finals when America was just one bout away from being shut out for the first time in Olympic boxing history. And forget 2000 when America finally came up empty. So, too, did television’s coverage of the sport, preferring commercials and test patterns instead.
This time ‘round, as we tune in to NBC and its so-called “seven-tiered platform” of presenting the 2004 Olympics from Athens to root, root, root for the home team and see if they can reestablish the American boxing tradition of winning, we find that amidst all the ruffles and shuffles of a patriotic celebration, boxing fans once again are treated with all the deference of lepers and orphan oppressors, with an incipient case of Bright’s disease thrown in for good measure.
Oh, sure, as one part of its “seven-tiers” NBC has scheduled 50 hours of boxing. But such gifts come encumbered with strings to untie and mortgages to pay–or, in this case cable or satellite dish bills to be paid. For if you examine the contents of the bottle, not just the bottle itself, you’ll find that 44 of those 50 hours are on CNBC and MSNBC, which, if you’ve paid your cable or dish bill by sending in your first-born and a second mortgage, can be found somewhere on your remote between the Chia Pet and the Elvis Impersonators channels.
For those who don’t have a dish or cable or can’t find CNBC or MSNBC without a Geiger counter, you can tune in to NBC-TV and find “sports” that can be called sports only in the same way a prune can be called a fruit–technically and only in a manner of speaking.
You almost feel like the Sundance Kid saying to Butch Cassidy, “What are those sports?” I mean, a “sport” called “Shooting–Running”? What’s that? Television’s version of drive-by shootings? Hell, I can go down to Dekalb Street in Brooklyn any time of day or night and watch gunzels packing heat doing the same thing. And better too! Then there’s “Beach Volleyball.” Who tunes in for that? “Honey watchers” waiting for one of the chicks to have an apparel malfunction moment? Shouldn’t that be on the Playboy Network, not NBC? Add synchronized swimming and gymnastic ribbon cutting to that list. And I still agree with George Carlin when he sez, “Swimming is not a sport; it’s a way to keep from drowning.”
It takes no giant intellectual balloon ascension to figure out that NBC has traveled, Columbus-like, into new worlds in order to attract advertisers and maintain its balanced columns of unassailable sums and straight-angled figures that spell profits, with a cap “P.” And, in the process, not only fail to pay full faith and credit to boxing’s traditional place in the Olympics but treat the sport’s fans as second-class citizens.
Bert Randolph Sugar, CMXsports’ Sr. Analyst At-Large, called “ The Guru of Boxing,” has a new book Bert Sugar On Boxing,” (or “The Best of Bert Sugar, The Worst of Bert Sugar, What the Hell’s the Difference?”), published by The Lyon Press and currently available at Border’s, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com