BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS: DAY 3 : Fear of Failure : Lingering Anger Over the Scoring Disasters at 1988 Seoul Games Seems to Be Intimidating Boxing Judges

The question has arisen whether the judges are under more pressure than the fighters in the Olympic boxing tournament.

As the 339-bout tournament finished its second day Monday, it seems that the 37 judges, representing 33 countries, are more reluctant to score a blow than a nervous boxer might be to throw a lead right.

No one is certain why, but the International Amateur Boxing Assn. (AIBA) judges using the organization’s computer scoring system are producing scores that look like those of baseball games.

In Badalona, scores of 13-4, 5-3, 12-5, 14-2, 8-2 and 12-6 have been typical. There have even been three shutouts.

But many of these same judges also worked the last World Championships at Sydney, Australia, last November and came up with scores of 37-24, 29-28, 49-47, 40-13, 49-29 and 49-47.

In Badalona, after 59 bouts, the highest winning point total was 21. On Sunday, American Eric Griffin, a light-flyweight, scored a 14-2 victory over Fausto Mercedes of the Dominican Republic.

That’s like holding the U.S. men’s basketball team to double digits. Griffin, a world champion 106-pounder and a favorite for the gold medal, won his bouts at the U.S. Olympic trials in June by scores of 94-12, 70-16 and 70-14.

What’s going on?

“There’s no one answer, but you can attribute a lot of it to the pressure on the judges in the Olympic environment,” said Jerry Dusenberry of Portland, Ore., the only U.S. judge-referee here.

The computer system, developed after International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch told AIBA in 1988 to rid itself of biased Olympic scoring or face expulsion from the Games, consists of four-button consoles at each of the five judges’ ringside seats.

If a boxer from the blue corner scores with a punch to the chin of a boxer from the red corner, the judge presses the blue button. It’s really that simple. However, a blow must be registered by three of the five judges within one second for it to be accepted by the computer.

“The judges in Sydney went into the computer system cold, with no pre-training,” said Jim Fox, USA Boxing’s executive director, trying to account for the lower scores.

“Here, there was a pre-Olympic tournament at the venue (in February) and with it was a two-week seminar on computer scoring. The Olympic judges and referees were selected from that seminar.”

But beneath the low scores, Dusenberry sees a layer of fear.

“Historically, judges have always been under a lot of pressure at the Olympics,” he said. “Their work has always been under more scrutiny at the Games than anywhere. Now, even more so, with what happened at Seoul.”

He referred to the gold-medal bout decisions that many felt unjustly deprived U.S. boxers Roy Jones and Michael Carbajal of Olympic championships. Most attributed them to biased judging.

Computer scoring, so the theory goes, makes it more difficult for a judge to manipulate scoring for political reasons. AIBA and U.S. amateur boxing officials believe that boxing, an Olympic sport since 1908, is safe through the Atlanta Olympics, but no one is sure beyond that.

“We’re all very concerned that a repeat of what happened in Seoul would put (amateur boxing) in a very, very serious situation,” Dusenberry said.

“Look at this arena (a 5,000-seat basketball arena, the smallest Olympic boxing venue since 1976). It’s a third-rate facility. We see this as a message.

“And that’s one reason, I think, why judges here are scoring so conservatively. No one wants to be the judge who turns in a strange score. They’re scoring only blows they see. They’re not assuming anything.”

Dusenberry said he believes the pressure on judges here is making them slow on the button.

“I’ve seen the printouts (of the scoring), and a lot of judges are simply hesitant--they’re not registering the blows within that one-second window,” he said.

Canadian AIBA representative Jerry Shears of Montreal expects scores to rise as the tournament goes on.

“The judges probably are feeling a lot of pressure, but I expect the scores to rise after a while,” he said. “When this is all ironed out (computerized scoring), it will be great for boxing. It’s a great achievement, to have brought boxing into the technical age.”

Karl-Heinz Wehr, AIBA general secretary, said Olympic scoring so far has been “very careful, very conservative.”

“The judging so far has been correct,” he said, through a translator. “We are quite happy.

“We keep telling our judges to score only correct blows, only blows that land in scoring areas with the white or knuckle-surface of the glove.

“We believe that the computer system has made the chances of incidents (such as the Jones and Carbajal decisions of Seoul) significantly less likely to happen.”