Down for count, Olympic-style boxing cleans up act

In the sad farce that Olympic-style boxing has become over the last two decades, globally and domestically, it would be hard to determine which of the organizations responsible was the bigger joke.

Was it USA Boxing, with its financial improprieties of the 1990s, its seven temporary or full-time executive directors since 2001, its takeover by the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2002 and the consistently declining performance of its athletes?

Or was it the International Boxing Assn. (AIBA), with the financial improprieties and corrupted judging that were hallmarks of the sulfurous 20-year reign of its former president, its being threatened at least twice with expulsion from the Olympic program by the International Olympic Committee, which had withheld AIBA’s $1.1-million share of Athens Olympic revenue as leverage for change.

“Sometimes you have got to find yourselves in the gutter before you can pull yourselves out,” said Tom Virgets, in his first year as chairman of the reorganized U.S. federation.

“We [USA Boxing and AIBA] were both very deep in the gutter. The fact we are both pulling ourselves out at the same time is exciting. We get to support each other and grow together.”

The World Boxing Championships that begin Tuesday at the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion give both organizations a chance to show they have cleansed some of the dirt that comes from years as guttersnipes.

For Chicago, the eleventh-hour volunteer as host after the reorganized international federation yanked the championships from Moscow seven months ago, it is a chance to bolster the city’s 2016 Olympic bid by showing it can make a success of the first major Olympic-related sports event in the city since the 1959 Pan American Games.

“But I think it is an even more important event for AIBA and USA Boxing than it is for Chicago,” said IOC member Dick Pound of Canada.

AIBA’s new president, Ching-Kuo Wu of Taiwan, calls this edition of the biennial world meet the “championships of renewal.”

“This is a new culture for AIBA,” Wu said. “We will let everyone know there is no more corruption, no more manipulation, no more control of the referees and judges for any competition.”

That was Wu’s mandate from the IOC and the major federations that supported him, including the United States, when he ousted Anwar Chowdhry of Pakistan by an 83-79 vote in last year’s presidential election. The IOC since has released $700,000 of the frozen funds, with the remaining $400,000 dependent on how the world championships go.

“These things [the reforms] have been moving in the right direction,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said, “and the world championships are an important opportunity to see them in practice.”

Wu, an IOC member since 1988, wasted no time in throwing off vestiges of the Chowdhry regime, whose corruption going back to the 1988 Olympics first was revealed in Andrew Jennings’ 1996 book, “The New Lords of the Rings.” Jennings details the judge bribing that led, among other things, to U.S. boxer Roy Jones’ being robbed of the light-middleweight gold medal.

“If Chowdhry felt someone should win a bout and he didn’t, those judges’ careers were short-lived,” said Virgets, associate athletic director at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Nearly 20 years passed until the IOC finally intervened, even though there had been loud protests over judging at every worlds and Olympics in the Chowdhry era.

“When president Chowdhry was in power, no one dared challenge him,” Wu said.

Wu, an architect, was an AIBA executive committee member from 1982 through 1998, when he first stood for president and was routed by Chowdhry, reportedly a favorite of former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch. Wu left AIBA for eight years and returned to run again for president, succeeding in part because Rogge militated for change in boxing, the only Olympic sport that excludes professionals.

In June, the AIBA executive committee voted a lifetime ban for Chowdhry and fired its administrative boss, secretary-general Caner Doganeli of Turkey, after allegations of his having been involved with Chowdhry’s misuse of funds.

At the same time, AIBA agreed on changes in the computerized scoring system adopted after 1988. One involves allowing spectators and media to see a running tally of the score, previously not made public until a bout ended.

All the reforms, shepherded through the international federation by IOC executive board member Gerhard Heiberg of Norway, are subject to approval at an extraordinary congress of AIBA’s 195 member federations Monday in Chicago.

The decision to remove the championships from Russia, a controversial leading player in AIBA affairs, also was part of Wu’s housecleaning, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. “When you pull a rider off a horse, you want to make sure you step on him good,” the source said.

In a Chicago Tribune interview, Wu said Moscow lost the event because the Russian Boxing Federation “could not fulfill its financial commitments.” Wu made a fence-mending trip to Russia last week, prompting Russian Boxing Federation President Gen. Evgeny Murov to say, “Let bygones be bygones.”

Wu said a similar attitude from many of the world’s other federations explains the record turnout for the Chicago worlds -- 114 countries, according to AIBA, as compared with 74 at the 2005 worlds in China. Of course, having these worlds as the first qualifying competition for the 2008 Olympics was guaranteed to increase participation.

“We have rebuilt the confidence of our federations, so everyone is happy to send athletes,” Wu said. “Also, Chicago really offers excellent facilities, with accommodation at very low cost, and that encouraged more countries.”

Not everyone was happy. Boxing power Cuba, which won medals in eight of the 11 weight classes at the 2005 worlds, is not sending boxers, apparently because it fears more embarrassing defections.

Cuba will have other chances to qualify its athletes in Beijing. But other countries, including the United States, should be able to capitalize on the Cubans’ absence.

“Having a world championships in the United States is a great opportunity for USA Boxing,” Wu said.

Not since the last “home” championships, 1999 in Houston, has a U.S. boxer won a world title.

“The turmoil, both internally and overseas, has hurt us quite a bit,” said USA Boxing coaching director Dan Campbell. “When we decided to clean up our act, so did the world.”

USA Boxing reorganized itself as the USOC had following management turmoil that drew congressional attention in 2003.

Boxing took the policy-making and elective power from its 200-person board of governors and shifted it to a 10-person board that includes three well-connected independent members, soccer impresario Alan Rothenberg, former Ohio State athletic director Andy Geiger and corporate executive Robert Blaha. In June, the board hired Jim Millman, founder and former CEO of sports marketing company Millsport, as the federation’s new CEO.

“These world championships can be a critical milestone in the resurgence of USA Boxing and amateur boxing in the United States,” USOC Chief Executive Jim Scherr said.

If this world meet shows boxing no longer is an Olympic millstone, that is.

--

Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.