Before Simone, Sha’Carri and Snoop, Olympics boxing was king

By Chris Murray
NABJ Black News & Views

While watching the pomp and pageantry of the opening ceremonies that marked the beginning of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, I got the chance to see interviews that NBC did with athletes from a variety of sports including  NBA star LeBron James and track star Noah Lyles, the favorite to win the 100 and 200-meter dashes.

As the Team USA boat rolled down the Seine through a driving rainstorm, I saw an interview with the family of Simone Biles and an interview with 2023 women’s U.S. Open Coco Gauff — and I saw images of American athletes representing a variety of sports, except for one.

Boxing.

None of the boxers on this year’s team are household names, unlike many of the athletes in track and field, gymnastics, or basketball. To even find out who makes up the United States Olympic boxing team, you would have to go to the USA Boxing website to know their identities. 

And if you’re interested in seeing Olympic boxing as part of NBC’s primetime coverage, prepare to be disappointed. If you have the network’s streaming service Peacock or access to the USA Network, you can catch it during the day. 

And because boxing no longer has an international sanctioning body, there’s been talk that the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles might be the last time you see boxing on the Olympic stage. The International Olympic Committee oversees the boxing competition at this year’s games. 

A look back

But it wasn’t always like this.

Back in the late 1960s and 70s, ABC Sports, who owned the rights to the Olympics at the time, put boxing front and center during the games. It was so important to the network’s Olympic coverage that they brought in venerable (and often controversial) commentator Howard Cosell. When you heard his raspy voice saying, “Howard Cosell reporting from ringside,” you knew it was a big deal. 

Olympic boxing used to be where you would see the sport’s stars of tomorrow. Internationally, Olympic boxing teams once served as a showcase for the next generation of world boxing champions.  For example, Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), Joe Frazier, and George Foreman were Olympic gold medalists before becoming heavyweight champions.  

But at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, only one American — Sugar Ray Seales — came away with a gold medal, while three others finished with the bronze. American middleweight Reggie Jones experienced the most controversial loss of that Olympics. 

In a fight televised in prime time, Jones had battered Valery Tregubov of the former Soviet Union for all three rounds only to be eliminated from the Olympics in a stunning split decision.

According to the Associated Press, only one judge scored the fight for Tregubov. The judges from Malaysia and Lebanon scored the fight in Jones’s favor. Inexplicably, judges from the Netherlands and Nigeria ruled the fight a draw. The draw led to Tregubov being given the win. 

The decision sparked a 15-minute demonstration in the Olympic boxing arena that included the tossing of debris onto the sports stage. Former world middleweight champion Nino Benvenuti, who was covering the match for Italian television said, “It was a scandal and disgrace.” 

But when you had Cosell, who was doing commentary for the fight on ABC, and his penchant for “telling like it is,” the decision became compelling theater. 

After the fight, Jones told Cosell that he was thinking about quitting boxing because of the travesty of that decision. 

The peak of boxing

The 1976 Olympics in Montreal and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles marked an era when boxing was at its peak as a prime-time sport at the games. 

At the ’76 Olympics, Sugar Ray Leonard became a household name before he fought his first match thanks to an interview with Cosell.  As a boxer, Leonard’s lightning left jab in the ring and electrifying charisma outside of it made him the most compelling fighter of those games. As Leonard powered his way to the gold medal, he kept a picture of his girlfriend and future wife on his boxing boots. 

Leonard was a part of what was arguably the best U.S. men’s boxing team ever. In addition to Leonard, the team included Leon and Michael Spinks, Leo Randolph, Howard Davis, Charles Mooney, and John Tate. The team went on to win five gold medals, a silver, and a bronze, and five members of the squad—Leonard, Michael and Leon Spinks, Randolph, and Tate — went on to win professional world titles. 

In 1984, the U.S. boxing team experienced even greater success in Los Angeles, winning 11 medals, five of them gold. Five members of that team—Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor, Virgil Hill, and Mark Breland—went on to become world champions. 

With the success of the U.S. amateur team during and after the Olympics, boxing continued to be a premier sport. In 1988, the United States pulled in eight more medals and produced two more world champions in the professional ranks. 

But the sport’s credibility at the Olympics began to crumble with another controversial decision at the ’88 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Roy Jones Jr. was the favorite to win the gold medal matchup in the light middleweight division. In his gold medal matchup against South Korea’s Park Si-hun, Jones dominated all three rounds. 

But Si-hun was given the decision and awarded the gold medal even though it was clear that Jones Jr. won the fight, leading to another black eye for the sport at the Olympic level.  

The turning point

That was probably the beginning of the end of Olympic boxing for a lot of people. The questionable scoring systems that include using computers to count punches and a judging system that has not often favored more aggressive boxers have made it unappealing for American boxers who tend to fight more aggressively.

I can’t pinpoint when the decline in the interest in Olympic boxing began, but I know it began sometime in the 1990s. The last real crossover Olympic boxing star was Oscar DeLa Hoya who won a gold medal in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. It was one of only three medals won by American boxers in that Olympics. 

The last American to win a gold medal in boxing was Claressa Shields in the women’s category in 2016. The U.S. Men haven’t won a boxing gold since Andre Ward, who retired as the undefeated light heavyweight champion of the world, did it in 2004. 

Several factors have brought about the decline of Olympic boxing. While you still have events like the Golden Gloves and the Olympic trials, many of the urban boxing gyms run by organizations like the Police Athletic League that served as feeder spaces for young boxers are in many cases closed. In fact, the gym once owned by Joe Frazier in Philadelphia has been a discount furniture store since 2013. 

Another contributing factor is that Black American young people in the inner cities, the place where most Olympic boxers have come from in the past, have other, more lucrative professional athletic options like the NBA and the NFL that don’t involve getting punched in the face. 

Even the boxers who have won Golden Gloves championships are opting to choose the lucrative paydays of the professional ranks rather than fight for their country. ff