Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the last of his disciples, Avery Brundage, must be turning in their graves. The last bastion of amateurism, which they nurtured and so jealously guarded in the Olympic movement for more than a century, is about to collapse. They must be surveying Rio de Janeiro with horror, scandalized by the prospect of professional boxing champion Manny Pacquiao ripping apart teenage simon-pures en route to the Philippines’ first ever Olympic gold medal.
While the athletes of the ancient Olympics were hardly amateurs, De Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, insisted that only amateurs—well-born gentlemen who were into sports as a
hobby—were qualified to participate when the Games were revived in 1896. Some say it was the French aristocrat’s way of keeping the “working class” out of the Games.
TV and corporate sponsorship changed all that. Much to the chagrin of the purists in sports, the self-anointed and self-perpetuating guardians of the Olympic spirit opened the Games to all professionals starting in 1992. Led by the celebrated Michael Jordan and US basketball’s Dream Team, the pros have since dominated the Olympics and ensured its commercial success. Football, tennis, athletics, cycling and other major Olympic sports followed suit and went “open.”
This year, boxing, the last amateur holdout of the major Olympic sports, surrendered; it opened its competition to pros, unable to resist the prospect of marquee names like Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather slugging it out for three rounds in the welterweight or light welterweight final in Rio. And, yes, a Pacquiao-Mayweather rematch in Rio would have been intriguing. (Both fighters have unfulfilled Olympic dreams. Mayweather lost a close fight in the featherweight quarterfinals and settled for a bronze in Atlanta in 1996. The closest that Pacquiao came to the Olympics was as an interloper: He was the flag bearer of the Philippine delegation in the opening ceremonies in Beijing in 2008.)
The International Amateur Boxing Association (Aiba), the world’s governing body in amateur boxing, has removed the “A” word from its name and is now known as the International Boxing Association, with the same acronym. It has required all its affiliated associations to do the same. It has launched the Aiba Pro Boxing for professionals. Now that the line separating amateur from professional has been blurred to make way for “open boxing,” the Olympic sport has shed its amateur pretensions.
Aiba president Wu Ching-Kuo of Taiwan appears willing to bend over backward to accommodate pros in the Rio Olympics. He is said to have dangled a “wild card” invitation to lure Pacquiao into his Olympic trap. Fortunately for his potential victims and for the Olympic movement as a whole, Pacquiao did not bite. His recent election to the Senate seems to have tempered his lust for an Olympic medal to go with his unmatched eight division titles. On Friday, he announced his disinterest in joining the carnival in Rio.
But the question remains: Should professional boxers be allowed to fight in the Olympics?
Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson thinks it’s a ridiculous idea, not only because he’s afraid that pros might eat amateurs alive, but also because of the strong possibility that amateurs might embarrass pros.
Prizefighting and amateur boxing are two different sports. Pros train to fight for as many as 12 rounds, and amateurs just three rounds. Pros fight for a living, amateurs would die for a medal. In the amateurs, each landed punch carries the same weight, no matter how hard it hits or how much damage it inflicts. That’s not so in the pros; it takes just one haymaker to maim, disable and destroy an opponent. With protective head gear no longer used in amateur boxing (they were deemed to have caused more concussions among boxers), amateurs will be in great danger of serious injuries.
Even Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s longtime promoter, bucks the idea of his ward fighting in the Olympics—probably because there’s no money to be made there. But this wheeler-dealer’s argument against pitting pros against amateurs remains valid: “The idea that Manny Pacquiao would face off against some 17-year-old kid who has no professional experience is not only stupid. It’s dangerous. These people ought to have their heads examined.”
Prizefighting is a deadly sport. At its best, it is beastly, a sportswriter once said. It brings out the carnivore in its practitioners and in every fight game enthusiast. If they are let loose in Rio, the gladiators will feast on the amateurs. The hallowed arena of the Olympics should never be the stage for a massacre of the innocents.