Gold Doesn’t Always Glitter

He still watches the tape, a couple of times a month, by himself in a darkened New Jersey den, cheering into the emptiness.

He still looks at the gold medal, by himself, runs down to the bank and pulls it out and laughs as the manager gets nervous, you wanna touch it, go ahead, touch it.

His souvenirs of that glorious August day serve as motivation and inspiration.

They are also proof.

These days, he needs proof.

He is the only U.S. boxer to win a gold medal in the 1996 Olympics, yet hardly anybody outside of his hometown remembers that hearty little fighter named . . .

See?

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A couple of days before the giddy U.S. women’s soccer team came to town to make lasting sports history, David Reid stopped by last weekend with a sobering message.

Not all sports history lasts.

Not if it is a sport that only periodically flashes across the crowded sky.

Not if that streak isn’t supported by enough energy to defy the awesome natural force known as the human attention span.

“I was hotter back then,” Reid says, as if he needed to.

Three years after his stirring last-gasp knockout of Cuban Alfredo Duvergel to win the light-middleweight gold medal, he is not on the cover of magazines.

He is on FX, tonight, between reruns.

Three years after joining a club whose members include Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and Oscar De La Hoya, he is not fighting in glamorous events.

He is fighting five-time loser Kevin Kelly, defending a WBA super-welterweight title that many didn’t know he had.

Three years after starring in a “Rocky” remake--he was trailing 16-6 entering that final round, meaning only a knockout would give him the medal--Reid has not done one commercial, or signed with any major sponsors.

TV shows? Movies? Books?

Put it this way: Reid’s publicity trip to Hollywood last week was his first.

“His worldwide reputation extends to the Philadelphia mainline,” boxing historian Bert Sugar says.

It’s not as if he hasn’t worked. He is 12-0 against a roster that includes four former champions.

And it isn’t as if he can’t fight. There is talk of a unification match with another super-welterweight champion, former Olympic teammate Fernando Vargas. There are also mumblings that De La Hoya or Felix Trinidad would move up in class to fight Reid.

But as with all flashbulb champions--a quick blinding pop, then nothing--perception is reality.

And outside of Philadelphia and Atlantic City, N.J., where he fights--the perception is that Reid has disappeared.

“He is known, but not known,” Sugar says. “Everybody wonders, what the heck is he?”

For now, he is a man who admittedly made some marketing mistakes, and is eager to punch his way past them.

“Coming out of the Olympics . . . I would have done some things different,” Reid says.

None of them involves his actual gold-medal bout, which was part thriller and part tear-jerker, the seemingly perfect lead pass to a lifetime of fame.

Reid, a little-known kid from a poor Philadelphia neighborhood, had fallen behind in the first two rounds. He was repeatedly getting hit by the favored Duvergel’s left jab. He sat in his corner before the final round amid a silent crowd, a beaten man.

“Everybody in the place gave up,” remembers Al Mitchell, his coach and father figure.

But then through the haze, Mitchell spoke. Reid still remembers those words today.

“He told me to go for it, go for the knockout, that I’ve come too far to give up now,” Reid recalls. “And that’s what I thought when I got out there, of all I’ve been through, and how it couldn’t end this way.”

It didn’t. Duvergel made the cocky mistake of going for his own knockout when he didn’t need it. He got too close, and Reid unleashed 22 years of frustration with a right jab that knocked Duvergel to the canvas.

“All that anger finally came out,” Reid says.

Duvergel climbed to his feet, but he was judged to be too shaky to continue, and Reid was awarded the knockout only 35 seconds into the final round.

“One punch,” Reid says. “One punch changed everything.”

Well, at least as long as it took him to meet his family and friends in a tearful embrace upon his emotional homecoming at the Philadelphia airport.

Then he made his first mistake. Thinking that his story was good enough to tell itself, he didn’t hire an agent. What did a street kid need with an agent?

“I should have gotten one right away, I just didn’t think I needed one,” he says. “I would have done that differently.”

So he didn’t wave the flag on Jay Leno, or joke about the last punch with David Letterman, or even cut the ribbon at some silly supermarket.

“I didn’t get to do anything,” he says.

His second mistake was that he didn’t immediately fight again.

Because of two operations on a drooping left eyelid that still droops, he didn’t throw another official punch for more than seven months.

Perhaps he needed the operations, although it is difficult to see how they have helped. And did the process have to take so long?

The U.S. women’s soccer team has talked about taking off the next six weeks.

Reid would tell them to somehow stay in the ring.

“You are never bigger than the minute you win the medal,” he says. “After that . . . “

It also hurt him that NBC did not show the fight live, airing a taped version after midnight on the East Coast.

“He got no exposure to begin with,” Sugar says. “And since then, he has gotten less.”

So check out David Reid tonight on FX. A nice kid. A decent boxer. One day, maybe a star.

But for now, a one-in-a-million shot who is only one of a million.

He still watches the tape, a couple of times a month, by himself in a darkened New Jersey den, cheering into the emptiness.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com