BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 9 : COMMENTARY : Computer Scoring: Garbage In, Out

They sat there, these three bureaucrats, and you could just tell what was on their minds: If this thing doesn’t work, no more free rides. No more junkets to Spain and Korea and Australia. No more gravy train.

They were supposed to be fighting for Eric Griffin, the U.S. 106-pounder who was a winner Saturday against Spain’s Rafael Lozano at the time each of the five ringside judges pressed the buttons on his computer keypad, and a loser by the time the information made its way to the scoreboard. And still, not one of them--not Jim Fox, the executive director of USA Boxing; nor Paul Konnor, one of its vice presidents; nor Buzz Buzalsky, the team manager--had the guts to stand up and tell the truth. The computer, the scoring system, does not work. It is a pile of high-tech junk operated by low-tech judges. It is a bust.

But even though their final appeal was turned down, they can’t say that, because if they do, then Olympic boxing is dead.

After the debacle of Seoul, when three corrupt and biased judges conspired to cheat Roy Jones out of a gold medal, the International Amateur Boxing Assn. (AIBA) came up with its cockamamie computer system, which, believe it or not, represents boxing’s last hope to remain in the Olympics beyond Atlanta in 1996. The International Olympic Committee plans to review all sports before the 2000 games, and none will get a closer look than boxing, which has been an Olympic sport since 1904.

“We will have to see how the boxing tournament goes in Barcelona,” IOC Sports Director Gilbert Felli said. Felli works for IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who hates boxing and is the leader of the anti-boxing lobby. He came to the fights one day last week for the first time in his life and said afterward, “It is not as bad as I thought.”

Good thing he was not here Saturday when judge Keith Dadzie of Ghana watched Griffin and Lozano trade perhaps 200 punches in three rounds, and decided to hit his keypad 13 times. That was a tough day’s work for Dadzie, who had just come off a two-day suspension for scoring consecutive 0-0 rounds in two fights. Said United Press International’s Dave Raffo: “Dadzie hasn’t driven his car ever since his wife bought him that automatic garage door opener.”

And it is fortunate that Samaranch was not in Joventut Pavilion the night Benjamin Ngaruiya of Kenya knocked Javier Calderon’s headguard clear out of the ring with a right hand not even Dadzie could miss--and got no points for the round. Body punches are routinely ignored. Nearly 20 bouts have ended in shutouts. Still to come, no doubt, is the ultimate indictment of the system--the punch that knocks a fighter cold and goes unrecognized by the judges.

“Well, at least they’re getting the winners right,” said one fight reporter who is an avid proponent of the system and amateur boxing.

Not always, and even that is not enough. It should be noted that the Griffin fight was not that of Roy Jones II in Seoul, but a good, close fight that could have gone either way, despite all five judges having hit their keypads 31 times more for the American than for his opponent, although the final score came up 6-5 in favor of Lozano.

This is the real problem here, that the final scores have had no apparent connection with what has happened in the ring. It’s why the scoring at the boxing venue has been the joke of these Olympics. In their attempt to eliminate corrupt decisions, the AIBA has tried to reduce boxing to a mere numbers game. To do it, they devised a system so complex and unwieldy that no one could make it workable, certainly not the aging, poorly trained, politically appointed group of judges that travel as part of this global carnival.

Konnor was asked if it was reasonable to expect these men to recognize and record, instantaneously, a flurry between two mini-flyweights who can throw a dozen punches each in the space of three seconds. “I think I could,” Konnor said. “I don’t know about some of my colleagues.”

Nearby, Griffin, whose case was closed by the AIBA’s executive committee Sunday, shook his head in disbelief. He knows that computers are not the answer to Olympic boxing’s woes. The problem is the AIBA and its cronyism and “continental rotation” judging system that insures every continent is represented among the judges, regardless of competence.

That is why Pakistan, which has no significant boxing program but is the home of AIBA President Anwar Chowdrhy, has three judges and the United States has one. That is why Dadzie and a dozen or so other judges who prefer to push no buttons because they have no clue about scoring continue to work these Games. This is supposed to insure fairness, but instead guarantees incompetence.

And instead of taking the logical action--doing a careful review of the work of these judges and sweeping out the incompetent--the AIBA looks instead to a computer keypad to bail it out, to keep its gravy train going.

Said Konnor: “This is a system that could be foolproof.”

Sure, if they got rid of all the fools.

* PROTEST DENIED: The book on Eric Griffin was closed by AIBA, which denied the appeal of his loss to Spain’s Rafael Lozano. C8