By Brent Matteo Alderson

BoxingScene.com recently spoke with USA Boxing’s media-relations representative, Julie Goldsticker, about the direction of American amateur boxing and its plans for the 2012 games in London. 

BoxingScene.com: How many amateur boxers are there in the United States?

USA Boxing: There are around twenty-thousand registered amateur boxers in the United States.

BoxingScene.com:  Is Emanuel Steward still involved with USA Boxing?

USA Boxing:  It was back in 2002 when Emanuel was working with us, but he hasn’t had any contact with anybody that was on the 2008 squad.

BoxingScene.com:  Were you guys disappointed with the team’s performance last summer?

USA Boxing:  I think everybody would have liked to see us win more medals.  We knew that we had a lot of talent going into the 2008 Olympics with two world champions in Rau’shee Warren and Demetrious Andrade and the least experienced athlete on the team won a medal and that was exciting in some ways.  To see someone just picking up the sport less than three years ago to going to an Olympic medal shows the possibilities in amateur boxing.  We’ve been able to retain two members who competed in Beijing in Rau’shee Williams and Reynell Williams.  We have so much talent in the younger boxers, but they turn professional pretty quickly so that’s one of the challenges that we face. So to have two athletes return and if he makes the 2012 team, Rau’shee will be the first U.S. boxer in history to go to three Olympic Games.

BoxingScene.com:  How about Robert Shannon?

USA Boxing:  He made the 1980 team and the 84 team so that was two Olympics. Rau’shee was actually the second boxer to compete in two Olympic Games.  Davey Lee Armstrong participated in two Olympic games in72 and 76.  Robert made two Olympic teams and only boxed in one of them unfortunately because of the boycott. 

BoxingScene.com:  Warren should be a favorite to win it in London. 

USA Boxing:  He should be.  It’s hard, he went into China favored to win and obviously he didn’t get the outcome he wanted and I think just to have Rau’shee’s presence in with a lot of the younger kids is going to be helpful.  Just having him around to tell the kids what its like to compete in the Olympics is going to have a huge impact.  We are going to change some things moving forward with our coaching staff and have more personal coach interaction.  We just hired our first high performance director late last year and right now we are looking for a national coach, but that won’t be named until June. It’s definitely a rebuilding process right now.

BoxingScene.com:  What about the pact with Oscar De La Hoya and Golden Boy Promotions.  Tell me about that partnership.

USA Boxing:  It’s a strategic partnership and Oscar met with some of our Olympians when they returned from China.  We went out.  We took some of the Olympians to the Casamayor fight in Las Vegas and they had a chance to meet Oscar.  He’s also going to be serving as the official spokesperson for our Gloves Not Guns Program which is being launched in several cities this year which is a program to recruit young boxers to take people off the streets and give them a positive way to spend their time.   So it’s not as much as a sponsorship as a strategic alliance and that’s what we are calling it. 

BoxingScene.com:  Do you think amateur boxing is losing more and more of the better athletes to some of the more commercialized sports?

USA Boxing:  I think that particularly with bigger boxers, that with football and basketball and those sports, definitely take from the athletes that might have competed in amateur boxing in the past.  Also the growth of MMA is also pulling some of our athletes away, but we are looking to combat that and looking at some membership recruitments such as Gloves Not Guns to pull young athletes into amateur boxing.  Right now we are in a rebuilding process.  A lot of times what happens people watch the Olympic Games and want to pick up whatever sport it is.  I’m sure swimming’s numbers have gone up following Beijing. 

We just have to keep using the tools that we have while reaching out to our alumni and trying to get them involved.  We had a coaching symposium last week where we brought in some of the top coaches to the Olympic training center and picked everybody’s brain as to what they feel like is the best direction to go in and when you pull thirty-plus coaches in one room there are definitely a lot of opinions flying around, but we are trying to get input from people that have had success. Andre Ward, our last gold medalist took part it in. 

BoxingScene.com:  In 1988 after Roy Jones was robbed of the gold medal, they implemented the computer scoring system in 1992 in order to make the scoring process more objective and the system hasn’t been very affective, will there be computer scoring in London in 2012?

USA Boxing:  Right now that’s in the hands of our international Federation and that’s called AIBA and from what I understand we are most likely going to stay on computer scoring at this point.  I think there are most likely going to be tweaks made to the system, but I believe we are going to end up with computer scoring, but we’ll wait to get official word from the international federation on what scoring system is going to be used going into London and beyond.  Obviously it’s a challenge that our amateur boxers face, adapting to the scoring system, and we are really working with the younger fighters trying to get everybody working with the computer scoring as much as possible so it’s not so foreign to them when they get to the National level as well as the international level. Generally what wins in the United States isn’t what wins internationally so we want to get our athletes on the same page so it’s not such a transition when they compete internationally. 

BoxingScen.com:  Who were some of the coaches that attended that meeting on the direction of the American Olympic program?

USA Boxing:  We had several of our past Olympic coaches, Al Mitchell.  We pulled in personal coaches from our Olympic teams, Andre Ward, and his personal coach, Virgil Hunter, were both in attendance.  It was mainly coaches that created the athletes on the Olympic team.  So basically it was made up of coaches that have molded young men into Olympians.  We really want to work on our alumni outreach.  And try to get some of the athletes that have come to our program to come back and give their time to these young boxers, they have so much knowledge, and I know the young boxers really look up to them.  So we are working on getting some of our alumni back to come help our young boxers to give them knowledge and experience inside and outside the boxing ring to help us move forward.  We are really open to any thoughts and ideas and suggestions to move forward and have a better showing in London and beyond.

BoxingScene.com:  So do you have a list of possible candidates for 2012 coaching position?

USA Boxing:  We won’t select our Olympic coach for a couple years now.  With our national coach we just finished taking applications so we are looking to announce our national coach in June.  Another big change we are making is with our national championship.  Generally we have a junior Olympic national championship which is fifteen and sixteen year olds and then our USA boxing national championships which are senior level boxers. We are combining that event into one event, so we are having our USA boxing championships which is men, women, and junior Olympic boxers in Denver June 8th through the 13th so that will kick off our journey to London.                        

Notes:

Favorite Quote: - Former heavyweight contender Henry Cooper who was known for his propensity to bleed once commented, “What tells you it’s a bad one is the warm blood dripping down your body.”   

I don’t think the boxing fraternity would have criticized Barrera for quitting before the end of the fourth like it did with Robert Guerrero because Marco’s earned the right to take the safe way out after taking the hard road so many times. 

Without question the cut impacted Barrera’s performance, but the difference in speed and size was still evident from the get-go and I don’t think there is any way Barrera can beat the young Brit at this point. 

The Barrera-Khan undercard was solid and well-worth the 24.95 price tag.  I wish American promoters would put on fight cards as intriguing as the one Frank Warren put on. 

Jameel McCline is dangerous and I told Henry Ramirez that Arreola better be ready to go twelve rounds because McCline hasn’t been knocked out since the Wladimir Klitschko fight in 2002, which was really a mercy stoppage and he responded, “McCline is a good fighter and we’re going to knock out him out!”

Bob Arum said that the real violence in the border region is concentrated in Ciudad Juarez.  I guess he hasn’t heard of the Arrelano-Felix crime organization or isn’t aware of the fact that Tijuana Police Chiefs are regularly murdered.

As good as Manny Pacquiao is, his fight with Hatton will not do over 700,000 pay per view buys. 

Alex Camponovo, the general manager and matchmaker for Thompson Boxing said that Bradley would also like to face the winner of Hatton-Pacquiao and noted “Bradley will be able to exploit the chinks in Kendal Holt’s armor.  Every boxer has weaknesses; there aren’t too many boxers that are perfect like Floyd Mayweather.”     

It’s too bad because ESPN’s relationship with boxing has always been beneficial to the network which used its regular boxing series with Top Rank in the early eighties to legitimize it as a leader in television sports, but the ESPN website no longer has boxing at the top of its menu and has it down right below Women’s Basketball and High School sports.  Shame on you ESPN.

Brent Matteo Alderson, a graduate of UCLA, has been part of the staff at BoxingScene.com since 2004. Alderson's published work has appeared in publications such as Ring Magazine, KO, World Boxing, Boxing 2008, and Latin Boxing Magazine. Alderson has also been featured on the ESPN Classic television program “Who’s Number One?”  Please e-mail any comments to BoxingAficionado@aol.com