U.S. Amateur Boxing Championships : High School Junior, Soldier Pull Major Upsets

In two major upsets, a world champion and a fast-rising super-heavyweight prospect were beaten in the semifinals of the National Amateur Boxing Championships at the U.S. Olympic Training Center Thursday night.

The upsets:

--Kelcie Banks, 22-year-old world champion featherweight from Houston, viewed by almost everyone in amateur boxing as a lock for the Olympic team this year, lost a 3-2 decision to a little-known high school junior from St. Louis, Carl Daniels.

--Riddick Bowe, a fast-talking, hard-hitting Brooklyn super-heavyweight was knocked down twice and stopped in the second round by Robert Salters, a Fort Bragg, N.C., soldier who started boxing 16 months ago.

Banks’ defeat, in the five-day tournament’s semifinals, came a day after the only other world champion here, welterweight Kenneth Gould, lost in the quarterfinals.

Banks, who hadn’t lost to an American since the 1984 U.S. Nationals, wasn’t knocked out of the Olympic picture. He still figures to get an at-large invitation to compete in the Olympic trials in June at Concord, Calif.

However, there’s a courageous, almost cocky 17-year-old kid in Colorado Springs today who says he’ll beat Banks in Concord, too.

Daniels achieved the victory despite losing two points when referee Floyd East penalized him twice for ducking below Banks’ beltline. Afterward, Daniels called it a go-for-broke victory.

“I knew I had to apply all the pressure I could to have a chance to win a decision against a world champion,” he said.

“When they announced the decision, I figured he’d get it, since they took two points away from me. But I was wrong. I feel I beat him even up. I’ll beat him again in Concord, too.”

For Bowe, it seemed in the aftermath that his mouth finally got him in trouble. Bowe has a tendency, in trying to be cute with sportswriters, to belittle opponents. Salters reads newspapers.

“He was talkin’ trash about me, and that helped me mentally,” Salters said.

For this one, Team Fort Bragg was fired up. Salters and his Army coaches and trainers marched to the ring chanting, “The Army takes no prisoners!”

In the first round, Bowe and Salters were roughly even when, with 10 seconds left in the round, Salters, 25, caught the Brooklyn 20-year-old coming in and decked him with a short, straight right hand . . . and then the trim, 233-pound Salters fell on top of the 220-pound Bowe.

In the second, when Bowe wasn’t missing Salters’ head with his vaunted right hand, he fought passively, as if confused by Salters’ surprisingly quick lateral movement. Occasionally, Bowe connected with powerful left jabs, but couldn’t follow up with rights.

With one minute left in the second round, Bowe went down from a six-punch combination in a neutral corner. He arose, shakily, with a bleeding mouth, and protested angrily when referee Jerry Dusenberry stopped it.

And minutes later, when the decision was announced, the two fighters exchanged heated words at center-ring and had to be pulled apart.

Bowe may have been beaten, but his mouth was still in gear afterward.

“This is a small thing to a giant,” he said.

“I never got into a rhythm. He caught me with some good punches. The ones that put me down I didn’t see, obviously. If I’d seen ‘em, I wouldn’t have gone down. He was strong, determined. I didn’t take him lightly. I was surprised he was that good, though.”

Bowe has pointed to the 1988 Olympics since his mid-teens. His stock soared at the Pan American Games last summer when he won a bronze medal after a courageous but losing performance against the eventual gold medalist, Jorge Gonzales of Cuba.

Until Thursday night, he had stopped three straight opponents here inside of three rounds.

Banks, who won his world title at the 1986 World Championships in Reno, was also last summer’s Pan American Games gold medalist and was a two-time national champion.

He’s a 6-foot featherweight (125 pounds) and a classic, busy, stand-up boxer. Thursday night, he blamed a shoulder injury for the defeat.

“I’ve had a tight right shoulder since I got here,” he said. “I’ve had massages every day, and it hasn’t bothered me a lot. But tonight it tightened up in the first round and I just didn’t have any snap in my right hand.”

The scores for Daniels were 60-57, 59-57 and 59-57. Two judges gave it to Banks, 60-59 and 59-58.

In the second and third rounds, Daniels seemed to be rapidly tiring and several times seemed to be on the brink of going down. But on each such occasion, to the cheers of his St. Louis region teammates, he would bounce out of trouble, sneaking right hands on Banks’ jaw and rocking him several times.

Daniels goes for a national championship tonight in the finals at the Broadmoor Hotel. He meets Frank Pena of Aurora, Colo. Salters meets Kermit Fitzpatrick of Highland Park, Mich., for the super-heavy title.

Six national champions will be absent from tonight’s championship bouts.

Michael Carbajal beat one of them, Brian Lonon, in Thursday’s light-flyweight semifinals. Banks is out. Lightweight Charles Murray couldn’t make weight; welterweight Nick Kakouris lost in the preliminaries; light-middleweight Gerald McClellan lost in the quarterfinals, and heavyweight Charlton Hollis was stopped in the first round of Thursday’s semifinals by Ray Mercer.