American flyweight boxer Rau’shee Warren, said by those with the patience or masochism to follow amateur boxing to be one of the better medal hopes for the U.S., lost his first bout to South Korean Lee Ok-sung at least in part because he danced around and avoided contact for the last 30 seconds of the bout, thinking he was leading when in fact he trailed by a point.
It’s impossible to know if Warren could have landed the tying punch in those last 30 seconds if he’d only thrown one. But a bigger problem is that it would have been impossible to know if Warren could have landed the tying punch even if he had thrown some. Even if he’d landed one. Even if he’d knocked Lee down with it.
Warren and American coach Dan Campbell complained about the scoring in the fight, which saw each man awarded a point at least once when the other had landed a punch. Lee seemed to get a point every time Warren got one, whether a punch had landed or not. At one point, Warren got credit for landing a punch as Lee landed one and Warren, missing, fell to the canvas.
“It was just weird the way the scoring went,” Campbell said. “It ain’t right,” Warren said. “It doesn’t seem real to me.”
Join the club. Ukraine has filed a protest over the scoring in a loss to a Chinese fighter, and Great Britain has groused publicly about the judging in a loss, also to China.
All of which means nothing more than that an amateur boxing tournament is going on.
Scoring in amateur boxing is about as absurd a thing as you’re likely to see in elite sports. There are five judges at ringside with computers, and they’re supposed to press a button when they see a legal punch land. If three of the five press their button within a second of each other, the fighter gets one point.
That’s it. Counting punches. A knock-your-block-off blow is worth the same as a love tap, even if it knocks the guy down, though he can still be counted out, which happens about once a century since the best amateur boxers pitty-pat away in an effort to score points. Ring generalship, power, aggressiveness — some of the big things that make boxing what it is — are ignored. The judges aren’t judges. They’re a team of punch counters.
This system came into being in response to the crooked decision that robbed American Roy Jones Jr. of a gold medal in Seoul in 1988. The idea is a judge can’t fix a fight if all he’s doing is counting punches and two fellow judges have to agree with him within a second for a point to register. It would be difficult — though it would seem there are people saying it’s not impossible — to arrange that in advance. There would have to be some kind of signals going back and forth.
So boxing is like gymnastics and figure skating in that the subjective scoring system has been tweaked in response to obvious and, let’s face it, inevitable corruption. Let’s hear it for the Olympic ideal of purity in sport.
Whether it’s served that purpose is debatable, but what isn’t is that in boxing the scoring system has devastated the sport. It’s unwatchable.
The basic idea of amateur boxing is: Go out there and do your best, and the random numbers on the scoreboard might just go your way. Even if it’s on the up and up, the scoring system rewards pot shots over combinations because single punches are easier to see. It rewards pitty-pats over power punches, because they’re easier to land and worth the same. It rewards head-hunting over body punches because body blows are difficult for judges to see. You can spend a day in the Olympic boxing venue and never see a body punch rewarded with a point.
In other words, if you want to create a successful Olympic boxer, you would take any of the legendary trainers of the last 100 years or so and tell the kid, “Every thing this guy says, do the opposite.”
I figure maybe it takes an American getting screwed to force a change in the system. Roy Jones Jr. wasn’t the first fighter who wuz ever robbed, after all.
So watching the Warren-Lee fight, with Lee seeming to get phantom catch-up points that had the Chinese crowd booing, it occurred to me that if Warren lost, this might be the bout to spark another change. Maybe the pendulum would even swing back to the old-fashioned boxing judging. There are other ways to combat corruption — such as the figure skating system of having only some judges’ votes count — than by gutting the very nature of the sport.
But I’ve long since grown so bored with amateur boxing that I don’t know if there’s any serious momentum toward a change, and except for a few days every four summers, I don’t care. At any rate, Warren’s brain freeze, thinking he was ahead when he was behind, overshadowed the judging, so the craziness continues.
As for Warren, 21, who stayed in the amateurs to go to the Beijing games after losing in his first bout in Athens, he’ll turn pro, where his quickness and slashing style figure to serve him well and the judging, while hardly free of corruption or incompetence, at least makes a modicum of sense.
That’s about as strong an indictment as I can think of: For the kid to get a chance at some fair treatment, he should go into professional boxing.
Jose Canseco, who has about as drifty a life as a bestselling author who’s made millions of dollars and is still relatively young and evidently healthy can have, got knocked out in the first round of a celebrity boxing match in Atlantic City, N.J., Saturday by former Philadelphia Eagles kick returner Vai Sikahema.
The celebrity boxing match stretched the definition of all three words.
Sikahema, a much smaller man than Canseco, is a former Golden Gloves boxing champion. Canseco has never been in sight when the words “gold” and “glove” were uttered together.
I’d write more, but I repeat myself enough as it is, so I’ll point you to this column’s deathless coverage of the epic 2002 bout between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones and ask you to adjust the details accordingly.
The Weinstein Co.
Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
CANNES, France — “This is way above my level. I’m a little intimidated,” said the man on the stage, clearly emotional as he addressed the crowd in the Théâtre Debussy who had just greeted his arrival with a standing ovation. “I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life. Thank you all so much for coming.”
Experimental filmmaker from Azerbaijan? Subject of a wrenching family documentary made in a remote Colombian village? No and no. The speaker was former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, given a hero’s welcome here for the premiere of “Tyson,” the documentary about his life made by American movie maverick James Toback. On one level the reaction seemed bizarre; as Toback’s film makes clear Tyson spent his entire athletic career psyching out opposing fighters and the public. But when I talked about it later over drinks with a few other critics, it dawned on us that Tyson has never before faced a crowd that was cheering for him as a person, rather than because they wanted to see him beat the living crap out of somebody.
The question of whether Tyson should be treated as a hero, in Cannes or anywhere else, is irrelevant to this festival, and also to Toback’s film. Immense fame is amoral at its core, and so is the Festival de Cannes. Tyson has survived huge success and a dramatic fall, has endured the suffering he inflicted on others and on himself. Here he is, formerly a boxer of terrifying ferocity and an inordinately wealthy man and now neither of those things but not quite an ordinary middle-aged retired athlete either. That was enough for the Friday night crowd in the Debussy.
“Tyson” was one of the hottest tickets at Cannes so far, which may just reflect the fact that its subject is a worldwide icon whose meteoric career trajectory already seems ready for the movies. It combines Tyson’s remarkably candid interviews with Toback with a quickie biopic that covers Tyson’s life from his childhood in the crime-ridden Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Brownsville to his blossoming as a fighter under trainer Cus D’Amato (who virtually adopted him), two stints as the heavyweight champion, three years in prison and beyond.
Toback told us before the screening that he wanted to capture Tyson as a “complicated and in many ways noble human being.” One can dispute the adjectives, but he certainly succeeds in rendering a man frequently depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood as a tortured and vulnerable person who has genuinely struggled to understand his flaws. For the most part Tyson discusses his failings frankly and with a striking degree of insight, but he still refuses to admit any wrongdoing in the 1991 rape case that sent him to prison, and has no idea how much money he has made and lost (at least $300 million, and conceivably much more). Tyson recently filed for bankruptcy, but my guess is his money’s no good here this weekend. (Since he’s both a Muslim and a 12-stepper these days, the rosé is officially off limits.)
Another famous American with a tabloid-heavy history who’s coming on all friendly-like with the European public is Woody Allen, whose new film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” debuts on Saturday night. As I write this in the festival press room, in fact, Allen and his wife Soon-Yi Previn, along with Penélope Cruz and British actress Rebecca Hall, are ascending the steps a few hundred meters away. (Scarlett Johansson appears not to be present.) Cruz has just told a television reporter that this evening’s gray and rainy skies over Cannes are “beautiful in a different way.”
Allen has always had a different status on this side of the Atlantic than at home, but the contrast has grown ever starker in recent years. At age 72, he gets the prime spot on opening weekend in Cannes for a film that’s likely to be a fleeting afterthought in the American indie marketplace. (If all goes as planned, I should have brief interviews with Allen, Hall and Cruz up in this space in a couple of days. After a long career of Garbo-like reticence, Allen is suddenly Mr. Availability.)
Maybe Allen is another of those Jerry Lewis figures in American culture who just reads differently in Europe (see also Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara and, increasingly, Quentin Tarantino) but I’m inclined to believe that both sides are wrong about him. Allen seems to me to have been punished unjustly by his former American admirers for perceived failings in his private life, and it’s no good judging an artist on that basis. On the other hand, I don’t see how anybody can argue that his recent films — while they’re far from being terrible — support the widespread European view that he remains a major figure in world cinema.
I caught “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” at Friday’s press screening, and it’s a pretty good late Allen film, meaning that it’s a competent, entertaining blend of sweetness and misanthropy, and that the director seems enormously far away from his characters. Johansson and the British actress Rebecca Hall play Cristina and Vicky, two young Americans spending their summer together in I-bet-you-can-guess-which Spanish city. Neither character is all that interesting; they’re like ideas about “today’s girls” rather than the real thing. (Are we really supposed to believe that Vicky, who is writing a master’s thesis on “Catalan identity,” speaks no Spanish or Catalan? That’s knockoff Tom Wolfe satire about the degradation of American education, not Woody Allen.)
At least Hall’s gawky good girl, engaged to a chino-wearing business-school twerp (Chris Messina), actually seems alive with unconscious yearning and tormented by her post-graduate contradictions. This is one of Johansson’s dullest roles; Cristina may be blonde and hot, and may think of herself as an artistic and sexual adventurer, but she seems profoundly bored with herself and with life. As with so many of Allen’s pictures since the ’90s, it’s impossible to say whether he’s fully aware of his contempt for his characters, or precisely what it’s expressing. (Oh, OK, we can guess. But I’ll leave that to you.)
What Allen’s got here is something like a lightweight reworking of “Portrait of a Lady,” or one of Henry James’ other moral fables about American innocents abroad. Vicky and Cristina’s Mephistophelean seducer is a bedroom-eyed Barcelona painter named Juan Antonio, and if the role is pretty close to Latin-lover caricature, Javier Bardem certainly digs into it with relish. Juan Antonio immediately tells our heroines that he wants to sleep with both of them. Vicky blows him off and Cristina is hot to trot, but if you’re guessing that A) he’ll get what he wants and B) none of it will quite work out as expected, then I guess you’ve seen movies before.
Anybody who knows Allen’s films can see him projecting himself into these characters, or trying to. Sometimes it seems like fantasy wish-fulfillment, and sometimes like self-judgment. When Cristina imagines herself escaping the Puritanism and provinciality of America for a European artist’s life (or at least a European artist’s mistress’ life), you think, oh, OK. When Juan Antonio proves so charismatic that beautiful women flock to his bed in multiples, you think, oh, OK.
All these people will in fact be disappointed, which may be the most honest aspect of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” if not the most enjoyable. That property belongs to Penélope Cruz as Juan Antonio’s demented ex-wife, a free-floating agent of chaos whose only role is to disrupt and destroy all possible manifestations of the central triangle.
Allen admitted at today’s press conference that he made this film because Spanish financiers invited him to shoot in Barcelona; perhaps in the last stage of his career he’ll become an itinerant artist who hires himself out to tourist boards in picturesque locations. One journalist from Uzbekistan invited him to come work in her country, and brought down the house by observing that this movie ought to play well in Central Asia, “where in our tradition we still have many women in the house as wives.”
Thursday, Jan 24, 2008 11:00 AM UTC
The harder they shawl: The documentary "Orthodox Stance" explores the worlds of Dimitriy Salita, an undefeated boxer and observant Chasidic Jew.
By King Kaufman
I’m working on a theory that, given a minimal level of access and technical skill, it’s damn near impossible to make a bad documentary about boxing. There are just too many interesting characters floating around, and the sport itself is so photogenic, its settings, tools and sounds so iconic.
Filmmaker Jason Hutt followed a Brooklyn junior welterweight named Dmitriy Salita around for three years, from the fall of 2002 to the summer of 2005, from age 20 to 23, from his ninth pro fight to his 23rd, from four-round undercard bouts in Las Vegas casinos to 10-round main events in front of roaring crowds of Chasidics in New York ballrooms. And he made a damn good boxing documentary.
It’s called “Orthodox Stance.” The hook is that Salita, 25, who immigrated with his family from Ukraine when he was 9, is not just an up-and-coming undefeated 140-pounder, he’s also an observant Orthodox Jew, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect. He won’t fight on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays. A promoter in the film quotes Salita saying about Saturday fights: “Anyone who wants a good whuppin’ from me is just going to have to wait until sundown.”
He keeps kosher, even eating meals prepared in hotel rooms by his advisor and manager, Israel Liberow, when traveling.
“Orthodox Stance,” like Salita himself, moves easily between his two worlds, Chasidic Judaism and secular pugilism. We see Salita wrapping his fists with tape and laying tefillin.
His trainers and most of his fellow pugs at the Starrett City Boxing Gym are black or Hispanic. The people closest to him and many of his fans are Chasidic Jews. He’s as much a confluence of cultures as his friend Matisyahu, the Chasidic reggae singer and beat-box artist, who sings him into the ring for the climactic fight in the movie.
Even the movie’s title bridges worlds. It’s a reference to his religion, obviously. But it’s also just a mundane boxing term, another way of saying “right-handed.”
Most of what’s interesting about boxing, especially in its current depressed state between the ropes, is outside of the ring, and “Orthodox Stance” is an unusually candid look at that. We see Salita, who has been something of a phenomenon for years — the Washington Post profiled him at length in 2002, when he was 20, had a 7-0 record and was just about to start getting followed around by a filmmaker — in tough contract negotiations with former HBO fight executive Lou DiBella’s promotion company.
There was a time when Jewish fighters dominated boxing. But that was a long time ago, between the world wars. A fan’s sign in “Orthodox Stance” refers to fellow Brooklynite Zab Judah as the greatest Jewish fighter of all time, which says less about Judah — or his occasional reference to his lord and savior, Jesus Christ — than it does about how much a typical fight fan might know about guys like Bennie Leonard and Barney Ross, to name just two.
Salita knows that his unusual story and — though this goes unsaid in the film — his white skin make him a marketable commodity. Big-time promoter Bob Arum saw the same thing and signed Salita to his first contract. That contract expires during the filming and Salita pursues the deal with DiBella because he wants to stop fighting on Arum’s undercards in Vegas and start building on his following in New York.
The film culminates in Salita winning the North American Boxing Association 140-pound championship, a sort of undertitle that can serve as a steppingstone to the big fights. That’s not a spoiler, since the movie’s publicity is not shy about Salita’s still undefeated record, which is now 27-0-1.
But he’s been inactive now for 10 months, partly but not entirely because of a hand injury, and while he still hasn’t lost, he was knocked down twice by a fighter named Ramon Montano in an eventual eight-round draw. And as he’s stepped up in class of competition, he’s begun winning more by decision and less by knockout, an indication that he may have reached his level. He has a fight scheduled for next month, opponent unknown.
I asked Salita, who has helped promote “Orthodox Stance” by appearing at film festivals and doing interviews, if the movie leaves viewers with a good impression of who he is.
“There’s more to everybody than you can see in a movie about them for an hour and a half,” he said by phone from his Brooklyn home, “but I think it covers some of the more important aspects of my life. It touches on how frustrating and difficult the business of boxing can be. There can be a movie just about that, unrelated to my career.”
There have been a few, now that he mentions it.
Salita didn’t grow up as an observant Jew. He became interested in the religion as a teenager, when his mother was dying of cancer. That’s also when he got serious about boxing. I asked him how he reconciles the peaceful spirituality of his religion with the violent and, in his word, dirty world of boxing.
“The business world is a dirty world altogether,” he said. “It might not be as dirty as boxing, but it’s a tough world out there when people deal with each other and there’s money involved. That’s the case with anything. When there’s an opportunity to hustle somebody for a dollar, people do that.”
Salita talked about how the media “can overstate, overindulge my religious observance.” But while he hesitates to even call himself Orthodox — “That’s a strong label, you know what I mean? I’m an observant Jew that’s connected to an Orthodox organization called Chabad” — he says that everything he does is “in the Orthodox tradition.”
“Some people’s mission is to be in the world and to insert as much godliness and spirituality as they could into their everyday mundane things,” he said. “And some people’s job is to study and to completely dedicate themselves to Torah. I believe that God gave me talent to box, and my job is to do the best that I can do with that ability. It’s certainly not a contradiction in my mind at all. I don’t come from a family of rabbis.”
Salita, now fighting as a free agent, hopes to land a bout with one of his heroes, Oscar de la Hoya, who has mentioned him as a possible opponent. He also wants to win a world title. He just can’t do it on a Friday night.
“I have a balance in my life that I’m completely 100 percent comfortable with,” he said, “completely at peace and comfortable with all the facets of my life. And I actually think the film reflects that well.”
Previous column: The coach and the archbishop
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Tuesday, Dec 4, 2007 2:55 PM UTC
Knockouts salon offers men sports, women ... and paraffin hand treatments.
By Catherine Price
What do boxing rings, scantily clad women and paraffin hand treatments have in common? They’re all on offer at Knockouts, a Texas-based salon chain geared toward men. Yup. Dubbed the “Hooters of haircutting,” it features women in short shorts (or dresses) and tennis shoes who cut hair in salons designed to look like boxing rings. Stylists’ stations have flat-screen televisions so that men can watch sports while getting their manicures, and in some states, salons even offer free beer.
But this is no Supercuts. Knockouts offers a variety of haircuts that include more luxurious touches than my women’s salon — the “Heavyweight,” for example, includes a consultation, “relaxing shampoo,” haircut, “re-shampoo with head massage and conditioning” and style; the “Upper-cut” involves an “all-over clipper cut,” shampoo and head massage. And it doesn’t stop there: You can get highlights, cover up your gray, treat yourself to a manicure or pedicure, sign up for a Swedish, deep-tissue, trigger point or hot stone massage, or try out reflexology or a paraffin hand treatment. (And waxing. Let’s not forget about the waxing.)
Now, I don’t have a problem with guys getting manicures and massages. And why shouldn’t they enjoy their salon experience? But does it strike anyone as a bit weird that to justify signing up for something as supposedly feminine as a manicure, some guys feel the need to go to a place where they can check out their stylist’s ass? It seems a little defensive — “Yeah, sure, I got my chest waxed — but you should have seen my manicurist’s tits!” (Or, to put it another way, “Just because I treated myself to a minifacial does not mean I’m gay.”) And it’s a little creepy to see the Web site’s photos, which feature girls in short shorts leaning over topless men, giving them massages. Some Knockouts haircuts cost an extra $1 per minute — but photographs like these make me wonder how much extra it might cost for a happy ending.
(For the record, Knockouts’ CEO, Tom Friday, would probably take offense at that comment — he’s quoted as saying that Knockouts has “done an excellent job of not crossing the line.”)
Presumably Knockouts also welcomes women and children, but I find it a little hard to believe that many women would forgo the other 150 or so salons they could choose from to frequent a place where tips are partially determined by how much flesh you show. Also, while some people might defend Knockouts by saying that it’s just a masculine take on the myriad women’s beauty salons out there (and after all, why should women have all the hot stone treatments?), I disagree. Knockouts is not a masculinization of a women’s trend; it is sexualization, and the two are not the same. (Nor can Knockouts be called a male version of a typical female salon, unless women’s salons were to involve topless hunks — which, trust me, they don’t.)
Regardless of my objections, I’m sure that Knockouts will enjoy the same clientele as Hooters — and since sex does indeed sell, I bet it’ll stick around until someone decides to, I don’t know, open a salon with pole dancers. In the meantime I’ll amuse myself by the company’s ability to rebrand a “relaxing head massage” as something that should involve boxing gloves.
Friday, Nov 2, 2007 7:20 PM UTC
Women's boxing emerges in certain Middle Eastern countries.
By Tracy Clark-Flory
A new saying could start circulating among Middle Eastern boxing rings: Float like a butterfly burqa, sting like a bee.
OK, Muslim women aren’t exactly boxing in burqas, but they are knocking each other out in the ring while wearing hijabs. The Age reports that women’s boxing has emerged in certain Middle Eastern countries — like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia. Keep in mind, though, that women’s boxing in the Middle East hasn’t arisen because of changing attitudes toward women but because of changing sporting standards — a country cannot enter male boxers into Olympic competitions unless it has a women’s team in the same sport.
It’s plain to see that cultural attitudes haven’t shifted along with Olympic standards. The four female Jordanian boxers profiled by the Age are not of the Muslim mainstream; three are Muslims of African descent, and one is a Christian. They’re also members of the police force to begin with, so it’s not as though boxing has become the workout of choice for Middle Eastern housewives. These scrappy sisters also face ringside disapproval: The Age quotes Ayman Awat, a male Jordanian boxer, who says, “I don’t agree with this at all. It’s a physical thing. They shouldn’t fight, they should stay at home. A woman should be a lady.”
The cultural significance of this emerging sport shouldn’t be overstated, but it does seem worth celebrating when hearing these women talk about their supportive fiancés and fathers — one woman impressed her pop by punching him in the shoulder to demonstrate her strength.
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