Team USA's plan to make amateur boxing relevant again

Interest in professional boxing has waned considerably over the past three or four decades, and its success in the U.S. is often contingent upon a handful of stars. But the same can’t be said for amateur boxing here. Interest in it is even lower, to the point of being almost non-existent.

That’s a change from the 1970s and ’80s, when not only were Olympic boxing bouts televised, so were big amateur tournaments and dual meets.

“Wide World of Sports,” ABC’s sports anthology show, broadcast many special dual meets such as U.S. vs. Cuba and U.S. vs. the Soviet Union that made amateur stars like Cuban heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson household names here.

Current Team USA coach Billy Walsh competed in many of those events in the ’80s when he was fighting for Ireland. He knows the importance of raising awareness of those types of tournaments in rebuilding what had been a moribund USA Boxing program.

Walsh led the men’s and women’s teams to a respectable showing at the Rio Games in August. Claressa Shields repeated as the women’s middleweight gold medalist and the men won a silver medal and a bronze finishing with an overall record of 11-6. It could have been better as Gary Antuanne Russell was controversially eliminated in a quarterfinal match in a bout most observers felt he won over Uzbekistan’s Fazliddin Gaibnazarov. Had Russell won that decision, he’d have been guaranteed bronze at worst.

“For me, I thought it was an astonishing feat,” Walsh said of the U.S. performance in Rio. “We had such a young team. With the male team, we had six of them with the oldest of them being 20. They were all babies, you know? I looked at all those other teams, which I knew from my time in Ireland, and they had a mountain of international experience on the world stage. We just had these young kids who were experiencing that for the first time.”

But the key to building the program is to keep the best of the fighters in the program so they not only gain that experience but also understand what it takes.

Walsh took over the U.S. program in 2015 after building a reputation as one of the best amateur coaches in the world while coaching Ireland. He was content coaching the boxing team in his home country, but whenever he looked beyond Ireland’s shores, he realized he had the chance to make a much bigger imprint.

“About eight or nine years ago when I was in Ireland, I did an article where somebody had asked me, ‘If you ever were to leave Ireland, where would you leave for?’ ” Walsh said. “And I answered, ‘The sleeping giant of amateur boxing, the U.S. of A. I relished the challenge of trying to turn it around.

“But when I got here, I realized how bad it was. Yes, there is talent in this country. I went to the Trials in Memphis and [it was] phenomenal, 400 athletes. Fantastic boxing, but you could have held it in a telephone booth. It was great stuff to watch, because they were putting lumps on each other, but that’s not Olympic-style boxing. Olympic-style boxing is about being good on your feet and hitting and not being hit. So we had to change that mindset and culture.”

And, Walsh said, that’s hard to do if young fighters make the Olympic team, compete in the Games and then quickly move on to the pro ranks. So far, none of the American boxers from the 2016 Olympics has turned professional despite many of them having interest from the pros.

USA Boxing has committed to funding the fighters so they can remain amateur status and not have to leave for the lure of the big pro money. And in the case of the men’s team, they’d still be in their early 20s even after the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

Walsh talked to the fighters at the White House last month when President Obama honored them, but he’s given them space to make up their minds. He will begin reaching out to them soon.

“We explained to them when we met the President what our thoughts were on trying to fund them and support them so they’d hopefully remain amateur for a few years,” he said. “We let them have time to go to their families and their advisers and think about everything. About the end of the month, we’ll call and see what it is.”

If Walsh can keep them around and continue to attract good young athletes, the future is promising for the U.S. boxing program. It still has more medals overall and more golds than anyone in Olympic history, but it’s been adrift over the past 25 years.

Walsh said he’s hopeful Shields will return, preferring to take a shot at becoming only the fourth boxer in history and the first woman to win three Olympic boxing gold medals. The only ones to do it are Laszlo Papp of Hungary and Stevenson and Felix Savon of Cuba.

If Walsh can begin producing gold medalists and up the overall medal count, that will only play into his plans to revive the amateur version of the sport here.

“We’ve got to make Team USA boxing a big deal here in America,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to get that notoriety back. Get the TV coverage, get the journalists excited and interested. It’s a big job, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I still think we can do it.”