U.S. Files Protest After Boxer Is Disqualified for a Low Blow

The U.S. boxing team was hit below the belt again Tuesday.

It was all because a U.S. boxer had hit below the belt.

After that, the saga becomes so confusing that even the president of the International Boxing Federation, Col. Don Hull, couldn’t explain it.

“I’m going to a party with my wife,” he said finally.

All in all, the U.S. boxers have found little good about the Goodwill Games. It began even before they left home, when the Pentagon prohibited 11 members of the team, 10 from the military and a Defense Department civilian, from competing here.

For that decision, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger has been characterized in the Soviet press as a villain for attempting to poison not only the Goodwill Games but also any hope for mutual understanding between the two countries.

Calling him “Cap the Knife,” Komsomolskaya Pravda said Tuesday that Weinberger has “one more time tried to sink his nasty instrument in the back of cultural cooperation between the USA and the USSR.”

Boxing, particularly at the amateur level, requires skill, and occasionally grace is exhibited, but this could be the first time it has been called cultural. Swan Lake it’s not.

Nevertheless, Sovietsky Sport, another newspaper that has been critical of Weinberger, probably was right when it said that he hurt the U.S. boxers more than he did the Goodwill Games.

Of the first four Americans to reach the semifinals, three lost to Soviets Tuesday night at the Olympic complex. That includes touted heavyweight Michael Bent, who beat Soviet champion Alexander Yagubkin in the world championship bouts last May in Reno. But Bent was easily beaten here by another Soviet, Vladimir Balay.

Nine more Americans will fight in the semifinals Thursday.

Or is it 10?

The United States has filed a formal protest over Tuesday’s disqualification of Harvey Richards, who fights in the 178-pound class.

Richards, of Springfield, Ill., appeared to be winning easily in the second round of his quarterfinal bout against Niels Hausgaard Madsen, a good Dane but not a great one, when the American hit below the belt.

Madsen clutched his, uh, stomach and fell to both knees, at which time the Soviet referee, Yuri Frolev, gave the Dane an eight count. Madsen was on his feet by the count of three, having been stunned but otherwise not hurt.

Instead of starting the fight again, however, Frolev polled the five judges on whether it was a low blow. They voted, 4-1, that it was, which means that Richards should have been penalized a point. The referee could have done that without polling the judges.

What Frolev did, though, was stop the fight, awarding it to Madsen.

According to international rules, the fight should have been stopped only if the referee had ruled that the blow was intentional or if the Dane had been unable to continue.

U.S. Coach Roosevelt Sanders said that it was a worse call than the one that cost American Evander Holyfield a berth in the final at the 1984 Summer Olympics, where Holyfield was disqualified for hitting a Yugoslav boxer after the referee had told them to break.

“That one felt worse because it was the Olympics,” said Sanders, an assistant coach with that team. “But as far as the decision goes, this one was the worst I’ve ever seen.”

When U.S. officials appealed to the three-member jury, the American team captain, Pat Duffy, said that Frolev admitted that it had been an accidental foul and that the Danish fighter had not been incapacitated.

“The referee panicked,” Duffy said.

So what was the decision of the three-man jury, one from the Soviet Union, one from the United States and one from Ireland?

The jury declared that the referee’s decision would stand and then disqualified the referee for the rest of the tournament.

Dissatisfied, U.S. officials filed a formal protest, which requires a $50 fee, in dollars, not rubles.

Duffy contended that since the jury found the referee at fault, it should have counted the points from the judges’ scorecards at the time of the incident and awarded the bout to the leader.

He assumed that would be Richards, although Duffy admitted: “I might be leading with my chin.”

Duffy said that members of the international federation’s executive committee who are present here would make the decision.

But Hull, who is president of the international federation, said it was not the executive committee’s responsibility.

“Maybe there’s an executive committee of the Goodwill Games,” he said. “This has nothing to do with the international federation. It’s between the U.S. and the USSR.”

Whoever makes the decision will have to make it by Thursday morning.

As for relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, they have been excellent during the boxing competition. In all close decisions, Soviet judges have given the advantage to the Americans, leading to charges from other countries that the United States and the Soviet Union are conspiring to advance as many of their boxers as possible to Saturday night’s finals for television purposes.

In the 112-pound class Tuesday night, Arthur Johnson of East St. Louis, Ill., won a 3-2 decision over Venezuela’s David Griman. The three judges who voted for Johnson all were from the Communist Bloc--the Soviet Union, East Germany and Bulgaria. The Soviet judge had them equal on points but ruled that Johnson was more equal.

“I would say the judging’s been fair all the way,” Duffy said.

Johnson was the only American winner Tuesday night. The three others in the first night of semifinals lost convincingly to Soviet fighters.

Ricky Royal, fighting in the 147-pound class, lost on a third-round technical knockout to Alexander Ostrovsky. Mike Padilla, one of two U.S. heavyweights in the semifinals, fought before Bent but for only 2 minutes 5 seconds before Sanders threw in the towel. The winner was Ramzan Sibiev.

“I think what happened to Harvey took something out of us as a whole team,” Johnson said. “When we saw them do this to one of our guys, we were thinking maybe we could be the next one.”

But Johnson said that Richards took it better than he expected.

“He went to the disco,” Johnson said.