Still not a word spoken.
I caught him before he could get into his car. He just looked at me and said, “Son, we’ve got to go train.”
Stankie used to get money from strangers by telling them he needed it to live on while he trained the next great Olympic star.
He didn’t last long with us.
With Stankie gone in 1991, we turned to Robert Alcazar, the man who had been there all along, waiting for his chance.
Robert had heard about me long before he met me. He and my father were coworkers at an air-conditioning-and-heating plant in Azusa. Since they were also both ex-fighters, their conversations centered around the ring.
My father mentioned that his son was a rising amateur boxer. Robert would eventually play a key role in determining just how high I would rise. After I had bounced from one trainer to another, it was my father who decided that the man he worked with every day would be the best choice to work with his son every day.
Since Alcazar didn’t have a home gym, we moved around a lot after his arrival.
I had been moving around quite a bit even before he took his place in my corner. Robert came on board in the midst of a string of successes that stretched around the globe. After winning at 119 pounds at the Golden Gloves in 1989, the victory that earned me the ring my mother had worn, I won the United States Amateur 125-pound championship in 1990, a gold medal in that weight class at the 1990 Goodwill Games, and the United States Amateur 132-pound title in 1991 before heading for the 1991 world championships in Sydney, Australia.
I had not lost a fight since 1987, when I entered the ring for my first match against a German fighter named Marco Rudolph.
He was quick and slippery. Like many Europeans, Rudolph had the point-scoring system figured out. He would get inside, land a punch or two, and get out. Get back in, another quick punch, and out again. I spent the whole match chasing him, but I never caught him.
I didn’t catch him on the judges’ scorecards, either. Rudolph beat me 17–13.
I was crushed. I didn’t lose very much as an amateur, only five times in 228 matches, and I never knew how to handle it. This loss was particularly bad because it was right before the Olympics.
I went to my hotel room in Sydney after the fight and refused to come out until the tournament was over. We’re talking about an event that had two more weeks to run. But I stuck to it, two weeks of voluntary, solitary confinement. Nothing would ever surpass the bitterness of that defeat. It was the worst time in my life in terms of my career.
My coach, Pat Nappi, would come to my door, yelling and screaming for me to come out, but I wouldn’t talk to him.
I was too depressed to face the world. I had been the darling of the U.S. team, a favorite to win gold, and here I was eliminated while my teammates were just getting warmed up.
I didn’t have any family or friends with me in Sydney, and at first, I was afraid to tell the people back home what had happened. Especially my father. I was really scared of his reaction. Ultimately, I did tell him, and once the news spread that I had lost, I passed my remaining time in Sydney sitting on the phone with people back home when I wasn’t just watching TV mindlessly, hour after hour, day after day.
It was a rough time for me. I wouldn’t forget Marco Rudolph. But I also wasn’t about to forget my vow to my mother. Upon returning home, I regained my resolve and finally shook off the sting of that loss.
Battling my way back into the win column, I qualified for the Olympic Games in a box-off by beating Patrice Brooks, a lefty.
I had made it. In front of a large group of family and friends, I had reached the Olympics.
Even as the excitement set in, however, so did the realization that I had only taken the first step on what would surely be a brutal journey to get to that Olympic victory platform.
En route to Barcelona, we trained in Hawaii and North Carolina, strengthening both body and mind for the task ahead.
Nevertheless, I was scared when we finally got to Spain, not because of the opponents I might face, but because of the pressure, the pressure I had put on myself by vowing to come home with gold for my mother, and the pressure others put on me because I was the poster boy for the whole U.S. squad.
I was the one on the cover of the boxing magazines and the one who did most of the interviews and photo shoots. Whenever the call went out for publicity assignments, my name always seemed to come up first.
Among the U.S. coaches, however, it was different. My name didn’t come up when they talked about the favorites for Olympic gold. I felt that since I had lost to Marco Rudolph, I was just another fighter to them. When Rudolph beat me, it was like everything went downhill in terms of impressing them.
Rudolph was the favorite in Barcelona, with the Cuban, Cuban Julio Gonzalez, considered a strong contender as well. I was not being talked about as much, even though I had beaten Gonzalez a year earlier.
That gave me an even stronger fire in the belly to work hard.
But deep down, I remained petrified. The nagging thoughts wouldn’t go away. What if I failed? What if I let everybody down? Worst of all, what if I let my mother down? That was on my mind constantly.
The day we arrived in Barcelona, everybody was excited. The city, right on the ocean, was beautiful. Staying in the Olympic village, we found ourselves walking shoulder to shoulder with star athletes from all sports. Remember, that was the year of the first basketball Dream Team for the United States. Here we were running into people like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.
The first night, the whole boxing team wanted to go out on the town, celebrate, sightsee, sample the nightlife.
I wouldn’t budge. “No,” I said, “I’m staying here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for a job. I’m taking care of business.”
I was so focused the whole time I competed. I would only leave my room to fight, eat, train, and then it was back to the isolation of my four walls. I would write letters, rest in bed, or simply concentrate on my next match. That’s all I did. I was scared something might happen if I went out with the guys. I would not let anything derail me.
Some of the other guys would sneak out of the dorms, and stay out late. Everybody had their own way of dealing with the grueling schedule before us and the heavy stress that enveloped us.
Once the competition began, my fear of failure disappeared with one exception, repeated over and over. It would hit me just before I stepped into the arena. In those split seconds before I would climb the two steps to slide between the ropes, I would ask myself, What if I lose?
But once the opening bell rang, I had all the answers.
My first match was against Adilson da Silva of Brazil, a guy who hit hard. I hit harder, knocking him down in the first round. I was feeling good.
In the second round, however, I was also feeling blood from a cut under my left eye. It wasn’t serious, but what if the referee thought it was? That was in the back of my mind.
Our whole team felt as if there was a bias against the Americans, felt as if any excuse might be used to cost us a match. One of our fighters, Eric Griffin, clearly won his fight, but got screwed over by the scoring system. Guys on the U.S. team were dropping left and right.
In the third round, the ref ordered the time clock stopped and motioned the ringside physician over to examine my eye. I was thinking, My God, it could be over right here just when I’m starting. Some doctor I don’t even know can kill it for me.
When the doctor allowed me to go on, it was a big, big relief.
With the threat of a stoppage still hanging over me, I stepped it up. I landed some body shots, threw some uppercuts, and as a result, I sliced da Silva open. With my opponent’s blood gushing from several cuts, the ref again stepped in to stop the fight. But this time it was to award me my first Olympic victory.
One down, four to go. Time for a meal and back to my lair.
My second opponent was Moses Odion of Nigeria. This guy was tall, maybe six three, a southpaw and lanky
, a Paul Williams–type fighter. I found it really hard to get inside to do damage. Especially hard after I hurt my right thumb. It got to the point where I could hardly use my right hand at all.
As if all that wasn’t tough enough, I was still adjusting my fighting style to earn more points in the complicated scoring system utilized by the Olympics. In that system, a judge must hit a key on a device in front of him every time he thinks an effective punch has been thrown. For a fighter to get credit, however, at least three of the five judges must hit their keys almost simultaneously when the punch lands. That can penalize U.S. fighters who often use their speed to put together two-, three-, or four-punch combinations. It is usually not possible for a judge, no matter how well intentioned, to hit his key fast enough to score every punch in a combination. As a result, a skilled boxer who can produce a high volume of effective punches can be robbed of any advantage he has over a slow, methodical fighter whose style allows him to land only one blow at a time.
Trying to adapt in the middle of a tournament is like trying to change your golf swing in the middle of a round, rather than on the driving range. But I had to do it. I had been fighting in a pro style, landing a lot of combinations, but I wasn’t getting rewarded by the judges.
So there I was, facing a tough opponent, armed with only one good hand and a style that could prove a recipe for defeat. Odion wasn’t exactly cooperating, either. He was holding excessively while peppering me with his jab.
All I could do was turn it loose and become more of a brawler than a boxer. I waded in and pounded away at Odion, not the smoothest of approaches, but at that point I didn’t care how I looked as long as I scored points.
I scored more than enough, winning 16–4, to get my hand raised again in victory.
It was painful to raise my right hand because of the injured thumb. I wasn’t going to indicate anything was wrong, of course, because the last thing I wanted to do was let my next opponent know he had an advantage, that he didn’t have as much to fear from my right side as he did from my left.
I went to our team doctor who iced the thumb and subjected it to electrical stimulation, but it still throbbed.
Fortunately, I didn’t have another match for two days, a forty-eight-hour window I could use to reduce the swelling and regain some flexibility in the thumb.
Next on my dance card was Toncho Tonchev of Bulgaria, an opponent who worried me because he had already beaten Julio Gonzalez in an earlier match. Tonchev was a little shorter than me, which meant he might have been five, six inches shorter than Gonzalez, but he had still been able to beat the Cuban. That’s why I was concerned.
That concern soon turned to relief. As tough as the Bulgarian was, his style was ideal for me. Not at first. He came out strong and I could feel his punches. I was only ahead 7–6 after the first two rounds.
But by the third round, Tonchev, continuing to stand in front of me with little movement, might as well have had a bull’s-eye hanging from his neck. The two-day break had allowed the swelling in my thumb to subside enough to bring my right hand back into play, but I didn’t even need it. Given a stationary target, I picked Tonchev apart with left hooks in that final round, a round I won 9–1 for a final score of 16–7.
I was in the semifinals, Olympic gold within view.
The responsibility for getting that most cherished of all medals rested solely on my shoulders. I’m not knocking the Olympic coaching staff because they have an entire team to worry about, so they don’t have much time for specialized training. Nobody sits down with you and reviews a tape of your next opponent. They don’t know your style, much less that of the guy you will face. Training by that point in the tournament consists of going to a gym and working out under the watchful eye of three coaches. They are training you to make and maintain your weight. For the rest of it, you are on your own.
I, however, wasn’t totally on my own. Robert Alcazar had come to Barcelona to give me any help he could. Whether it was flying or driving thousands of miles, Robert made sure he was always available when I needed him.
I took advantage of his presence in Barcelona, twice breaking my self-imposed exile in my room to sneak out of the village after the 9 P.M. curfew and meet him. I went through two security checkpoints to make it down to the beach area where Robert would pick me up. He took me to his hotel room, where we brushed up on my technique.
That’s not standard procedure according to the Olympic handbook, but I didn’t care. Any edge I could get within the Olympic rules, I was going to take. It gave me reassurance to know Robert was there to help me through this process.
I think my Olympic coaches suspected I was going off campus for some extra help, but they looked the other way. Because of the success I was having in Barcelona, they treated me special.
In the semis, I met Hong Sung-Sik of South Korea. This guy was a dirty fighter, a brawler, more of a wrestler than a boxer.
Sung-Sik was penalized three points in the match for infractions of the rules, but I stooped to his level and was also penalized three points. I felt there was no alternative but to match his tactics if I wanted to survive. Sung-Sik would rush in and use his head or his elbows to try to injure me. He probably would have used the stool in his corner if he could have reached it.
A fourth warning can mean automatic disqualification. Sung-Sik got his fourth, but the referee allowed the bout to go on.
In the final half of the final round, the match was still close. Would the gold medal be elbowed out of my grasp by the South Korean? With Sung-Sik hanging on—literally—to steal the match, the referee separated us and warned him once again.
Still no disqualification.
In the final seconds, I took matters into my own hands, landing a clean shot to squeeze out an 11–10 win. It was not only my toughest fight of the Olympics, but one of my toughest fights ever.
I looked up at the ceiling of the arena, but I didn’t really notice it. What I was really looking at was an image of mother in my mind. Wow, I thought, she really is looking out for me. She has to be.
My father was mad when the fight was over, mad that it had been so ugly. I felt only wonderment at escaping with a victory, along with the excitement of knowing that when I stepped back into the ring the following day, it would be for Olympic Gold.
My opponent? I wouldn’t find out until the next day. That might seem hard to believe, especially for those back home who have the advantage of seeing all the competition on television. But when you’re in that environment, it’s different. Once the competition had begun, I was so preoccupied with my own fights, so anxious to get back to my room and rest up for my next match, that I hadn’t followed the daily results. I didn’t know who was winning and who was being eliminated.
I think the coaches liked it that way. They treated us as if we were prowling tigers confined to a cage, our aggressiveness building. When we were released to fight, that aggressiveness would hopefully emerge in ferocious fashion, unencumbered by the burden of overanalyzing a particular opponent. They did not want us slowed by mind games.
But there was no way my mind was going to be at ease when I walked into the arena for the gold-medal match and learned the identity of the other fighter.
It was my old nemesis, who had beaten me a year earlier at the world championships in Australia, the opponent who had driven me into seclusion and haunted my dreams, Marco Rudolph.
I had never been able to put Rudolph out of my mind. When I got to Barcelona, I checked the brackets to see if and when our paths might cross again, but I had lost track of him.
I knew he made a living as a cook at the Branitz Hotel in his hometown, Cottbus, Germany, and I was determined to send him back to the kitchen along with the demons he had unleashed upon me. But all that resolve melted when I actually saw his name next to mine on the bout sheet.
My first reaction was, The dream is over. This is the guy who beat me. Why wouldn’t he do it again?
I started panicking. I talked to myself, p
leading for composure, trying to convince myself that this time would be different.
When I came out for the gold-medal match, I was pretty much alone, as far as my teammates were concerned. All the others had been defeated, and once the fighters lost, they would go their own way, not sticking around to support the survivors. Instead, they went out to party and have a good time.
I had an American flag in my hand as I approached the ring. My aunt Irma handed me a Mexican flag and told me, “Hold this in honor of your mother. She was Mexican.”
For my mother? Of course.
But as I prepared to slip between the ropes, a U.S. Olympic official blocked my path. “If you take that up there,” he said, pointing to the Mexican flag, “we are going to disqualify you. If you win, we will take the gold medal away from you.”
I kept moving. Come on, if I won the gold, who would dare take it away?
When I got in the ring and saw Rudolph for the first time since Sydney, I think I was more scared than I have ever been in my life. My heart was pounding like a drum. All the time I had spent giving myself a pep talk was wasted. I had built this guy up in my mind so much that when I saw him in the flesh, he looked like a monster to me.
Once the bell rang, though, my heart stilled, my mind sharpened, my determination overwhelmed my doubts, and I was able to concentrate on the game plan I had devised for him. No more running after Rudolph, trying to cut the ring off as I had the first time. This time, I would lie back. Let him come to me. Let him attack and I will counterpunch, piling up points. That might leave him desperate to catch up.
Sure enough, I took the early lead, but Rudolph stayed in the fight, trailing only 3–2 as we headed into the final round.
American Son Page 2