Boxing / Earl Gustkey : Olympic Gaffe Still Haunts Adams

The man across the table was talking about a painful memory, one he has been carrying around for about 6 weeks.

“There’s not a day that I don’t think about it,” he said. “It hurts every time it pops into my mind, and I’m sure it’ll be with me the rest of my life.”

Ken Adams, coach of the U.S. Olympic boxing team, took all the heat when he and his assistant, Hank Johnson, misread a bout schedule early in the Seoul Olympics, causing middleweight Anthony Hembrick to be scratched from the tournament when he didn’t get him to the arena on time.

“What hurts most of all is the implication by some people that it was a careless mistake,” Adams said. “I’m the kind of guy who double-checks everything. And we did on that bout schedule, too. I read it twice, and so did Hank Johnson, and we both agreed on when that bout was supposed to happen.

“But it was a confusing schedule. It had bouts scheduled for two different rings on the same sheet of paper . . . and we just misread it.”

Adams was in Las Vegas last week to finish negotiations with promoter Bob Arum on the pro debuts of several members of the Olympic team.

Growing weary of the same old faces in boxing? New ones are on the way.

In 1984, half of the Olympic boxing team turned pro in one night--”Night of Gold,” they called it--at Madison Square Garden. This time, Arum is planning a similar show in Las Vegas for mid-February.

Adams will soon move from Killeen, Tex., to Las Vegas. Several Olympic team boxers will join him, as well as others who were in the Olympic picture during the team selection process last summer.

Arum has put together a group of half a dozen Las Vegas businessmen--including Jerry Tarkanian, the Nevada Las Vegas basketball coach--who will manage and help promote a “team” of Adams’ Olympians.

The management group will pay the salaries of Adams, Johnson and the chief trainer. The boxers will receive signing bonuses, salaries and percentages of gate receipts. The group even has plans to build its own gym, Adams said.

So far, two gold medalists--bantamweight Kennedy McKinney and heavyweight Ray Mercer--are committed, according to Adams, and several others are expected to sign with Arum. Kenya’s gold-medal winning welterweight, Robert Wangila, is also on board.

Roy Jones of Pensacola, Fla., the light middleweight who missed a gold medal in a much-criticized 3-2 decision, is not signed, however, and the word on Jones is that he’s shopping himself around and insisting that his father be part of any pro deal.

“He came to us, and when he got to the part about his father, we said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ ” said New Jersey-based promoter Dan Duva.

“We told him the same thing,” said Adams.

Light-heavyweight gold medalist Andrew Maynard and super-heavyweight silver medalist Riddick Bowe are still negotiating with several groups. Light-flyweight Michael Carbajal of Phoenix, a silver medalist, may also join Team Las Vegas.

Mercer is still in the Army in West Germany and may not be discharged until Jan. 1. Alfred Cole, who came in second in the Olympic team box-off to Maynard, will be discharged from the Army in December and will join the Arum group.

Adams, 47, recently retired as a master sergeant after serving 30 years in the Army.

Boxing Notes

From the Las Vegas notebook: Art Aragon, the original Golden Boy of Los Angeles in the 1950s, was livid. Donny (Golden Boy) Lalonde was using his moniker in promoting his fight last Monday with Sugar Ray Leonard. Said Aragon: “He’s a fraud! And he besmirches the name, whatever that means.”

Remember the name: Rafael Pineda. He’s a Colombian junior welterweight who raised his record to 19-0 with a second-round technical knockout last week at a Showboat Hotel show. Pineda, promoted by Dan Duva, is the goods. His jab is a thunderclap, and so are his left hooks to the head and body. He’s silky smooth and extremely strong. None of boxing’s three governing bodies have Pineda rated yet, but Duva says he’s ready for big game.

“I’d like to get him Jose Luis Ramirez, if Ramirez wants to fight again,” Duva said. Ramirez lost his World Boxing Council lightweight title when he was badly beaten Oct 29 by Julio Cesar Chavez in Las Vegas. . . . Speaking of Chavez-Ramirez, the laugh of the week goes to the announcement by the WBC that it was studying the stoppage of the bout, after Chavez’s accidental butt cut Ramirez’s forehead. Referee Richard Steele, on the advice of Dr. Flip Homansky, stopped the bout in the 11th round. By that point, Chavez had turned the bout in a near slaughter. Better the WBC should take a close look at the judges, Rudy Jordan and Lou Tabat, each of whom had Chavez winning by only 2 points.

Michael Bass, who spent much of last week getting the word out to boxing writers that he, and not Don King, would promote Chavez’s bouts in the future, neglected to point out one item. Seems he served 13 months at the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary in 1983 and 1984, after conviction on eight counts of mail fraud. King, meanwhile, denies that he has lost promotional rights to Chavez. “I’ve been his exclusive promoter for 5 years and I still am,” King said. “I talked to Julio yesterday, and he told me he would end his career with me as his promoter.”

Maybe so, but Bass and Chavez’s attorney, Paco Penaloza, said Chavez was flying to Los Angeles Friday to discuss, among other things, a fight with Roger Mayweather. . . . Virtually everyone gave Leonard high marks for his bravery after he crawled off the deck in the fourth round to knock out Lalonde in 9. And several days before , Lalonde had actually called the shot.

During a meeting with writers, Lalonde, after predicting that he would beat Leonard, said: “Ray has a good chin, but it’s his heart that carries him. He has great courage. Mentally, he has summoned himself to levels beyond what he’s physically capable of doing. After 8 rounds against (Marvin) Hagler, he was dead. He just kept digging down.”

Mike Trainer, Leonard’s lawyer, on how Leonard achieved financial independence in his first pro bout, in 1977: “He wanted to be independent as a fighter, so we incorporated him right off. He needed some money, so I loaned him $1,000 and I got about $20,000 more in loans from some friends. Ray got $40,000 for his first bout on ABC, he paid me and everyone else off, and he’s been independent ever since.”

Dave Wolf, Lalonde’s manager, on the difference in hospitality at Las Vegas and Port of Spain, Trinidad, where Lalonde took away Leslie Stewart’s light-heavyweight title in May: “So far, no one has come up to me with a machete and suggested to me that it would be in our best interests if Donny lost.”