RIGHTING OLD WRONGS

When the Olympic boxing tournament opens in Athens next August not even the most one eyed, jingoist sports fanatic from these isles is going to expect that Britain is going to follow the Sydney 2000 super heavyweight success of Audley Harrison with another gold medal. Rigorous regional qualifying tournaments organised by the still proudly amateur international governing body could make it hard for any Brit to qualify, let alone compete with distinction.

At least our sport has survived on the Olympic programme after a slap in the face just before the first Olympic Games at Athens in 1896 when the Greek hosts and the feisty French revivalist of the ancient Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, ruled out the inclusion of boxing on the programme because it was “ungentlemanly, dangerous and practised by the dregs of the population”.

Eventually introduced into the 1904 Games of St. Louis, the first Olympic boxing tournament took place several weeks after the last European competitors in other sports had left for home and only U. S. boxers took part, one of them allowed to compete even though he failed to make the weight.

After a more competitive Olympic boxing tourney in London in 1908, of which more later, the Games of the 1920s were marred by disputed decisions and angry spectators. My high point as a ringside reporter was at Melbourne in 1956, when Britain won two golds (flyweight Terry Spinks and lightweight Dick McTaggart), plus a silver and two bronzes, to be followed by Chris Finnegan’s middleweight triumph at Mexico City in 1968.

But soon both British standards and, more important, the reputation of international amateur boxing in Olympic circles, began to sink, the latter thanks to gross examples of ignorant, biased or even possible corrupt adjudicating by officials. The odds that boxing might be actually removed altogether from the Olympic programme became so threatening by the 1980s that I recall, tongue in cheek, getting the then International Olympic president, Juan Antonio de Samaranch, to inscribe his biography with the fact that he had been an amateur boxer (boxed two, won two…).

Against the odds, the Lausanne-based Association International de Boxe Amateur has made a remarkable comeback. On the spot witnesses, including my oldest son, a senior BBC Radio Five sports producer, report a much higher standard of officiating from the Sydney Games. I still regret the removal (to give television a tighter programme?) of the light-middleweight division, twice illuminated by the late Hungarian master, and 1948 middleweight winner, Laszlo Papp.

“History is more or less bunk,” insisted the American motor millionaire Henry Ford. He’s long dead, for all his money, so I insist that Papp’s third successive Olympic gold, at Melbourne, was unforgettable emotion with virtually his whole team having come from a capital, Budapest, ravaged by fighting with their Soviet masters, now singing their national anthem for the last time before so many sought political asylum.

In elegant defense of our history, the great Joe Liebling of the New Yorker wrote: “The sweet science of bruising is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.” It’s a good enough text for me, and London ex-policeman and amateur boxing historian Larry Braysher, to tell you of our long and finally successful search for justice on the part of a British Olympic boxing champion with the unwarlike nickname of “Johnny Won’t Hit Today”.

John William Henry Tyler Douglas, Olympic middleweight champion at London in 1908, gained his unlikely nomme de guerre from ironic Australian cricket followers when he was captain of England at our national summer game and renowned for his defensive batting tactics even though, to the fury of the Aussies, he retained the Ashes down under.

Douglas, who also played football for England as an amateur, had the misfortune to beat an Australian, one Reg “Snowy” Baker, in an Olympic final described by The Times as “one of the most brilliant exhibitions of skilful boxing, allied to tremendous hitting, ever seen”.

The misfortune, which has continued even to this year from a fight that took place in 1908, is that Baker, undoubtedly a great sporting all-rounder at rugby, swimming, rowing, horse riding, fencing and water polo, was probably not slow at blowing his own trumpet, especially in later years when he became a film actor and then settled in Hollywood, giving lessons in fencing, riding, boxing and general fitness to legendary stars like Greta Garbo and Douglas Fairbanks.

Baker never publicly contested the close points verdict which Douglas, who scored a second-round knockdown over him, won in their Olympic final. But, in a 1952 interview, he claimed that Douglas’s father had refereed the fight, leading to widespread suspicion of a dodgy decision which can still be found circulating on web sites today.

It has taken investigator Larry Braysher and myself years to fight this false rumour, pointing out that John Douglas senior was only at ringside, from where refs worked in those days, so he, three times Queensberry amateur middleweight champion, could present the medals as president of the ABA. The real ref was Eugene Corri who did not have to give a casting vote as the two judges agreed that Douglas was a narrow winner.

Another, far more ridiculous smear on Douglas’s record is an Australian claim, repeated in the 2000 edition of the Complete Book of the Olympics by respected American author David Wallechinsky, that Baker “knocked out Douglas in a rematch a few days after the Olympics”. An Australian book suggested “Baker and Douglas fought again, bare knuckle, after a dinner at the London National Sporting Club, and this time Baker knocked out his man”.

Consider that the 1908 Olympic boxing was staged on just one day in October — Baker boxing three times and Douglas, who had a bye, twice before their final. It is inconceivable that the two would have fought again within a few weeks, let alone “a few days”. There is no way, either, that Johnny Douglas, like his father a pillar of the establishment at the NSC, would have taken part in illegal bare knuckle fighting.

But at last, just 74 years after Douglas died, bravely trying to save his father when their ship went down following a collision at sea, Boxing Monthly can report that his ring reputation has been cleared. An overseas phone call to Harry Gordon, whose revised history of Australians at the Olympics has just been published, brought the answer: “There is no record of a return bout, let alone Baker winning by a knockout, and I have no reason to believe one ever took place.”

A final question mark about Douglas is whether, as rumoured, he ever took part behind “closed doors” in an exhibition with Tommy Burns, the Canadian-born world heavyweight professional champion from 1906 to 1908. Absolutely true, says Bernard Angle, city stockbroker and referee, in his memoirs, because he was present when the men boxed “in a small ring in the City Athenaeum, better known as The Thieves Kitchen in Throgmorton Street, while we enjoyed oysters and pate de fois gras.”

Both Angle and Burn’s biography reports that the heavyweight champion, who was no Lennox Lewis, being only 5ft 7ins though a hard hitter, was amazed and then angered when Douglas attacked fiercely rather than engaging, as expected, in a friendly sparring session. Of course, Douglas’s invariably chilly remark, whenever he put on gloves, was “You look after yourself and I’ll do the same.”

After three hard rounds Burns, controlling himself in front of the London clubmen, said with an attempt at joviality: “If this is what you call a sparring exhibition what is honest to God fighting like here?” But then this was the same Douglas who, asked to address a cricket dinner in Australia, rose and announced: “I’m no good at speeches but I’ll box any man in the room for three rounds.” Even as a schoolboy at Felsted his nickname was “Pro”.

Johnny Won’t Hit Today? You must be joking.

NEIL ALLEN reported 14 Summer and Winter Olympics from Melbourne 1956 to Atlanta 1996 for The Times, London Evening Standard and, finally, the New York Times.