Boxing reduced to a shadowy sideshow

IF amateur boxing's beleaguered community needed any reminding that things are not what they used to be, television executive Dick Ebersol yesterday provided it, when announcing the sport's removal from prime time schedules. Instead, boxing enthusiasts among NBC's viewing public, must content themselves with recorded highlights to be shown between 12.30 a.m. and 2.0 a.m. For a sport which over the years gave the Olympics such personalities as Cassius Clay, Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, that's hard to take.

Women, according to Ebersol the Sports President at NBC, are to blame for the degradation. "Statistics show that when we put on boxing, we lose up to 75 per cent of the female audience. And we just can't live with that," he said.

Lawton Clay Bey, who represents America in the super heavyweight class, doesn't altogether agree with that "The real reason is that the network has been reading about us and decided not to show us," said Clay Bee who has been accused of sexual assault in "his hometown of Hartford.

Sadly, he is not the only member of the American team tainted by scandal. Light heavyweight, Antonio Tarver, thought to be their brightest hope for a gold medal, was once addicted to crack cocaine heavyweight Nate Jones served 20 months for armed robbery and light middleweight David Reid is accused of assaulting his girlfriend.

To make matters worse, Bakule Charles Kizza, a beefy Ugandan heavyweight, was caught passing counterfeit $100 notes in a Gainsville store while buying women's underwear.

It's scarcely a scenario in keeping with the sport's proud tradition. Nor is it the only problem creasing the brows of troubled boxing officials in the countdown to today's weigh in and draw for the championships, which start tomorrow.

Just four years after being used for the first time in Olympic competition some officials are expressing renewed concern about the computer scoring system. "The old arrangement of five as sitting around the ring and calling the fight as they saw it may not have been fool proof but I think it was safer than the one, we now have," said boxing coach Al Mitchell. "In the old days, the combination punchers the guys we used to call the shoeshine hitters were the winners but not any longer. Nowadays, judges score the first punch that goes in, but miss the three or four shots' which follow. It has made for a situation in which it's now all about single shots and that favours the counter puncher. I don't particularly like it, but you've got to play the game as you find it."

Irish officials, on the other hand, favour the new system and point to Michael Carruth's surprise win in Barcelona as proof that it rewards good technicians who pick their punches carefully.