Ending On a High David Reid's knockout finish salvaged one gold medal for the U.S. in a tournament that gave the sport another black eye by S.L. Price Give credit to the myopic TV programmers, the classless coaches, the hapless judges and the absolutely friendless scoring system. Credit the sharky promoters who cruised the floor of Alexander Memorial Coliseum in Atlanta, and—just so he doesn't feel left out—credit Snipin' Joe Frazier. Credit overhyped American light heavyweight Antonio Tarver, who allowed himself to get fat and, when it mattered most, stupid. Credit all those whose colliding self-interest nearly combined to kill boxing as an Olympic sport. Assistant coach Burns hadn't pictured Reid as the U.S. boxing hero of the Olympic fortnight. photograph by V.J. Lovero How close was it? Let's just say they had the knife on the neck. For the first 16 days of the Atlanta Games, the sport that produced magic in Rome, in Mexico City and in Montreal had all the cachet of a Gomer Pyle rerun. NBC shunted boxing highlights into a late-night ghetto, while the Games' power brokers seemed to trot out Muhammad Ali at every venue except the one that needed him most. There was Ali lighting the torch, mixing at the Athletes' Village, meeting Monica Seles; there was Ali the night before the Games ended, receiving a replica of his lost 1960 gold medal—at a Dream Team game. "Why was that done on a basketball court?" asked USA Boxing president Jerry Dusenberry at Alexander Coliseum. "Why wasn't it done here?" Dusenberry's anger was telling: When your most sought-after athlete hasn't competed in 16 years, something has gone wrong. In Atlanta, Ali served as the sport's perfect symbol—all glorious past and shaky present—and by Sunday's last gold medal bouts, international boxing had endured its most humiliating fortnight. Yes, a Tongan super heavyweight, Paea Wolfgramm, who describes his real job as "clerk, mild-mannered clerk," emerged as a saving grace. But most of the subplots were disheartening: A U.S. judge resigned in protest over the scoring, the Cuban team refused to speak to the press because of recent defections, and U.S. coach Al Mitchell's boxers were just one loss from their worst performance in 48 years. And this time few observers seemed to care. On Sunday, Ali entered the boxing building for the first time and got his thunderous due. But it all seemed too little, too late. Certainly a first look at the last U.S. fighter didn't offer much hope: There was unheralded light middleweight David Reid, chasing top-ranked Alfredo Duvergel of Cuba around the canvas. Reid's right eye was scraped and swollen from the Cuban's slicing jabs. And there was Duvergel, dancing in and out, cuffing Reid into the ropes, leading 15-5 after two rounds and sailing toward Cuba's fifth gold medal. Reid lunged after Duvergel, trying to draw him into a rumble, and right then U.S. assistant coach Jesse Ravelo, a Cuban expatriate and an expert on his former team, saw something he couldn't believe. Instead of running away and protecting his lead, Duvergel was wading in. And just as Ravelo thought What the hell is he doing? Duvergel opened up his guard like a party invitation, and Reid drove his right fist down into the Cuban's face. After upsetting Rubalcaba, Wolfgramm took it on the chin from Klichko in the final. photograph by V.J. Lovero Duvergel dropped like a sack of stones, flat on his chest. He tried to get to his feet, wobbling as the referee counted eight. "I was going to try and finish him off," Reid said, "but I saw that he was out. Gone." Reid leaped high. Duvergel started weeping. It was, simply, one of the great comebacks in Olympic history. Only 11 times before had an Olympic boxing final ended in a knockout. And only once, with Reid's crushing hook, did boxing seize center stage in these Games. "People can say all they want, but when that big punch lands, this sport is out in front," Mitchell said. Reid raced to his corner and hugged Mitchell and his assistant, Pat Burns. Mitchell stunned Reid by saying he loved him. For a decade, ever since Reid walked into Mitchell's variety store on the North Side of Philadelphia at age 10, the two had been close—like family, given the absence of Reid's father. But the 49-year-old Mitchell had never told Reid that he loved him. "It's an unbelievable feeling," Mitchell said of Reid's victory. "For a while it looked like our flag wasn't going to go up, and of all the persons to be there [on the medal stand] ... my own son. I started crying. It's hard for me to cry, but tears rolled out my eyes. You couldn't have a happier ending. Dave took this Olympics." The night before, after Mitchell and Reid had done their laundry and Reid had gone to sleep, Mitchell wandered about. "I couldn't sleep," he said. "So I watched tapes for four or five hours, and I thought about Dave when he was a kid, and all the great times we had." At first, the relationship was one-way: Mitchell bought Reid shirts and shoes, trained him with a pack of other kids in the gym, sat with Reid for hours to watch film of Sugar Ray Leonard and Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis. Reid would often stay at Mitchell's house. "He took me under his wing," Reid said. "There were five of us, and he'd take us out and buy us things, take us to the movies, come and get us every night to go running. We'd say, 'Man, why's this guy putting his time into us? Doesn't he have anything better to do?'" Eventually all the other boys dropped out of boxing. And after Mitchell lost his two kids in a custody battle and was injured in a brutal robbery attempt that left him in a coma for five days and with a plate in his head, he found himself attached to Reid. "He was special to me," Mitchell said. "When I divorced my first wife, he was with me all the time. He picked me up when I was down." Mitchell went to Marquette, Mich., in 1989 to run the U.S. Olympic Education Center boxing program, and later he persuaded Reid to follow him and get his high school diploma in Marquette. When Reid considered turning pro two years ago, Mitchell told him not to. Whenever Reid needed prodding to work out on winter mornings, Mitchell was at the foot of his bed at 5 a.m. screaming, "Come on, chump! Get up. It's time to run!" So it was perfect when on the Olympics' final weekend, Reid and Mitchell again found themselves alone together. As unlikely as it had seemed three weeks earlier, they were the U.S. boxing team's last hope. Though five other U.S. boxers—Tarver, heavyweight Nate Jones, lightweight Terrance Cauthen, middleweight Roshii Wells and featherweight Floyd Mayweather—won bronze medals, none fought the last two days. Reid clattered around the emptying Athletes' Village, waiting. "I felt lonely, very lonely," he said. "Just me and Al. I'm like, Hello! Hello! Where you all at?" Good question. When the Olympics began, most observers figured the young U.S. team could win four gold medals: World champion Tarver was considered a lock, while Mayweather, super heavyweight Lawrence Clay-Bey and welterweight Fernando Vargas were given good chances. Reid was known mostly for the muscle damage he suffered in his left eyelid during the Olympic trials and for a bizarre episode in June when he was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend. The charges were subsequently dropped. But Clay-Bey and Vargas bombed in the second round, losing tight decisions that the coaches, starting an unseemly trend, whined about to no avail. When Mayweather, perhaps the finest pro prospect in the bunch, lost a questionable decision in a semifinal bout with Bulgarian world champ Serafim Todorov, Mitchell accused the judges of corruption, and longtime U.S. referee Bill Waeckerle resigned as an international boxing official. Tarver, meanwhile, fattened up on hamburgers before his first bout—which he won, but with such a flaccid effort that he was booed—and then broke curfew the night Centennial Park was bombed. Ravelo was so angry that the next morning, as he was yelling at Tarver, he drove his fist through a wall. "He was walking around like he had already won the gold," Ravelo said of Tarver. "I do a good job, and I'm not going to allow anybody to pull my reputation down because he thinks he's a superstar." Tarver's lack of focus caught up with him in the semifinals. After the first round against Kazakhstan's Vasilii Jirov, Tarver abandoned the defensive style that had made him one of the most decorated amateur boxers in U.S. history. He panicked and slugged himself into exhaustion, so that he could barely raise his fists for the third round. Tarver survived the round but lost 15-9. Though the U.S. would win twice as many medals as in Barcelona (six to three), the team underachieved. Meanwhile, the world's other boxing power, Cuba, was steamrollering the field. And when Cuban super heavyweight Alexis Rubalcaba entered the ring for his quarterfinal bout with Wolfgramm on July 31, the Tongan's defeat seemed inevitable. Why not? The 23-year-old Cuban stands 6'6" with muscles seemingly carved from obsidian. The 26-year-old Tongan is a 309-pound building with feet, who had just 23 fights to his credit before Atlanta. Wolfgramm, a former rugby player who grew up mostly in New Zealand, trained at Michael Carbajal's Ninth Street Gym in Phoenix for three months before the Olympics. Those who had seen him in previous bouts weren't taking him lightly, for he has quick hands and moves surprisingly well. But Rubalcaba hadn't ever seen Wolfgramm fight. Within 30 seconds the Cuban was on the ropes, getting pummeled, and the crowd was chanting, "Tonga! Tonga!" Wolfgramm won the bout 17-12. It was the first time Cuba had lost a super heavyweight fight in the Olympics. Beating Rubalcaba, Wolfgramm said, was his gold medal match. (In the semifinals Wolfgramm would outpoint Duncan Dokiwari of Nigeria but suffer a broken nose and wrist, and he would lose in the finals to Vladimir Klichko of Ukraine.) When the Tongan was asked if Alcides Sagarra, the gruff Cuban boxing coach who sometimes hands out gifts to opposing fighters, had given him anything after his upset win, he said, "A bad look. I went to shake his hand, and usually a coach will give you a smile or a nod. He didn't." It was that kind of Olympics for the Cubans: they won four gold medals and three silvers yet suffered their two most disastrous boxing losses of recent times. When Mitchell shook Sagarra's hand after Reid stunned Duvergel, Sagarra didn't bother chatting. "He was mumbling," Mitchell said. "I don't think he was saying hello." Mitchell laughed at this; funny how one gold can make five bronzes seem just fine. "It's unbelievable," he said on Sunday. "A storybook, me and Dave." He looked over at Reid, who was surrounded, having his picture taken with anyone who asked, and signing hats and pieces of paper and shirts. A woman reached over to fondle his gold medal. "I'm going to shower and throw it right back on!" Reid said. "And I'm going to wear it tomorrow—all day." Now Mitchell nodded. "That's what boxing is," he said. And nothing NBC or anyone else does can deny the day's simple truth: In boxing it only takes one punch to keep a man—a sport—very much alive.