No Goodwill but a Way : Military Boxer Derrick Wilson, Denied Trip to Moscow, Takes Consolation in Festival

Spec. 4 Derrick Wilson, an Army communications specialist from Ft. Bragg, N.C., said it was the most difficult order he has had to obey.

When Jim Fox, the executive director of the U.S. Amateur Boxing Federation, made the announcement to the 11 military boxers and officials that they would not be allowed to compete in the Goodwill Games at Moscow, Wilson winced.

“He came into the room and he said he had some news that concerned everyone, but I knew that it would be us, the military,” Wilson said.

Wilson and the military boxers, preparing for the game, were training with the U.S. team in Colorado Springs, Colo. Two days before they were scheduled to leave, Fox told the boxers that the Pentagon would not allow military personnel to take part in the competition because it was a commercial venture. The Goodwill Games were paid for, in part, by the Turner Broadcasting System.

“I can’t say I agree with the decision because I wanted to go so bad,” Wilson said. “But I’m a soldier in the U.S. Army and I have to comply with whatever orders are given to me.”

The 21-year-old welterweight got two bones thrown his way in the wake of that disappointment, though. The military boxers were invited to the Mayor’s Cup in Washington, D.C., and also were given the opportunity to box here in the U.S. Olympic Festival. There are 10 service boxers here.

“Nothing can take the place of not going, but at least we got to box after all,” Wilson said, sitting in his room in the athletes’ dorm at Rice University. “Going to Washington was special.”

It was special to Wilson because it gave him a chance to recall anew the memory of his father--at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Wilson’s father, Jerome, died in Vietnam when Derrick was 3.

Since then, Wilson has followed his father. He enlisted after high school with the thought of joining the 82nd Airborne, his father’s old unit. He has. He is stationed at Ft. Bragg, where his father was stationed when Derrick was born.

No one in his family had been to the monument.

“Well, then I saw my father’s name on the wall. I was drawn to it. I was kind of stiff. I knew what I was going to see. I knew what everything was going to be like. But it still kind of stiffened me. You kind of fight the feeling.

“I stayed there for a while. I put a piece of paper over it and (with a pencil) rubbed the name off--for my mother. One day I’ll get a chance to take my whole family there to see it.”

Wilson’s boxing career has been a ragged series of setbacks, from which the cheerful boxer has seemingly rebounded.

External scars exist, though, and not all of them from boxing. The most noticeable runs from the knee to the ankle of his right leg, an indelible reminder of a bout he lost to a drunken driver.

Wilson was posted to Ft. Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne and the Army boxing team, in April of 1984. He requested assignment to the boxing team. He was tried and found wanting. Request denied. That didn’t stop him from watching all the matches on the base, though, and one night he was jogging back to the barracks after a fight.

“All I can tell you is what was told to me,” Wilson said. “I don’t remember what happened.”

What they told him was that a drunken driver hit him from behind, dragged him for about 60 yards, then drove away, leaving Wilson sprawled on the road.

“The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital in tremendous pain,” he said.

Small wonder. He had a broken collarbone, a broken shoulder blade, fractures of both elbows and two broken bones in his right leg.

The leg injuries were the worst. Doctors put a pin in from knee to ankle. A circulatory problem developed and, despite three operations, blood was not flowing to his right foot. Unknown to Wilson, his doctors warned his mother of the possible need to amputate the foot. Eventually, though, circulation was restored to the foot and Wilson began recuperating.

“Sitting in that cold hospital, looking up at the ceiling, you do a lot of thinking,” Wilson said. “It was very painful. I think that’s where I started realizing what boxing meant to me. I saw that if I could make it here (in the hospital), then there ain’t nothing to boxing. I was looking forward to getting out so I could box again.”

A year later, after nine months in a cast, Wilson did box. He could barely stand on his right leg, though, and was forced to change to a stand-up style to compensate for his loss of mobility.

“Even now, I’m always concerned about the leg,” he said. “Never in the world do I want to go through that pain again.”

He worked, though, and improved and was finally accepted by the Army team in 1985.

And he has done well, bum leg and all. He was the 1985 U.S. amateur champion and this year was second in the Army tournament, as well as in the U.S. amateur tournament and the World Championship Box-Off.

The Festival competition was supposed to redeem Wilson after the disappointment of the Goodwill Games. Yet he met with another setback here, losing a semifinal bout with Golden Gloves champion Frank Liles.

“I wasn’t myself in that fight,” Wilson said. “I want to have a successful amateur career and maybe turn pro. But if that doesn’t happen, I am still a professional soldier. I’m a paratrooper, a real soldier. Like my dad.”