Boxing : Olympian Goes Home to Erase Seoul, Turn Pro

A boxer goes from Great Falls, Mont., to the Seoul Olympics, becomes famous, then goes to Houston to learn how to be a pro, then returns to Great Falls.

That’s the story of Todd Foster, the kid who turned around the Olympic boxing tournament for the United States 3 months ago.

As it turned out, Foster didn’t win a medal in South Korea, but he did win an asterisk. And he provided some electricity for his team when it desperately needed some. Foster may never be able to show anyone an Olympic medal, but he’ll always have that asterisk. He’s the only guy in Olympic history to box twice in one day.

They’ll tell the story again Jan. 24 during an ESPN telecast from Great Falls, where Foster will turn pro before family and hometown followers.

In the early going at Seoul, U.S. Coach Ken Adams’ team looked like a collection of stumblebums. In fact, for a while, even Adams looked like a stumblebum.

When the Olympics began, the South Korean crowds booed the U.S. boxers vigorously. Then the boos began to turn to laughter.

First, the team’s most decorated boxer, world champion Kelcie Banks, was knocked stiff by a little-known Dutch boxer on the tournament’s second day.

Then Adams and assistant Hank Johnson misread a bout schedule and didn’t get middleweight Anthony Hembrick to the arena on time, and he was scratched.

It fell to Foster to get his coach and Hembrick off the front page. In a preliminary bout, Foster stopped a South Korean, Chun Jin-Chul, with a left hook. Problem was, Chun had heard the bell ending a round from the nearby second ring. In the ring Chun was in, rounds started and ended with a horn.

The Koreans cried foul, claiming their guy had thought the round was over. The Americans cried fair, claiming it wasn’t Foster’s fault the Korean didn’t know a horn from a bell.

“I was sure they were going to DQ me, just like they’d done to Evander (Holyfield) at the ’84 Olympics,” Foster said Thursday from his Houston gym.

“It’s the first thing I thought of, because I’d watched on TV in ’84 when it happened to Evander. So the way it turned out, I was just luckier than Evander,” he said.

For 5 minutes, grown men yelled and screamed while Foster patiently waited in a neutral corner, bobbing up and down.

Finally, when the referee, the five judges and the competition director could not agree on what had happened, the referee and Emil Jetchev of Bulgaria, chairman of the judges’ committee, rose to his feet, raised both arms overhead, and shouted: “No contest!”

No contest? Reporters immediately thumbed through their amateur boxing rule books, searching for the “no contest” section. No contests, the book said, result when an “act of God” causes a bout to stop. Such as the power going off, or the building catching fire. Nothing about horns and bells.

No matter, Jetchev ruled, Foster and Chun would go again that evening. In the “rematch,” 2 hours later, in what turned out to be one of the Olympics’ most memorable bouts, a bloodied Foster knocked out Chun with another left hook.

Foster, 2-0 at that point in the tournament, missed his chance for a medal when he lost a 3-2 quarterfinal decision to Australian Grahame Cheney.

A reporter’s lingering memory of a sad scene: Foster, his hometown coach, his girlfriend and his parents, all clinging together in a hallway immediately after the loss to Cheney, crying.

The promoters of Foster’s Great Falls pro debut haven’t found an opponent yet, but whoever he is, Foster figures he shouldn’t have to beat the guy twice on the same card.

“There’ll be a lot of pressure on me, but I wouldn’t want it any other way,” he said. “It’s a 6,200-seat building and they sold 4,000 tickets in 4 days, so there is some pressure to do well in front of my hometown people, but I might as well get used to it.

“I mean, if I have a long career, if I become a champion, I’ll have to deal with more pressure than this.”

And for Foster, there will always be Seoul.

“Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it,” he said. “If I’d won a gold medal, people would have already forgotten about boxing that guy twice. But so far, it looks like that’s how people will always remember me--the guy who fought twice in 1 day in the Olympics. Maybe as a pro I can make them forget that.”

Boxing Notes

The last of the fighting Quarry brothers, heavyweight Bob Quarry, 24, meets Keith McMurray at The Strand in Redondo Beach Jan. 26. Older brothers and former boxers Jerry and Mike will work Bob’s corner. He has a 10-4 record.

Mike Tyson will be in both the courtroom and the gym in Las Vegas Monday and Tuesday. He’s training--behind locked doors--at Johnny Tocco’s Ringside Gym for his Feb. 25 match with Frank Bruno. He’s also expected in a Las Vegas court both days to give pretrial depositions involving his lawsuit against his manager, Bill Cayton. Tyson has reportedly hired trainer Aaron Snowell, who once worked with Tim Witherspoon. Tyson says he fired his former trainer, Kevin Rooney, because he “had a big mouth and wanted to be a star.”

Fast-rising Paul Banke (16-3) of Quail Valley, Calif., boxes Ramiro Adames (20-2) of Dallas for the World Boxing Assn.’s Americas super-bantamweight championship Monday night at the Forum. Banke, who won the Forum’s super-bantamweight tournament championship, is rated 11th by the World Boxing Council. Same card: Samuel Fuentes (19-5) vs. Santos Cardona (17-0) in a Forum super-lightweight quarterfinal tournament bout.

The Caesars Palace boxing office scrambled this week, and held together its Feb. 4 all-welterweight card. Tomas Molinares, the WBA champion from Colombia, pulled out of his bout with Mark Breland, citing “severe mental depression,” according to his manager. Molinares also vacates his title. No. 1-ranked Breland will instead meet No. 2-ranked Lee Seung Soon of South Korea for the WBA title. The other half of the show matches England’s Lloyd Honeyghan and Marlon Starling for Honeyghan’s WBC championship.

Donny Lalonde will not box for the vacant WBC light-heavyweight title he lost last November to Sugar Ray Leonard after all. He will, however, have the first shot at the new champion this spring, according to WBC president Jose Sulaiman. Dennis Andries of Guyana and Tony Willis of England will meet for the title instead late next month. Leonard knocked out Lalonde in Las Vegas in November, then vacated the title. Dave Wolf, Lalonde’s manager, said Lalonde was still “burned out” from the Leonard bout.

Olympic heavyweight gold medalist Ray Mercer makes his pro debut in Atlantic City Feb. 24, on the undercard of Roberto Duran-Iran Barkley. Also fighting as pros for the first time will be three other Olympians: Silver medalist Michael Carbajal of Phoenix, who meets Willie Grigsby (1-0) of St. Paul, Minn.; U.S. bantamweight gold medalist Kennedy McKinney, and Kenyan welterweight gold medalist Robert Wangila. McKinney and Wangila will fight “opponents to be named later.”