Boxing Amateur

Many people believe that boxing is dead because of the rise of MMA, and while that may be true there will always be those amateurs who continue to keep the sport alive with some highlight reel knockouts of their own.  After all, who needs a ring or octagon when you can put on a show in the comfort of your own living room.

These two guys put the gloves on and decided to get a couple of swings in there with their friends watching.  They touch gloves and right away the mayhem begins.  With their fists swinging wildly, both guys get in some devastating shots before the final blow is landed.

It was the type of blow you would expect to see delivered from a giant heavyweight fighter, or perhaps even the right hand of Dan Henderson.

This is without a doubt one of the better amateur boxing matches I have witnessed as there could have been at least two or three knockouts prior to the punch that ended it.  It was a great finishing shot, but I am not sure what was more enjoyable to watch; the knockout, or the reaction of those in the room, including the male who delivered it.

One thing about amateur boxing is the ringside doctors tend to be amateurs as well.

With the low ratings that many boxing matches have received, and the extremely high ratings that MMA has received, is it reasonable to conclude that boxing is losing the battle?

Boxing has fallen out of favor in recent years for many good reasons:  There are too many shady promoters (can we say Don King?), too many weight classes, too many weight divisions, too many “manufactured” stars, and too little of what boxing fans need:  Great fights between great fighters.

In the wake of MMA-Mixed Martial Arts-many have questioned the continued viability of boxing.  Pay per view trends in each sport were beginning to support that claim.  Mixed Martial Arts, once relegated to the blood and lust fans, regulated itself (or was regulated!) and became a sport with true cross-over appeal.  The pay per view numbers began to meet and exceed those of prized boxing matches.

Boxing and MMA are two different sports.  Many will say “fighting is fighting is fighting.”  True, in each sport, the competitors go to war and seek to beat the other into submission, but that is where the similarities end.  Boxing is (or was?) pure, natural and…sweet with a storied history.  MMA is new, raw, and much broader.  A fighter can use multiple skills from wrestling to Jujitsu to defeat their opponent.

MMA captured the viewership of many boxing fans not for the blood and guts (its rawness!) but because it was beginning to show signs of what people loved about boxing:  competitors willing to lay everything on the line to beat their opponent.

We recently witnessed the last fight of one of MMA’s greatest fighters, Chuck Lidell.  He embodies the phrase lay it on the line.  When Chuck Lidell walked into the ring, he would give you everything he had, risking life and limb (a literal statement in MMA) to provide a great fight.

When was the last time you have seen this in boxing?  The boxer laying everything on the line in the ring?  The recently retired (and now becoming unretired) greatest pound-for- pound boxing champion is Floyd Mayweather Jr.  With such amazing skill, he never once seemed to give everything he had, or risk anything, in the ring.  True, he would always win fights, but he never won the hearts and minds of the people.  He was always in it for him, not for you, not for the fans.  The people paid Floyd Mayweather Jr.  He did not pay them back.

In this manner, boxing lost its fan base.  The people decided to stop paying because they were not being paid back.

However, just when it looked like boxing was going to receive a knockout punch, recent boxing champions, like Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines, are proving their mettle and their willingness to lay it on the line.

The battle between MMA and boxing is not yet over.  It’s in the mid-rounds and boxing has recently caught a second wind.

Among British amateur boxers, only those who won Olympic gold medals tended to achieve recognition beyond the limits of boxing enthusiasts. They included Harry Mallin (Middleweight), 1920 and 1924), Terry Spinks (Flyweight, 1956), Dick McTaggart (Lightweight, 1956) and Chris Finnegan (Middleweight, 1968). In 1908, at the Olympic Games in London, five weight divisions were contested, Bantamweight, Featherweight, Lightweight, Middleweight and Heavyweight. British boxers won them all, and four of the finals were all-British!

It is the professional side of boxing, however, that has produced the celebrities whose activities the public have generally followed. In the period between bare-knuckle pugilism and post-Queensberry boxing, Jem Mace was important. He carried many of the traditions of the old London Prize-Ring, but promoted the use of gloves and helped to popularise the sport
in the United States and Australia. In the post-Queensberry era, the first British fighter to achieve superstar status was Bob Fitzsimmons. He weighed less than 12 stone but won world titles at Middleweight (1892), Light-heavyweight (1903) and Heavyweight (1897) and fought his last bout at the age of fifty-two.

Successful fighters have provoked fierce local pride. The best example was Jimmy Wilde, a Welsh Flyweight who won the world Flyweight Championship in 1916 and held it until 1923. He once had a sequence of eighty-eight fights without defeat. Between 1911 and 1923, he won seventy-five of his fights by a knockout. He was idolised in Wales, where they commonly believed him to be the best boxer, pound-for-pound, that ever lived. He was described as the “Mighty Atom” and “the ghost with a hammer in his hand”. Freddy Welsh (Freddy Hall Thomas), from Pontypridd, won the Lightweight title in 1912.

The Scots had a similar pride in Benny Lynch, a Flyweight from Glasgow, who held the world Flyweight title in 1935 and again in 1937. Over the years, Scots have had great success at this weight; Jackie Paterson won the title in 1943 and Walter McGowan in 1966. Ken Buchanan won the Lightweight title in 1971 and Jim Watt in 1980. In Northern Ireland, Rinty Monahan held the Flyweight title from 1947 to 1950 and Barry McGuigan won the W.B.A. Featherweight title in 1985.

England, too, had its successes at the lighter weights. Among the Flyweights, Jackie Brown won the title in 1932, Peter Kane in 1938 and Terry Allen in 1950 and Naseem Hamed in the 1990s.

The Welsh had their own featherweight legend Jim Driscoll. His nickname was “Peerless Jim”, he was born in the onetime Irish “slum” of Newtown. Jim was the first outright winner of the Lord Lonsdale Belt. Jim had prolific wins of the British, Empire and European titles. Jim is considered by many to be the best pound for pound fighter of all time.

Britain has had other popular world champions. In the 1930s, Jackie Berg won the Light-Welterweight title; in the 1940s, Freddie Mills won the Light-Heavyweight title; in the 1950s and 1960s, Randolph Turpin and Terry Downes won Middleweight titles; and in the 1970s, John Conteh and John Stracey won the Light-Heavyweight and Welterweight titles respectively. With so many title-awarding bodies in the 1980s and 1990s, the public became unsure about who actually was the champion.

Nevertheless, the successes of Nigel Benn, Chris Eubank and Joe Calzaghe continued to bring extensive media coverage to boxing and sustained a considerable public following.

The most popular boxers, howevers, have not always been the world title-holders. Just fighting for the world title in the Heavyweight division can bestow celebrity status, as was shown by Henry Cooper, who twice unsuccessfully fought Muhammad Ali in the 1960s.

Britain had to wait 100 years to have its first Heavyweight champion since Bob Fitzsimmons lost his title in 1899. Lennox Lewis became undisputed champion in 1999, having first gained the W.B.C. title in 1993. Frank Bruno held the W.B.C. world Heavyweight title shortly between 1995 and 1996, after beating the man who beat Lewis, Oliver McCall. He lost it to Mike Tyson in a rematch of their 1989 title bout.

Sue Atkins (alias Sue Catkins) helped to pioneer women’s boxing in Britain in the 1980s, but without any official recognition. The first British woman to be issued with a license was Jane Couch from Fleetwood, who won the Women’s International Boxing Federation (W.I.B.F.) Welterweight title in 1996. Most experts would agree, however, that it was the Christy Martin-Deirdre Gogarty world championship bout, also in 1996, that helped women’s boxing popularity grow internationally. Weeks after defeating Gogarty by a six round decision, Martin was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Outside the United Kingdom, of course, boxing has also produced many celebrities on a world-wide basis. Muhammad Ali of Louisville, Kentucky, United States, often recognised and self appointed as The Greatest, is probably the best example. Puerto Rico has three boxers to be generally considered national heroes out of a cast of over 50 world champions from that country, these being Felix Trinidad, Wilfred Benitez and Wilfredo Gomez. Nicaragua has Alexis Arguello, Mexico, out of over 100 world champions, Ruben Olivares, Salvador Sanchez and Julio Cesar Chavez, Cuba has Jose Napoles and amateur legend Teofilo Stevenson, Argentina Carlos Monzon, Panama Roberto Duran and Eusebio Pedroza, Australia Jeff Fenech, Japan Jiro Watanabe, Ghana Azumah Nelson, South Korea Jung Koo Chang and so on. These are boxers whose fame transcended the boxing borders and became household names among regular folks.

In Mississippi City, on February 7, 1882 the last heavyweight boxing championship bareknuckle fight took place.

In 2004, female boxer Ann Wolfe surpassed Henry Armstrong (until then the only man to hold world titles in three divisions simultaneously), by becoming the only boxer ever to hold world titles in four different categories at the same time. A rule preventing men from holding titles in more than one weight class at the same time is in place since soon after Armstrong held his three titles.

After scandal robbed Roy Jones Jr. of the Olympic Gold at Seoul in 1988, the International Olympic Committee decided that serious changes needed to be made to Olympic Boxing. Most boxing experts and fans agree the changes have only caused more controversy by making judging less reliable and have stripped boxing of its former glory.

1988 Olympic boxing scoring:

• 5 judges score bout
• The white part of the glove must land on front of head/torso for a point
• Each judge marked their score on a scorecard

1992 scoring after changes:

• 5 judges score bout
• The white part of the glove must land on front of head/torso for a point
• Each judge has 2 electronic buttons, one for each respective boxer
• 3 of 5 judges must press a respective boxer’s button within 1 second for him to receive a point

The last rule is not a misprint. When a fighter lands a qualifying blow 3 of 5 judges must press a button within 1 second of each other in order for him to receive a point. Button scoring threatens integrity of scores.

In the course of a bout judges may get the buttons mixed up, believe they are pushing a button hard enough when they’re not, or buttons as on a TV remote, keyboard or gaming controller can stick or malfunction.

Under this system flurries between fighters, ‘’infighting where no full force punches can land’’ (Boxing – Olympic Rules, Judging and Officials), in which more than one punch literally couldn’t be counted using the 1 second method the AIBA (International Boxing Association) relies on, are to be scored as a single point after the flurry ends. That point is to be given to whichever one of the boxers the judges feel got the better of the exchange; provided that three of the judges push one of the boxer’s respective buttons within 1 second of each other after that flurry ends.

This is very controversial. A flurry between fighters can be advantageous to both and can be difficult to score even when a judge has the time to evaluate the flurry and contemplate them subjectively; process that can take longer than a single second even by an experienced judge.

Seeking objectivity?

According to the International Olympic Committee the electronic scoring machine was introduced to make judges’ officiating more objective. Boxing is not an objective sport. Factors such as ring generalship (how well fighters control their opponent in the ring), technical efficiency, and accurate effective punching are subjective, key factors to being an effective boxer. In fact these factors are the very essence of boxing; what separates the sport of boxing from the act of fighting and what made Muhammed Ali, Leon Spinks, George Foreman and others Olympic Champions. Under the Olympic rules however, these aren’t even taken into account. And fighters receive no extra points for knocking their opponent down.

A major flaw in the 1 second scoring was made clear Tuesday night in Beijing when USA’s Rau’shee Warren, as NBC Boxing commentator Teddy Atlas pointed out, scored a point while reeling off balance and falling to the ground after a blow by South Korea’s Lee Ok-sung.

This is only one of a number of incidents at the 2008 Olympics thus far. There is a consensus amongst boxing experts; boxing at the Olympics has been ruined by the 1992 rule change. It will be interesting to see if the AIBA changes anything at the conclusion of the Beijing Games to bring legitimacy back to Olympic Boxing and restore its former glory.

Amateur boxing is practiced at the collegiate level, at the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games, and in many other venues sponsored by amateur boxing associations. Amateur boxing bouts are short in duration and fighters wear head protection, so this type of competition prizes point-scoring (based on number of clean punches landed) rather than physical power. Bouts comprise four rounds of two minutes in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, and four rounds of two minutes in a national ABA (Amateur Boxing Association) bout, each with a one-minute interval between rounds..

Men’s senior bouts changed in format from four, two minute rounds to three, three minute rounds on January 1 2009.
Headgear is mandatory in amateur boxing

Competitors wear protective headgear and gloves with a white strip across the knuckle. A punch is considered a scoring punch only when the boxers connect with the white portion of the gloves. Each punch that lands on the head or torso is awarded a point. A referee monitors the fight to ensure that competitors use only legal blows (a belt worn over the torso represents the lower limit of punches – any boxer repeatedly landing “low blows” is disqualified). Referees also ensure that the boxers don’t use holding tactics to prevent the opponent from swinging (if this occurs, the referee separates the opponents and orders them to continue boxing. Repeated holding can result in a boxer being penalized, or ultimately, disqualified). Referees will stop the bout if a boxer is seriously injured, if one boxer is significantly dominating the other or if the score is severely imbalanced.[1] Bouts which end this way may be noted as “RSC” (referee stopped contest) with notations for an outclassed opponent (RSCO), outscored opponent (RSCOS), injury (RCSI) or head injury (RSCH).

History

Amateur boxing emerged as a sport during the mid-late 1800s, partly as a result of the moral controversies surrounding professional prize-fighting. Originally lampooned as an effort by upper and middle-class gentlemen to co-opt a traditionally working class sport, the safer, “scientific” style of boxing found favor in schools, universities and in the armed forces, although the champions still usually came from among the urban poor.

The Queensberry Amateur Championships continued from 1867 to 1885, and so, unlike their professional counterparts, amateur boxers did not deviate from using gloves once the Queensberry Rules had been published. In the United Kingdom, the Amateur Boxing Association (A.B.A.) was formed in 1880 when twelve clubs affiliated. It held its first championships the following year. Four weight classes were contested, Featherweight (9 stone), Lightweight (10 stone), Middleweight (11 stone, 4 pounds) and Heavyweight (no limit). (A stone is equal to 14 pounds.) By 1902, American boxers were contesting the titles in the A.B.A. Championships, which, therefore, took on an international complexion. By 1924, the A.B.A. had 105 clubs in affiliation.

Boxing first appeared at the Olympic Games in 1904 and, apart from the Games of 1912, has always been part of them. From 1972 through 2004, Cuba and the United States have won the most Gold Medals, 29 for Cuba and 21 for the U.S. Internationally, Olympic boxing spread steadily throughout the first half of the 20th century, but when the first international body, the Federation Internationale de Boxe Olympic (International Olympic Boxing Federation) was formed in Paris in 1920, there were only five member nations.

In 1946, however, when the International Amateur Boxing Association (A.I.B.A.) was formed in London, twenty-four nations from five continents were represented, and the A.I.B.A. has continued to be the official world federation of amateur boxing ever since. The first World Amateur Boxing Championships were staged in 1974.[2]

Computer scoring was introduced to the Olympics in 1992. Each of the five judges has a keypad with a red and a blue button. The judges must press a button for which ever corner they feel lands a scoring blow. Three out of the five judges must press the button for the same boxer within a one-second window in order for the point to score. A legal scoring blow is that which is landed cleanly with the white knuckle surface of the glove, within the scoring area (middle of the head, down the sides and between the hips through the belly button, and the boxer can’t be committing a foul (slapping, ducking head, wrestling, holding, etc). As long as the punches land within the scoring area, they are legal and that includes body punches, as well as those to the face. When computer scoring is used, and one opponent is leading by 20 points at any time before the fourth round, the referee is notified and the bout is stopped on an RSCOS – meaning the referee stopped the contest as the opponent was outscored.

Recent developments in sports technology for boxing[3] has introduced systems like the Automated Boxing Scoring System which uses instrumented boxing gear to send information back to a ring-side computer for the purposes of scoring. The system was developed to overcome the shortcomings of the computer scoring system, however the automated system has not been introduced as the official scoring system yet and could take some time to become accepted by boxing officials.

Rules And Regulation (United Kingdom)

Amateur boxing has an age limit that states that you must be at least 11 years of age to have bouts, but there is no training age limit.

Seniors 1. A Boxer becomes a Senior on his 17th birthday. When he reaches his 34th birthday, he will no longer be allowed to box, and his ME3 must be returned to his Association Registrar for cancellation.

Round Duration 2. Boxers will box 3 x 2 minute rounds and males may box 4 x 2 minute rounds or 3 x 3 minute rounds by agreement. Females may box 4 x 2 minute rounds by agreement. In Open Championships and Internationals, males will box 3 x 3 minute rounds and females 4 x 2 minute rounds. In every case there will be an interval of one minute between rounds.

3. A Senior Boxer may participate in a maximum of 18 contests per season excluding Championships and International matches.

Classification 4. There shall be three classes of Senior Boxers. The appropriate classification being: (a) Novice A Novice is a boxer who has not competed in any stage of an Open Senior Championship. A Novice Boxer must not compete against an Open Class Boxer other than in recognised Championship (b) Intermediate An Intermediate is a Boxer who has: (a) entered and competed in an Open Senior Championship but has not won a Regional Association Title, (b) won a Novice Class ‘B’ Title. (c) won a CYP Class C Title. (d) returned from professional boxing. (c) Open

An Open is a Boxer who has: (a) won an ABAE Senior Championship Regional Association Title. (b) boxed at Senior level for his Country. A Regional Association Executive Committee may upgrade a Boxer who in their opinion, is clearly above the prevailing standard for his current level of classification. Similarly, a boxer may be downgraded if his ability, in their opinion is below the standard prevailing in his current classification.

Juniors 1. A boxer is a junior from his 11th birthday (at which age he is eligible to hold an ME3), until his 17th birthday. 2. (a) Boxers under the age of 17 years MUST NOT concede more than 12 months in age, except where necessary for specific International Events. (b) Novice boxers aged 17 years can compete against boxers aged 16 years provided 43 there is no more than 12 months difference in age. (c) It is recommended that Junior boxers do not concede age, weight and experience in a contest. The final decision for any contest is the responsibility of the OIC. Rounds Duration 2. Unless the conditions for Championships or other authorised events prescribe otherwise the duration of bouts for Junior boxers will be as follows: Both boxers aged over 11 years and under 14 years – 3 x 1.5 minute rounds One boxer aged 13 and the other 14 years – 3 x 1.5 minute rounds Both boxers aged 14 years – 3 x 2 minute rounds One boxer aged 14 years and the other 15 years – 3 x 2 minutes rounds Both boxers aged 15 years or over – 3 x 2 minute rounds, or 4 x 2 minutes by agreement. 3 x 3 minute rounds by agreement (Male boxers only)

United States amateur boxing organizations

Amateur boxing can be considered any amateur fight at a local boxing gym, but there are several tournaments that take place to determine amateur champions.

There are several different amateur sanctioning bodies in the United States, including the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) of the United States, the Golden Gloves Association of America, and USA Boxing.

The Golden Gloves is an amateur boxing tournament that is fought at both the national level and the regional level. Although the Golden Gloves typically refers to the National Golden Gloves, it can also refer to the Intercity Golden Gloves, the Chicago Golden Gloves, the New York Golden Gloves, and other regional Golden Gloves tournaments. The winners of the regional tournaments fight in a national competition annually.

USA Boxing also sanctions a national tournament to determine who will compete on the United States National boxing team at the Olympic Games.