Olympic Memories, Part III
The next two events I went to were boxing. Wednesday at 5 a coworker who was out sick called and said that he felt like shit, he had three tickets to the boxing, and did I want them? Hell yes! The problem was that they started at 7, and I had to find two friends who could drop what they were doing and head down to the Worker’s Gymnasium in time. It took a lot of phone calls but I managed to do it. We got there a little late, around 7:30. The seats were up in the middle section, and by the time we got there it was a madhouse. We walked up to try and find our seats and there was no way we could, so we walked down and asked one of the ushers to show us where they were. She said “follow me” and walked off in the opposite direction, then led us to a section right down in front which was full of empty seats.
Being tardy does sometimes have its advantages.
I’d never been to a boxing match before, and I’ve never really been much of a fight fan, but I have to admit I enjoyed the hell out of it. We were really cheering on some of the boxers, including the guy from Ireland—“Come on you drunk bastard!”
At the second night of boxing there were a couple of noteworthy events. France was boxing someone, I think Morocco but I could be mistaken. At any rate the French guy had about a four inch reach on this guy and was dominating the fight up until the third round. (There are four rounds in Olympic boxing.) The little guy just couldn’t get in close enough to hit him, so I’m sure his trainer said, “Get in there and lock up with him, then punch him in the guts.” Round three and four basically looked like the two of them were dancing, because the little guy just kept locking up the Frenchie. The referee is supposed to break these up and separate the fighters if they last more than a second or two, but this guy wasn’t doing his job and the French guy ended up losing. It was a real bullshit fight, and the French boxer was robbed. It was actually kinda sad to watch because you could see the agony on his face of knowing he just lost a fight which, by all rights, he should have won.
Then there was the American heavyweight fighting an Italian. The American was a big black guy, about six inches taller than the Italian, and had quite a reach on him. It should have been a severe ass-beating, but the Italian just flat-out worked him. The American wasn’t taking many swings, he was on defense the whole time, and the final score was something like 12-0. It was really humiliating, especially when just based on size the American should have beat the piss out of the little guy. Good for Italy, they definitely deserved that win.
