U.S. Boxers Fight Team Training Methods, to Little Avail

Breakfast was tense. The boxers gathered around a patio table outside their Sacramento hotel as a strong wind blew through the pine trees.

In a few hours these young fighters, America’s best amateurs, would be going up against an experienced Soviet team. A national television audience would be watching.

The boxers spoke quietly, but angrily, among themselves, away from the national team coaches. They talked about the training camp where the team had spent two weeks preparing for the Soviets.

“In two weeks, we only sparred three times and only two rounds each time,” super-heavyweight Alex Garcia said. “I went to the coaches myself and told them I wanted to spar every day, but they have their routine down and they’re not going to let anyone change it.”

Another boxer, Kenneth Gould, complained about being kept away from his father and coach, Nathaniel, during the crucial days before the bout. The fighters’ personal coaches weren’t allowed in the national team camp.

“Not to take anything away from them, but the Olympic coaches haven’t been training with you, they don’t know what to tell the boxers,” said Gould, a world champion at 147 pounds and probably the United States’ best amateur boxer.

“I’d rather train at home,” Garcia said.

On that Saturday last July, the Americans won only two of eight matches against the Soviets. Even the team’s winners, Gould and Darin Allen, complained of fighting sluggishly.

Months have passed since the USA-USSR bouts in Sacramento, but the boxers remain bitter.

“We should have beat them,” said Allen, the world amateur champion at 165 pounds. “We were in good shape, but we were rusty. We needed that ring work and we didn’t get it.”

Garcia, a Los Angeles boxer ranked No. 2 in the world, was so frustrated by the experience that he has vowed never to fight for the United States again.

Although United States national team coaches saw gold in the 24-year-old fighter’s future, and Garcia himself said he was training with an eye on the 1988 Olympic Games, he says now: “I won’t fight for the U.S. anymore,” adding that he will soon turn professional.

Such grumblings are nothing new to the amateur boxing scene in America. They have revived a lingering controversy surrounding the way this country’s amateur fighters prepare for international competition.

The boxers selected to represent the United States are brought together to train as a team in the weeks leading to a tournament. They are kept away from their personal coaches and work instead with national trainers.

But boxing is more an individual than a team sport, and each fighter has his own preferences and needs when it comes to training. Some require daily sparring, others strategy work. Some must be constantly encouraged, others harangued.

At camp, the team members run through an unvarying routine of drills. There is little accommodation for individual needs, and that has angered the boxers.

The national team coaches say that fighters have been complaining about camp for as long as anyone can remember. The problem came to a head most recently before the 1984 Olympics, when several of the top American boxers left the Olympic Village to train in a Santa Monica gym with their personal coach. Their complaints were similar to those of today’s amateurs.

“It’s hard to train at home for so long and then all of a sudden go up there and do things differently with Olympic coaches,” said Mark Breland, a gold medal winner at the 1984 Olympic Games. “Whatever is going to make the fighter the best fighter he can be, let him do it.”

The USA Amateur Boxing Federation selects and prepares the teams that represent the United States in competition ranging from the Olympics to dual-nation meets like the one in Sacramento. For years, the ABF’s training camps were set up at the competition sites. In 1981, the federation moved into the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

ABF officials say it is impossible to bring 15 or 20 fighters into camp and accommodate all of their needs. They say somebody is always going to be unhappy about something.

“You get put in a position where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” said Bruce Mathis, the assistant to the ABF’s executive director. “Our program has always been controversial and it probably always will be.”

National coaches Pat Nappi and Roosevelt Sanders have handled the American teams for years. Their teams have always won gold medals. Yet, they have had to listen to fighters’ gripes.

“They have to go to camp to get ready,” Sanders said. “If they didn’t, we’d just be getting a bunch of guys together and hoping for the best. I’m responsible for these guys and I have to make sure they are ready.”

At Colorado Springs, fighters are taught the nuances of international boxing, Sanders said. They view videotapes of opponents. There is a sports medicine center and a team psychiatrist. Visiting experts offer tips on what to expect concerning living and competing conditions in foreign countries.

The boxers like the camp’s facilities. Sanders and Nappi are widely respected, too. But their training methods, especially their long-standing policy on sparring, are not.

“We are trying to get away from too much sparring because we have found that a lot of injuries occur in the gym,” Sanders said.

Conditioning is the top priority. Road work has replaced ring work at the camp. Gym time is devoted to hitting the heavy bag and shadow boxing. Boxers say their pleas for more sparring have been denied.

“Sparring gets your reflexes up and prepares you mentally,” said Johnny Vasquez, a 119-pounder from Phoenix who represented the United States at the Goodwill Games in Moscow last summer. “At camp we talk about this. We say, ‘I wish I was home so I could get some good sparring.’ Especially when you lose, you say, ‘Damn, I wish I was training at home.’ ”

Breland, now a ranking pro welterweight, said he couldn’t stand to miss sparring as an amateur.

“I would train at Kronk (his home gym in Detroit) before the camp,” he said. “I’d box seven, eight rounds a day so I’d be in shape. I showed up late to camp a few times. Sometimes I didn’t go to camp until two or three days before the fight.”

The boxers contend that sparring injuries are a necessary risk. Both Allen and Garcia said lack of sparring hurt them against the Soviets.

“I felt frustrated, out of time, slow,” Garcia said of his bout, which he lost by decision. “I couldn’t throw punches.”

The 1984 Olympic team members complained publicly when Nappi and Sanders limited sparring in pre-Olympic camp. But Sanders is quick to point out that the team won nine gold medals, a silver and a bronze.

“The athlete may feel he needs more sparring,” the coach said. “But the coach is on the ball and he knows when the athlete is ready. We don’t want to overdo it.”

Some of the people involved believe that the conflict could be settled if personal coaches were allowed to attend training camps.

“I don’t care if you have the best coach in the world, you can’t get a guy ready in two weeks if you don’t know anything about him,” said Nathaniel Gould, who coaches his son, Kenneth. “There are fighters with different styles, and the same coach is teaching them all. They get the guys all confused.”

The issue is a hot one because it reaches beyond the technicalities of training. Close relationships often form between fighter and coach.

Nathaniel Gould, for instance, has been working with Kenneth since he was 12. And Blinky Rodriguez took Garcia into the gym two years ago, after the fighter had been released from prison, where Garcia had served five years for voluntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of a rival San Fernando gang member. The two have since grown as close as brothers.

Said Vasquez, of his coach, Willy Bourchert: “I really shine when I’m with my trainer. He makes me go over and over my moves. At camp, they don’t teach you anything.”

The boxers say they can forget important lessons or fall back into bad habits during those two weeks in camp.

The problem is not confined to United States boxers. Before the 1984 Olympics, Canada’s top two amateurs, light middleweight Shawn O’Sullivan and heavyweight Willie deWit, agreed to compete in the Games only after their personal coaches were named as national team coaches.

No such concessions are made for United States fighters. Sanders maintains that it would be impossible to run camp with individual trainers for each of the 12 fighters who make up a national team.

“If I’ve got 12 athletes and 12 different coaches in that gym, there’s no way I could teach them anything,” he said. “It would be a helter-skelter outfit.”

According to Sanders, much of the controversy has been stirred up by personal coaches envious of missing out on the excitement and attention of the Olympics and other international matches. Indeed, most of the personal coaches interviewed said it was unfair that they are excluded from their boxers’ biggest fights.

“These kids and their coaches have the opportunities of their lives,” said Emmanuel Steward, a former assistant to Nappi who coached several members of the 1984 Olympic team and works with professionals Thomas Hearns and Milton McCrory. “If the kids can make the Olympics, it could change their lives. If you have trainers who can come out and train their own kids, let them. These kids need the individual attention.”

Replied Sanders: “There’s an ego thing, and that’s natural. For myself and Nappi, there was glory at the Olympic Games. But there’s nothing after the Games. Mark Breland’s coach is making $40,000 or $50,000 a month. I’m still driving an old, beat-up Ford.”

Pressure from fighters and their coaches has brought some change. After the 1984 Games, the ABF agreed to let personal coaches work their fighters’ corners in world amateur tournaments and other international matches. Personal coaches are not allowed, though, at the Olympic and Pan American Games. And they are still barred from camp.

“We can’t have an individual out there working by himself,” Sanders said. “We have to work as a team.”

Team spirit is a term that may sound out of place in boxing. Some fighters and coaches say team spirit does not exist in their sport. Sanders maintains that it is essential in amateur competition.

“At the Goodwill Games in Moscow, the team got into that ring 8,000 miles from home and you had 40,000 Soviets hollering for the Russian boxer,” he said of the 24-man American team. “But we had 23 teammates yelling for our guy and he could hear that. That’s where team spirit comes in.”

Some of the boxers agree, some don’t. Steve McCrory, a gold medalist in the 1984 Olympics, said that during the two weeks of camp before a match, teammates can boost one another’s confidence.

“It’s important because when you’re in the locker room you know everyone is behind you,” said Breland, McCrory’s former teammate. “You’re going to have that spirit to win.”

The hard work of conditioning, working through the same drills together, is what builds team spirit, according to Sanders. He says it helps the fighters become friends.

Others argue that most of the top amateur boxers already know each other well, having competed as youngsters in the same junior and Golden Gloves tournaments.

Garcia said he doesn’t believe in team spirit.

“This isn’t baseball or football,” he said. “When you’re in the ring, you’re in there alone. There’s no team.”

Several coaches said they regard Sanders’ argument for team spirit as merely an excuse to bring boxers into camp.

“Hey, the ABF coaches have to protect their jobs,” said Rodriguez, Garcia’s coach. “They get the fighters in there for two weeks and try to act like they perform miracles.”

Steward agreed: “The team spirit is that they are all against the (national) coaches. Those guys run a program where they don’t give the kids the best opportunity to win.”

Despite a history of dissent, there won’t be any drastic changes at the ABF training camp. At least not for the next few years. As long as American boxers continue to win gold medals, the program will continue unchanged.

“The bottom line is that this training camp is set up specifically to improve the athlete’s skills so he can be a world-class athlete,” Sanders said. “My thing is to get wins for the USA. If we get that, everybody’s happy.”

And, in the end, the boxers’ complaints may well be futile. They have no choice: If they want to fight internationally, they must compete on the United States team, and that means they must show up for camp.

“I’m willing to go because I want an Olympic gold medal,” 112-pound boxer Arthur Johnson said. “You really don’t want to. You have to learn to like it.”