By Scoop Malinowski

Former 1976 Olympic gold medalist Howard Davis Jr. will be Brian Kenny’s in-studio guest on ESPN2s Friday Night Fights on August 15. Davis, one of the most decorated and successful amateurs in American boxing history is not very excited about the current American team because he doesn’t know much about them. Davis says exposure of U.S. amateur boxing has been inadequate.

“It’s sort of a sorry state for amateur boxing now. It’s not on TV. The more exposure you have, the more people show up, the more people will try boxing. If you’re not exposed to it, you don’t know what’s out there. When I was a kid, boxing was on every week on one of the major networks like CBS, NBC and ABC. I was inspired by that,” said Davis from the gym in Florida where he trains boxers and MMA fighters.

Davis says he caught an amateur fight on cable - just by chance. “I saw a little bit of the Olympic Trials a few weeks ago. I saw the heavyweights in the Trials but I wasn’t real impressed. The Olympic Trials used to be on ABCs Wide World of Sports. Now it’s on MSNBC, if you have cable. If you don’t have cable there’s very little coverage of it. What the hell happened? Boxing was always popular with the networks.”

Of the two American amateur heavyweights Davis watched, he was not particularly dazzled. “I wasn’t impressed at all. Not at all. I’m thinking, Wow. These are our heavyweights? We have these guys representing us?”

Davis says the boxing styles he saw lacked science. “It seems to be about who is in the best condition to throw the most punches. I don’t see thinking in there, jabbing, feinting, setting up an opponent, no real science, just a lot of punches.”

Amateur fights now are scored by having five judges push a button when they see a punch land. When all five push the button for the same punch, it scores as one point for the boxer who landed it. Back in Davis’s day, the international amateur boxing scene was dominated by Cuba, American and Russia. Now, Davis says, “it’s more conducive to Europeans winning.”

In the last Olympics, even a boxer from Thailand (Light welter Manus Boonjumnong) was able to win an Olympic gold medal. “When you’re seeing a country like Thailand winning an Olympic championship, something’s wrong.”

More exposure and publicity for the American amateur boxers would be a start, says Davis, about turning the dire situation around.

When I mention that the USA has one amateur world champ at 152 pounds named Demetrius Andrade from Providence, Rhode Island, last year, Davis had not heard of him.

Unfortunately, neither have most boxing fans.