BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 6 : THIS TIME, IT’S NOT AMERICA’S MISTAKE

The winner of the Anthony Hembrick/Wylie Farrier memorial subway token for 1992 goes to Iranian light-heavyweight Kazemi Ali and his team manager for missing the bus to the Joventut Pavilion Wednesday, causing Ali to miss his bout against Asghar Muhammad of Pakistan.

As Muhammad stood alone in the ring, Ali suddenly burst in, dressed in trunks, shirt and ring shoes, but without gloves or handwraps. He bounded up the ring steps and gestured to the referee, apparently pleading to be allowed enough time to glove up. He also turned to shout at someone--presumably, whoever was responsible for the travel snafu--but the object of his wrath remained safely in the passageway and did not come into the arena.

“It was essentially a no-show, a Hembrick,” said Jerry Dusenberry, the U.S. referee-judge. “I heard him say, ‘I missed the bus.’ ”

At the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Hembrick, through a misreading of the bus schedule by team manager Farrier, missed the bus he should have taken and arrived at the gymnasium just as his first-round opponent was being awarded a walkover victory.

Despite Ali’s entreaties, under AIBA rules, a boxer must be ready to go within three minutes of the announcement of his bout, and Muhammad was declared the winner by a walkover, to the boos of the crowd. One young woman yelled down at the officials, “Come on, now, don’t you have a heart?”

The crowd seemed most disappointed by the fact that it had been deprived of the chance to witness something it had not seen in quite some time--a Muhammad-Ali fight.

* This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.